 I'm here in Seattle for the build show, the developer conference from Microsoft. It's cold, it's rainy, I'm tired, cranky and my back hurts, but whatever man, it's awesome. We're going to push through, we've got a ton to talk about, it's going to be exciting, therefore you should stay tuned and be happy for the Virgin Mobile Show. Hi I'm Dieter Bohm. Hi I'm a Windows Phone fanboy. I'm Chris Ziegler. This is the Virgin Mobile Show, it's episode number 23 for the week of October 29th, 2012. Today the day we're recording is the well-known internationally beloved holiday, my father's birthday. Happy birthday dad, I know you're not watching, but there you go. Also it's holiday. Happy birthday Dieter's dad. Is that why everybody's coming to knock on my door to celebrate Dieter's dad's birthday? Yeah. It is a global holiday. He really missed the golden opportunity to troll me, to not tell me that Halloween existed and just make me believe that everybody was running around in costume for his birthday. That would have been really smart. Wow, that would have been good. I was probably looking for information for somebody to steal his identity. Everybody knows his birthday anyway. Missed the bone. Doctor Bohm, he is a doctor. And so is my sister. Everybody in my family has got doctorates except for me. You're the strong one in the family. Come on, Dieter is a doctor of mobile telephony. He's got enough knowledge. Geekiest doctorate ever. We need to start talking about phones because as I said at the outset, I'm cranky. Not really though. I'm happy. I'm happy because there is so much news to talk about and so many big announcements to talk about. And I'm happy that Vlad is happy about Windows Phone. So it's finally here. Can I do my little thing here? I want to do a little impromptu demo. Tap and send on Windows phones. Because I just set them up and they've got this, got a couple of Windows phones here in my hands. And they've got this crazy sound. Oh, it's not crazy anymore. Oh, there it is. So I tap to pair and nothing's happening. But the sound is cool. So I haven't been able to tap and send anything between these two phones. But the sound is cool. So I've confirmed that. Carry on. Cool demo, bro. Dude, the sound. You know what? No, I'll do it too. What's up? We're all just going to sit here and make noises. No, I'm not. Chris can't. I'm the only one here without a Windows phone. It's very upsetting to me. It really should be. Okay. I'm going to stop teasing people. I'm going to show these two phones side by side. And hopefully it's useful. Oh, no, my face is invisible. Oh, no, I've got my volume turned off so you can't hear it. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. So, Chris, how is life without a Libia 920? I hate you, Vlad. And you too, Dieter. And Tom Warren, if you're listening right now, I also hate you. Because all of these gentlemen have access to 920s. To my knowledge. I do not. What? Tom Warren does not have one yet, to my knowledge. No, but he's with you. Or he was with you. Yeah, he was. He is currently at the conference proper talking to developers and nerding it up about Microsoft. There's a lot to it up about, to be honest. Yeah, let's kick off with that. I mean, since I started off with this random exposition on Windows Phone and it's tapped send feature, let's kick off with Windows Phone 8, which Microsoft finally launched. Yeah. So they launched it in Seattle two days ago, three days ago. I've lost track of time. And we've been waiting and waiting and waiting to find out what the big secret is, why they wouldn't allow hardware manufacturers to show off the entire OS and so on and so forth. We actually talked to them about that. We talked to Joe Belfiore. And his answer was, we wanted to get the hardware manufacturers a chance to show off their wares, talk about their hardware on their own timeline. And we wanted to hold and have our own launch for Windows Phone 8. So it's not like there was a big conspiracy or mystery. They just wanted to try and see how it went this time around. I think it probably went OK for them. I think that we obviously knew what was going on a long time ago, but maybe general consumers didn't. But in terms of big, huge new features, it's sort of like nips and tucks in terms of actual user experience. The really big, big feature in Windows Phone 8 is that it shares the same, quote, core with Windows 8, which means that they'll be able to get hardware updates out more quickly and they can support faster processors and bigger screen sizes. And theoretically, it should enable more cross-platform code and collaboration between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 in the future. For now, though- Well, just briefly, I was just going to mention briefly, you're right. In terms of introducing brand new features at its launch event, I think the only thing that Microsoft showed off was the active lock screen where applications can take over the lock screen. And they talked about the fact that Facebook can do it, the Facebook application. They've got Bing and they've got a couple of other apps. But the list is really pretty short. And by the way, as silly of a feature as that is, I have to say I really like the Bing one. Because Bing, as much as I kind of vaguely dislike it as a search engine, the one thing Bing does very well is its homepage and their photography, the imagery that they use for their homepage. And if you turn on the Bing integration on Windows Phone 8's home screen, you get that daily Bing image automatically on the lock screen. So it's kind of cool. You turn on the phone, you see a new image every time, and it's always a really cool photo. Yeah, but the thing I was going to say is besides that, again, as Theodore says, there weren't that many surprises, but the thing that stood out for me actually is thinking about the way that things built up. Because usually when a company bumps a deadline or bumps a release back the way that Microsoft has been doing, I mean, we knew as a fact that it was because the software wasn't ready. But usually when a company is forced to do that, at the end, they release it and it's full of compromises, full of holes, there's bugs, there's issues, there's flaws, et cetera. Now you guys, you know, you got together and as a pair, you did our thorough Windows Phone 8 review, and I want us to get into that. But the thing that stood out for me is that actually the stuff that is being shipped in these review devices, the HTC Windows Phone 8X and Lumia 920, is really robust and solid. So Windows Phone 8 might have things that still need to be refined and improved on, but in terms of just reliability and just functioning and doing the things it's supposed to do, I'm impressed. Microsoft hasn't added that much, but the things that it has added all seem to work. Mostly. Yeah, mostly. Yeah, there's a couple weird things. Yeah. Go ahead, Chris. Yeah. Well, yeah, I was going to say that I think the single biggest annoyance for me, I have a few friends, not many, but a few who use Windows Messenger. And if I'm talking to, Microsoft does not have their Windows Messenger story as together as Apple does with iMessages, now with, you know, between Mountain Lion and iOS 6. Because like, if you're assigned on to Windows Messenger on a desktop machine, and you also have your Windows Phone sitting next to you, it is completely random which messages go to the phone and which messages go to the PC. Like it's completely like insane and unusable. Well now, are you using an official messenger client on the PC, Chris? I'm using ADM, which for Windows users is Pigeon. I mean, it's the same code base as Pigeon. So yeah, but I think that might be true of Facebook chat as well. Yeah. I'm not sure how it works exactly with Facebook chat. Like actually, I really like the chat integration in the Outlook.com website, the new website. How the chat is just off to the right of your email. But when I was doing that with Facebook chat, I think messages actually duplicated. So yeah, I think Chris, you're onto something. Either the message is duplicated or I got them on my phone and then I got others on the Outlook site, which is an ideal. You're right. You can't be sure where the next message is going to come. Now I just- Right. But I don't want to concentrate on the negatives. There are a lot of good things in Windows Phone. The thing that I was talking about is just the basic core. It's like nothing is crashing for me. Nothing is freaking out. Well, again, nothing is kind of a maybe an overstatement, maybe a few things and a few oddities might sprout up. But I expected a mini disaster, to be honest. I just expected app crashes and issues and problems. This feature will be forthcoming soon, et cetera, et cetera. And that hasn't been the case. So it's encouraging. I think that's a very reasonable thing to say because as few user facing changes as there are in Windows Phone 8, they actually did completely extricate the kernel of Windows Phone and replace it with a completely different kernel. And it was basically a complete re-architecture of the system. So to be able to say that we reviewed these devices and the legacy apps worked fine and we didn't experience any crazy crashes is pretty impressive in its own right. Peter, what are your thoughts? Are you going to say Peter is still with us? I was watching the chat. I admit, the chat. Gmail is down for some people. It's fine for me. But yeah, no, all of my actually I should mention that I just noticed that all of my Google services simultaneously crashed. I don't have access to anything right now, which is interesting. I wonder if that's a Hurricane Sandy situation. Oh, man, I have to break up the podcast and start writing news items about this. Well, that's what that's actually what happened during our Google hangout. We did a hangout. I'm sure that some of our listeners were listening in when we did a hangout on Monday to talk about the day's news, because Monday was a big day and we'll get into all that shortly. But halfway through, Apple announced that Scott Forstall was leaving. And so our listeners kind of got a live peek at adverge editors freaking out at actual news breaking, which was, I'm sure, enlightening for some of you and confusing for others. So yes, if there is a massive Google services outage right now, you heard it here first. Yes. So I think the most impressive thing- I just confirmed it in the UK and in Chicago and in that Seattle hotel room. So there we go. That's Google. Back to Windows Phone. I was going to say, the most impressive thing, speaking of services about Windows Phone for me is the SkyDrive integration. I know that there was a bunch of it in Windows Phone previous, but this was the first time I really deeply used it. And Microsoft has done just an incredibly good job of making it feel seamless and connected and you don't have to think about stuff when it syncs to SkyDrive. And my favorite part about it, and I think I mentioned this in the review, is Apple's got iCloud and different apps can connect to iCloud. But Apple's being so aggressive at hiding the file system that it's really hard to feel like you've got access to the stuff that gets saved into iCloud, whereas with SkyDrive, it's very transparent. It saves to SkyDrive, you go to your SkyDrive and there it is, no problem. Vlad actually pointed out that the photo integration was really, really good. So I hadn't even realized that I- I left it on because that was the default, so I hadn't paid attention to it. But I went and I started playing around with it and it was like it had been invisibly uploading my photos into a folder that I could get to just without me even thinking about it, without me setting it up, without anything. And it was really impressive, really amazing. And that's an option, you can also disable the automatic uploads, which I have to do because I'm so picky about my photos that I usually take about six versions of them. And if every single one was uploaded to SkyDrive, then me going to SkyDrive would be just the most frustrating time in the world. So many duplicates. But anyway, yeah, SkyDrive very much for my purposes, again, strictly just for my purposes, can replace Dropbox. Well, for my purposes when using a mobile phone, which I primarily use Dropbox on my mobile phone to take photos and share them around so I can access them on a computer. I still prefer Dropbox for everything else, which includes sharing things with colleagues, sharing things with friends, et cetera. But the way the SkyDrive works, which has been saying, is really nice. And also the new SkyDrive website, which together with Outlook.com got overhauled during the summer is really, really nice. I never go to Dropbox.com. I always manage things from my devices. But also when I'm on Dropbox.com, I don't feel like it's particularly great layout or anything like that, whereas with SkyDrive, it's kind of a pleasure. You can drag things around. It's essentially a web app. And it's nice. But the thing that actually stands out for me with SkyDrive is I'm showing people sample photos from my reviews. And I'm sending them SkyDrive pictures. And they're like, whoa, a SkyDrive link. I haven't seen one of those. And that's going to be one thing that Microsoft is going to have to break through this, I don't know, prejudice or just expectation that it's not going to be as good as the leading services. Because as I say, if you're just uploading photos to the cloud, it's just at least as good as Dropbox. Speaking of Microsoft needing to break through and get people to take them legitimately in the smartphone space, I want to talk about Internet Explorer 10. I am really, really impressed with its speed and with how well it handles web pages. But I've had to switch it to full desktop mode because even though it's a fast web standards compliant browser, most of the mobile web is built for WebKit. It's built for Apple and it's built for Android browsers. And anybody else uses WebKit, Chrome, Safari, you name it. But of course, IE is not based on WebKit, just like Firefox is not based on WebKit. They've got their own rendering engine. And Google especially, but there are a few other sites who see this browser and they treat it like a second class citizen. They're like, now we're going to give you our old mobile page that we coded in 2002 or whatever. It's like using IE 10 on Google's web pages. It's the same experience as if you're using Blazor on Palm OS. It's terrible. That was kind of an outdated analogy I have to say to Dieter. What? What? That analogy would have worked in 2006. Don't worry, I used an even older one on Twitter today and I got called out by a bunch of people. I think it was a good one, so I'm just going to recite it. I was saying that the Lumia 920, no actually never mind. That's a spoiler, I'm not going to repeat it. You can find it on Twitter. It's a really ancient Lumia 920 MBA related analogy. That's all I'm going to say. Anyway, as near as I can tell, IE 10 is a really good browser. It can't get no respect. That same exact thing of they need to get attention from outside of the Microsoft bubble in browser and people accepting SkyDrive as a first class citizen of the cloud of the web, and apps. Microsoft told us I think they've got 46 of the top 50 apps that they're targeting or something, whatever, that's great. They need more of those top apps. I know what's the number they hit, 120,000 or something. But the problem isn't the number of apps, because the numbers game is the numbers game. The problem is the quality of the apps and how well they're updated. And Chris, you actually made a really good point about this a while ago that they'll tick the box off of getting an app, and then a year later the app is still basically in the same state that it was and it hasn't been updated. Right. Yeah. And I can think of a bunch of examples of that where they obviously paid or otherwise encouraged a top tier developer to make a brand name app for the platform, or Microsoft just said screw it, we'll do it ourselves like they did Twitter and Facebook. But when they're reaching out to these third party developers to make their apps for Windows phone, I think they're just, like you say, Dieter, they're just ticking the box to get it on Windows phone, and then it's kind of like set it and forget it. And then you look back six months or a year later and the app is in the same state, maybe it's gotten one update to fix like a critical bug. But then meanwhile, on iOS and Android, they've been updated every two days. The running joke for a long time, Dieter, I think you noticed this as well, is that on Android, RDO for a while was being updated like, or was it Spotify or RDO? One of those two was being updated. It was RDO being updated every 25 minutes. It was ridiculous. Yeah. For like a month or two. And you will not see that on Windows phone, that's for sure. Yeah. What else do you want to say? The smart glass Xbox stuff seems pretty cool. I haven't played with it a ton. Chris, you were messing around with that more often than I was. Yeah. I mean, I went into it thinking, okay, this is going to be a silly gimmick that, you know, I mean, it'll be like cool, a whiz bang feature that I'll never use. But I could realistically see using smart glass as my full time Xbox controller, because I'm not really a gamer, you know, I don't have my Xbox to play games. Like I bought Fez and it's going to take me five years to beat it. But apart from Fez, I basically just used it for watching movies and whatnot. And so for that kind of stuff, the remote control that is in smart glass works great because it's basically a track pad for the Xbox that's on your phone or tablet. Now, long term, I don't necessarily see myself using smart glass on a Windows phone. But the cool thing about it is that Microsoft is going cross platform with it. They're launching clients for iOS, for Android, and of course, for Windows phone and for Windows 8. So, but yeah, it works very well. My only complaint with it is that it never thought that it was on the same network as the Xbox. I don't know why, because they were on the same network. And when that happens, my first thought was, OK, this is kind of crazy cool that I can control my Xbox from anywhere in the world, basically, because they don't have to be on the same network. But the downside of that is that it disables the smart glass browser and the keyboard. You can't for some reason. So you can't type with it. And you also can't use it to browse websites using your phone projected onto the Xbox. And I was never able to solve that problem. I tried a bunch of, I turned off cellular data. I have three different Wi-Fi networks in my house. I tried all three. But it was on the same subnet as my Xbox the whole time. So I don't know what the deal was. But strictly as a remote control, it's awesome. Regardless of whether you're using an Android phone, an Android tablet, an iPhone, an iPad, whatever, get smart glass if you have an Xbox, for sure. So in terms of launch hardware, I mean, we should just get into it. There's a bunch of phones. We saw the 822 coming to Verizon. And it's just like whatever T-Mobile's got, the 820. I forget what T-Mobile's is. Is it the 810? All these mid-tier Nokia Lumia devices, they're all basically iterations on the same thing. It's a big, chunky phone. There's the Ativ S from Samsung, which basically feels like we got a hands-on with it finally. It basically feels like a Galaxy S2. It's like a plasticky Windows phone. It's super light. S2 or S3? S2, I would say. Maybe S3. It's like a little S3, I guess. It's not quite as big. But it's typical. The Ativ S is really weird to me because I seem to recall the big sales pitch from Samsung being that it had aluminum, excuse me, aluminum construction. It sure does feel like. Right. And I'm playing around with it. I took off its back cover, its classic thin plastic from Samsung and extremely flexible. I'm poking at it. I'm touching it from every angle. I don't feel any metal here. It pretty much is a Galaxy S3 running Windows phone, which probably some people will love, but it's underwhelming. We spoke to HTC at this launch event, and they explicitly said, we want to stop having our Windows phones basically be repackaged Android phones. And the first phone that we're doing that with, where we're designing it as a Windows phone from start to finish, was the 8X. There's two basically hero launch devices for Windows phone, the 8X and the Nokia 920, the Lumia 920. And we have already reviewed the 8X. And Vlad, is it fair to say that you are smitten? Is it fair to say that maybe you're so deeply in love that if you were walking on up here, you wouldn't notice if you walked off the end, you'd just keep going? Walking on the edge. Yeah, I was just holding both of them up like a salesman, and I just feel really dirty for doing that. I'm trying to be useful to the people who are actually watching the show, but then holding them up like that, it kind of starts to feel like an infomercial. Yeah, I mean, I really like the 8X. And I'm not alone. Aaron, PhoneDog, what's his surname? Baker. Baker, that's right. I just saw his Twitter handle, somebody retweeted him. And he was saying the same thing, that he's got the 8X on his desk, and he's just kind of randomly picking it up and playing with it and touching it and looking at it. It's still a phone we're talking about here. Keep your mind out of the gutter. I mean, I just think it's a really nicely designed phone. And Dita, this is something that you said first, and I've echoed a bunch of times. It seems to really flow very well with the ethos and the aesthetic of Windows Phone in general, right? Because to me, Windows Phone 8 is the maturation of the Windows Phone idea. The Windows Phone 7 and just the square tiles, which didn't have the size flexibility, it wasn't there. But now that you can resize the tiles, I mean, I've seen some of the PR people who are showing off these phones, and they've got some ridiculously nice patterns built into their home screens, just by having a square one, a number one, a tiny tile, and they just arrange them into really kick-ass patterns. But yeah, it's all kind of minimalist and stripped down and kind of modest in terms of it doesn't take up all this space. There's no skeuomorphism. There's no extra chrome and all of that junk. And Windows Phone 8 kind of involves that in a really nice way from Windows Phone 7. And frankly, if this phone was just running Windows Phone 7, I would be like, well, that's a great design with a sucky OS. But I do feel like there are so many little tweaks. I mean, maybe the home screen change seems smaller than it is in practice. That's the way that I feel. Like in practice, it just gives you so much more flexibility. So I'm excited about the OS. Like I feel it's fresh and it's different. And even though there's a massive, massive gap where the app ecosystem should be, to somebody like myself and you guys, it's just really new and fresh. And I just need to explore it. I don't just want to explore it, I need to. And just the design of the edX is brilliant. And it just feels so good in the hand and it's so ultra matte. I mean, I was saying it has some ergonomic issues. Like it's a 4.3 inch screen, but it's exactly as tall as the Lumia 920, which is a 4.5 inch screen. But the difference when you're holding the two in your hand is crazy. The edX just makes everything else feel so fat. Can I provide a counterpoint to absolutely everything that you just said, Vlad? Yes. So first of all, and if any HTC employees are listening right now, I apologize in advance because I'm going to sound a little cranky. And I want to emphasize that my views on this phone are not shared by pretty much anyone else on this team. And I also think that my negative views may have been influenced by the fact that I was set a sense of black one when everyone at HTC knows very well that I like colors. So I want to know, I want to know who at HTC is trolling me and why I got a blue one right here. Chris is very blue. I know, I know you have a one, believe me. And it has a logo on the bottom. It's LTE. No, that is how you're just trolling me. But look, so I will say a few things about the eight X one, the phone is too square. It's annoyingly square. So it, no matter where you're holding it, no matter where you're holding it up or down along the edge of the phone, one of the, the corners is always digging into your hand. It doesn't roll across the hand nicely as most phones do. Even squarish phones like the iPhone are rounded enough at the corners so that it isn't annoying, but that the, the eight X is square enough so that it does dig into your hand. That's the first problem to it's the soft touch is so soft touchy that I just got an email from Jeff at HTC saying yes, HTC employees are listening. So Jeff, I'm sorry for, for, for what I'm doing to the eight X right now. But I'm going to continue now that I know that I'm on a stage, the, the back of the phone is a little too rough. So it I had, I wouldn't call it difficulty, but it was like it, it was a little bit tougher to like put it into and pull it out of my pocket than I would normally expect with the phone, even a soft touch phone. And then third, and somebody else made this observation too. I can't remember who's you, Dieter or Josh, but I agree. Someone was pointing out that despite how thin it is, for some strange reason, it feels thicker than it actually is. Yeah, it does. It's weird. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so I guess those are my three big ones with the design. Don't get me wrong. Like it, you miss the really, you miss the real complaint about the design. There's only one genuine complaint that I have about the design and that's the power button, which is on the top. And I'm used to stuff than being on the side, but it's sort of, it's easier to hit from the front than on the back, which makes no sense. And like, I'm constantly missing it. I'm constantly like having to press in and like push harder than I ought to to get it. You know, if you're going to have this nice, you know, angled thing on the back, you should be able to sort of just tap on that, that Ridge on the back to get it. But instead you've got to like reach all the way up there and push down on it. And it's, that's the only legit complaint I've heard over the past three minutes though. Everything else is just crazy riffing. And I mean, it is, it is so soft touchy that I can't pull it out of my pocket. It's it's like, it's like, it's basically an adhesive back. Like I could probably stick it to the outside of my pants and it would just stay there. Like it's really adhesive. But but yeah, the power button is completely flush. And and Vlad, I think you pointed this out as well. The position of the power button relative to the volume buttons is such that it's very difficult for some strange reason. I found myself constantly pressing the power button and accidentally triggering the volume. So I'd be like, you know, jacking the volume up or down one point, you know, on the 30 point scale that they use. No, no, that's true. That's true. And it happened to me the first day or so. But the other thing I would say is I'm adapting. And I'll give you I'll give you the point about the edge as well. It does dig into your palm a little bit. But then you just kind of adapt your grip a little bit. And I don't want to sound like Steve Jobs. I don't want to be like you're holding it wrong, Chris. Fix your grip. But I'm just saying you kind of adapt in it. These things fade into the background. Like they don't stop being an issue. I spoke with HTC people and I was saying to them, you need a side mount power button because everybody else is doing it. And it just makes so much more sense. Like Nokia, LG, Samsung, everybody's mounting on the side apart from Apple. And that's where the power button really belongs, particularly on this really tall phones, because there is no way that you can use any phone with a four point five inch screen or above or even the Aidex with one hand and not have to readjust your grip to reach the top and then come back down to the capacity keys to the very bottom. Whereas if the power button is on the side, then you've got no problem. But still, you know, go ahead, Chris. When Samsung first started doing those side power buttons, I was like, this is the dumbest thing ever. And I now kind of don't like it when a phone's power button isn't on the side, especially to your point, if it's like four and five inches or above. Like I get really annoyed if it's not on the side. Yeah. Just the other thing I was going to say flew out of my mind. Yeah. No, it was the fact that I made no secret. I've got a 920 here with me. And I can tell you the Aidex, in spite of its flaws that we just discussed, is the phone I keep returning to. Like I just want to, you know, it's the one I prefer. I mean, that's the other thing is I'm very open to the fact that a bunch of people might prefer the Lumia or something else. But the Aidex just kind of really appeals to me. And that's basically the end of the story. And I don't think I'm alone. I think it's a really well designed phone. I also think the thing that you mentioned about HTC not just taking its Android designs over to Windows phone or even flipping it around, just, you know, pausing designs between operating systems is a good thing. Because one of these designers, they need to be paid, they need to have jobs, and they need to do something fresh and innovative to keep us interested. I think the Aidex is totally one of those devices. Yes, I will agree with you on that. As many complaints as I have about specific design points on the Aidex, I do, you know, I have to give it to HTC for making something that is very notably different from their Android line. And that's something that, you know, I think that they are very cognizant of the fact that they fought in the 7.5 world. You know, if you look at like the Titan 2 from a distance, especially an average consumer walking into a store, I think the assumption would be that that's an Android device until you get close and realize that it's not running Android. Just a quick update here on our breaking news story about Google Apps. They seem to be back, first of all. Yeah, they're back. So that was like a little blip. But also, somebody tweeted at us saying Google Apps had to crash at the wrong time just as I'm meant to receive my bootloader unlock from HTC Dev. The thing that I will say to that person is that he's being way too optimistic. I registered to get a bootloader unlock and to get my, well, to get an account started on HTC Dev and it took them about three months and I need to get in touch with somebody for them to sort that out. So don't worry about it. You haven't got the HTC Dev and Buck stuff happening in your email. I'm pretty sure. But anyway, shall we talk about Android now? Do you want to switch it up? Yeah, I was just going to say the big crazy news in addition to Windows Phone is Android. We have got the Nexus 4, the Nexus 10, the Nexus 7, 32 GB plus mobile, whatever, and Android 4.2. We went to Google's campus. We got a deep dive on Google Now. We got a very close look at the phones and the tablet. And it all got announced despite Hurricane Sandy. And I mean, I don't even know where to start. The Nexus 4 is based on the Optimus G as we expected. It looks like an LG version of the Galaxy Nexus. It's got glass on the front and the back. It's got wireless charging, which I'm going to have a little freak out about later. And it's got Android 4.2. It's crazy fast. It looks really, really good. It's remarkable how much better it feels than any of the Optimus G variants that I've held. I've held the Sprint one, the AT&T one, and the International one. And it's markedly better. It feels way better than all of them. The way that they did the rim with the soft touch plastic that just barely goes over the glass so it's less likely to scratch when you set it on a table. Matias convinced me that they got into the design. I mean, the Nexus program is funny because they work with other manufacturers. And I was like, oh, this is just a rebranded G. Oh, this is just a rebranded Galaxy S2 or whatever it is. But the amount of design work that went into, especially the Nexus 4, makes it feel like a completely different phone. And I desperately love it. I desperately want to make it my next phone. But I'm desperately unhappy about the lack of LTE, which is something we really need to talk about. Maybe we put that off. I'm wondering what your guys' general impression of the Nexus 4 was from what you've seen. Chris? I absolutely, I mean, it's a very, from a distance, I should qualify this. I haven't touched the phone. I haven't seen it in person. But from a distance, judging from the pictures and the impressions that Josh posted and everything that I know about the device, it seems like exactly the upgrade from last year's Galaxy Nexus that Google needed to put out there. And I'm cautiously optimistic at this point that LG, a company that I don't associate with great hardware, is going to pull off this phone in a way that everybody's happy with. But yeah, the dream killer. I mean, there's zero question that if this phone had LTE, that it would be my next phone. There's absolutely no question. And I think that that sentiment is echoed by several people on our staff, D.D. included. But it's a dream killer. I mean, especially in Chicago, where AT&T's HSPA network is completely worthless and continues to be, it's just not feasible for me to use an HSPA-only device. I can't do it. So, OK, I mean, let's just get into it. Go ahead, Vlad. Sorry. Well, I mean, I was going to say, Chris's point is fair enough. If you're stuck without LTE, you're stuck. But as the international member of the show, I have to give voice to all the crazy people who have freaked out at the price. Because Google is selling this phone unlocked. So it doesn't have LTE, which is a major issue in the United States. But for most of the rest of the world, it's not. And selling this unlocked, and I understand it's £279 in the UK. It's £299 in the US. That's crazy price. And I forget, is it a 16-gig version that's £299? I think it starts at £8. Is it £8? Yeah. Which is ridiculously cheap for a phone of this caliber to be charging that straight up without a contract. Yeah, £299 for £8 and £349 for £16. If you're on T-Mobile in the US, this is the phone to buy. Because especially since T-Mobile charges more than AT&T and Verizon do for equivalent devices subsidized, I think T-Mobile has several phones that are £299 or more on contract. You can get this phone off contract, and then you can go on under one of their value plans that are actually lower per month because you're not taking a subsidy. It's a no-brainer. Yeah. OK. Damn it. That person who was expecting the AC dev email got it. So I was completely wrong. I'm a troll. I'm a terrible troll, and I apologize. Well, but I mean, to that point, you guys have this £199 price point in the US, and it's kind of nice and straightforward. You can't... On contract pricing in the UK is like a full zero to try and keep track of. It's ridiculous. You can get this phone if you pay £50 in advance, and it will give you £60 cash back, and then you need to sign up for two years, and after two years, we get to name your first child, et cetera, et cetera. It's a mess, right? But the thing with the £199 on contract price is that ultimately, if you don't get some sort of random amnesty from AT&T or Verizon or whatever, or you don't upgrade before the contract expires, in order to use and enjoy the phone with your service, you're paying, I don't know, thousands of dollars by the end of the full contract. Whereas with this new Nexus 4, you're getting a top-spec Android device, and I can vouch for the specs and the experience of the Optimus G. I was using the... Well, basically, I guess Korean version, the international version of the Optimus G just before this deluge of Windows Phone 8 devices took over my life, and I was really enjoying it. As far as I was concerned, the Optimus G is the nicest Android that we've got going on at the moment. I mean, maybe not the nicest camera necessarily, but I was really enjoying the user experience. Even LG's skin. I know, I'm nuts. But yeah, the Nexus 4 being stock in all of that. I mean, the Nexus 4 is, yeah, it's stacked on good things, and it's cheap compared to pretty much everything else. So the OT thing, again, might be a big deal in the US. It's not gonna get in its way. It's not gonna stand in its way as far as Android taking over the rest of the world, I don't think. I mean, the price point is just the crazy thing. That's the really standout thing for me. So in terms of it not having LTE, we talk to Google a lot about this, and it basically comes down to a few issues. One, there's the battery life issue, which I think is a red herring, because we've seen plenty of other companies handle this. And so Google wants the Nexus program to be sort of like pure Google, and morally pure, ethically pure. I don't even know what the right word is for it, but they wanna push their software updates out without carrier intervention, and without having to wait for that. And basically, they didn't feel like they could do that if they released a version with LTE, because if you're gonna release a version with LTE on Verizon, you've gotta release, it's gotta have CDMA. And if it's on CDMA or LTE on Verizon, Verizon gets to vet your software updates. What's interesting is that on AT&T, we talked to AT&T about this, and they're like, whatever, bring it on lock phone to our LTE network, totally cool. We have zero problem with that. So why didn't they? We assume it's economics, that there's just not a big enough addressable market on AT&T's LTE to make it worth it for them to create the device, I guess. But basically, we talked about this in the Hangout, that my feeling is like, Apple's pulled this off, because Apple's able to do it. Google apparently isn't. They don't have the clout in the mobile space with this Nexus line of phones to demand software updates without carrier intervention. And so they had two choices. They could stick with the purity of the Nexus program, or they could get their hands dirty with the carriers, either to force through the update issue or to accept the delay. And they just decided not to get their hands dirty. Yeah, ironically, and Dieter, I think that you made this point earlier in the week. I don't know if we were talking or if you said it in a post or something. But ironically, if Android was a closed system that they had kept to themselves and developed over the years, I think that they would have the same level of clout at Apple in this situation. They'd be able to throw that weight around. But because Android is open, carriers are like, who cares about this Nexus? We'll go tell Motorola or LG or whomever that we want these ridiculous changes to the software, and we'll get it exactly our way, and we won't have to deal with you. And goodbye. Yeah. And I mean, AT&T has got the Optimus G. What did Verizon get? They got something from LG that's not the Optimus G, but it's pretty good. It's Spectrum 2 or something? Nah, I don't think it's very good. I think it's the Optimus Nitro Achieve Max HD. Oh, that one. I remember that one. You know, if it only had one fewer name, I might have forgotten about it because it has so many. I've got no problem. Yeah, so I mean, I was thinking, OK, you know what? I'm just going to use the Optimus G on AT&T. I'll just accept that. But then you can't uninstall AT&T's junk. And that's insane that you were supposed to like Google reneged on that promise that you'd be able to uninstall stuff after ice cream sandwich. You can't uninstall stuff, and that's not OK. Windows Phone, there's a whole bunch of AT&T junk on an AT&T phone. No problem. Just uninstall it. Gone, gone, gone, gone. Not an issue at all. So like, I don't know what I'm going to do. Am I going to go with the Lumia 920? Am I going to go with the Optimus G? Am I going to suck it up and not have LTE? It's hard for me not to get LTE because I use it for tethering all the time when I'm working. It's one of my things I need for work. You know, the thing I was going to mention, guys, is building up the argument for going without LTE, if we're going with T-Mobile, mobile T-Mobile is apparently well, at least as my understanding, T-Mobile had the best reception during the hurricane in New York. Like it stayed up the best out of all the networks. Am I correct in this? I think that's the thing that our colleagues were saying. Yeah, yeah, I think it might be. I don't know. T-Mobile is a non starter. I have bad signal. Yeah, Kimber lives. I believe Kimber lives in New Jersey. Kimber, if you're listening and you don't live in New Jersey, I apologize. But wherever Kimber was, she had T-Mobile go down. I mean, it's not a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, which actually we'll talk about this a little bit more later, but that is part of the reason why T-Mobile is sharing their network with, with, with AT&T through this disaster, because I think that some networks are having better luck in some neighborhoods than others and vice versa. So it kind of works out. Right. Okay, fine. That wasn't a great argument for me, I guess. But still, I mean, if you want to help out the underdog, like if I'm in the US, I would work really hard to get on Sprint or to get on T-Mobile just to undermine the oligopoly happening or even the duopoly happening up top. You know, do my little thing so that our children can have a choice of mobile characters. Being against the machine is a fool's game in the US wireless business. I mean, you're only hurting yourself. It's like, you know, I look, I mean, T-Mobile is, is great. And I love what T-Mobile is trying to do. They have a very, very pro consumer policy, largely because they have to, because they're the underdog. But at the end of the day, I want LTE. And Josh made this point in our hangout on Monday. I think that the difference is not insignificant in many parts of the country, right? Like we're not talking about five versus seven megabits down. We're talking about like 20 megabits down versus two or three. And to Dieter's point, like when you're using the phone for work and you're using it for tethering and that's something that you need to be able to rely on, that makes a big difference. Not to mention the latency difference. Yeah. Very unhappy. Let me actually bring us back to Nexus 4 for a moment because I am really hesitant about the geo glass stuff. I've heard all the arguments about, yes, there's glass in front, there's glass in the back, we'll protect the glass really well, blah, blah, blah, blah. I am not a fan of that. Like I would need to, again, I'm kind of like Chris insofar as I've only seen the pictures and the videos of it. I haven't seen it in person yet. But I would be really surprised to see a phone with glass on both the front and the back and for it not to lose some durability, some endurance, for it not to be more fragile than one that is made out of plastic or metal. I mean, how do you guys feel about that? Dieter, you've got to say. I never broke an iPhone 4 for us. I never shattered the back or the front on a 4 for us. So apparently, apparently it's not a problem for me. It doesn't give me pause. Yeah, neither did I. And I actually have to be honest. I'm actually back on an iPhone 5 for the moment. And I would actually prefer, like as good as the phone looks and as good as the aluminum looks, I would prefer the glass of the 4S because I don't care about drop durability. I care about set it on a table and it doesn't get like micro scratches durability. And that's something that I can't like I always have to make sure to set the iPhone 5 down on a like a soft surface. Like if I'm setting it on a table, I set it on a book or a magazine or something. I don't set it on the table itself because I know that I'm going to lift it up and find some micro scratches. That's something that you don't worry about with glass. So I would I would much prefer that a phone be durable to that and not be able to survive a six foot fall, then vice versa. And I'm just imagining right now how you facilitate all of these soft surfaces. And I'm thinking because you didn't tell us when you complained about the 8X and how it how it's a pain to take out of your trousers. You didn't tell us whether they were silk, but it made out of silk. Was that the issue? It's silk trousers. First of all, I have to tell you that there's no such thing as trousers in in in in America or in other freedom loving countries. We call them pants. Pants. Yeah. But other people call pants underwear or other underwear pants. What no underpants. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff. There's a difference between pants and underpants. Also, we could call them pantalons. I was going to say pantaloons. We could. Yeah, we were pantaloons. The image, the composite image that I'm getting from this podcast today is that Chris is this shadow is going crazy. Suave silk wearing gentleman who has this little, you know, silk. Okay. But he lays out on a table every time he's put down his iPhone. Yes. He's like, be careful people. Micro scratches. I'm pulling my iPhone five out of my silk pantaloons and setting it on a silk handkerchief on my table. That's right. That is exactly the image that I'm getting. That's that's it. You figured it out. Are you the Scarlett Pimpernel? Yes. Yes. Yes, I am. This is Chris. He is Chris. Oh, my God. Can we talk about Android 4.2? I think it's a really nice PIP update for Android. They they just added a whole bunch of like, I don't know, random features, but they did some good stuff. So I MiraCast, I guess is interesting. I got swipe typing, gesture typing. They've got quick settings so you can swipe down from twice or there's a button in the notification area to toggle quick settings. What am I forgetting? There's the photo sphere thing. You know, that's fine for panorama stuff. Oh, the lock screen improvements. I think that's really interesting. So you can swipe left or right to get to different widgets or to go straight to the camera, even if you have a password on it, finally. And then, of course, you know, we did this deep dive on on all the stuff they've added to Google now that makes it just, you know, be able to do more. It can read your inbox now and can give you hotel and flight package information from stuff that was emailed to you. And this isn't Android 4.2 thing, but we got really deep into their voice search stuff and how how well they are able to recognize voice based on their neural network, which actually applies to the iPhone, too, because the voice search app for iOS just got released and it's amazing. Anyway, you know, it doesn't look like it's as crazy big as either ice cream sandwich or jelly bean in terms of, oh, my gosh, I must have all these features. But you know, I want it. And I am looking forward to spending the next 18 months complaining about waiting for updates to 4.2 from every single manufacturer on the planet. Can I be the first to predict that the Galaxy Note 2 will get its 4.2 update roughly three months after Keyline Pie comes out on the next Nexus phone? That's my prediction. And Keyline Pie being the thing the thing that comes after 4.2. Right. Because 4.2 is still a jelly bean, technically, in Google's parlance. But I mean, I'm intrigued now. There's a couple of questions here. So Google now can now read your inbox, you said. How like first of all, how does that integrate into the whole set of information that Google now presents to you? And secondly, I know that Chris, like myself, still hasn't gotten into using Google now on a regular basis. So can you give us the fresh sales pitch for Google now? The email features actually, they have been trialing these email features on Google search on the desktop for, you know, you could sign up for the trial. And basically, it doesn't happen on your phone, it happens in Google's cloud. And it just, you know, every time you get an email, Google now, Google reads it. And if it sees something in a certain set of categories, hotel reservations, flight reservations, package tracking, I think, like event tickets and concert tickets, it just takes that information and it puts it into, you know, Google now's database of things that knows about you. And then when you land in a city, or your flights coming up, or your, you know, use time for you to leave to go to the concert or whatever, the next time you check Google now, it, you know, a card for that piece of information will just be there. And then you'll be able to use it to get to where you're going. So like you land in a new city, you pull out your phone, you check Google now, and the first card, oh, look at that, there's there's my hotel, I don't have to go looking into my email for it's just sitting there. And that really fits in with, you know, you guys say you haven't like made Google now part of your life. And like, that's okay, like, I don't think anybody should try and completely depend on Google now yet. But it's sort of one of these things where, you know, every now and then it like, pushes a piece of information in front of you that's like, oh, man, I needed that. That's great. Thank you. And so it just feels very serendipitous. But it's not like a utility. It's just sort of a nice like, oh, hey, now I you know, I know I need to leave to get home in time. Or oh, you know, this is the weather or my, you know, baseball team lost or you know, whatever. It's, but what's interesting about Google now is that Google has got all the pieces to enable this futuristic vision of computing. And they're like, moving in that direction slowly, like, Siri's a personal assistant, but Google now actually knows the stuff about you that you'd want a personal assistant to know like, it's able to check your email like personal assistant. Right. Of course, you can opt out of all the stuff. The issue for me, though, the issue for me is that as soon as Google introduced now, it made it just kind of too ubiquitous for a thing exactly as you describe it. And I think I totally agree that you can't necessarily rely on it can't be your personal organizer. It can be a helpful system and a sidekick, I guess. But then Google now just way too easy to access and accidentally we've talked about it on previous shows. And Google is kind of pushing on to people. Whereas again, I agree with you and still much agreement for a podcast. To be honest, we need to disagree on something. We tried to have an argument this morning. Yeah, we've completely failed. We're like, we're gonna fight. And then we just agreed with each other. It was great. We flunked it. But well, it's it's too much respect, man. It's we need to I don't know, start disrespecting each other start trolling each other a bit more. But anyway, like I said, I agree with you insofar as Google is building towards his vision. I guess you remember Amit Singha, one of the Google fellows, he did a talk in London. And he was saying Google's kind of, you know, its ultimate goal, the pinnacle of where it's going is to do search without search. And this is what Google now is building towards. It's not there yet. It's not complete. But that's what Google wants to be. That's what Google wants to evolve into. And I find that an admirable goal. And I think that will be an exponential use of things to people, even if it makes us dumber. And it kind of builds into that wall-e scenario where we're just kind of being rolled around on autonomous cars that know everything we need to do. And we just kind of bovine about the whole situation. But OK, see, now I forgot what it was. Oh, did you did you say bovine? Bovine. Yes. So you're saying that people become cows because of Google? No, it's a. You want to be trolled, man? Yeah, sure. OK, it's Nietzsche. Nietzsche was the guy who was saying that. Well, he used the term bovine to describe just people who. Don't have. You know, the interest or the mental. I don't know, who are just really calm and impassive about the world around them. You know, just bovine. You're like a cow. Google is milking people. I'm sorry, continue. Let me make my point, man. Let me make my point and then we'll get back to the troll. Let's do that. But but yeah, the point I was going to make is Russ Miller brought this up and it's a great point. There's no setting where you can just punch in a few quick settings for yourself and get going. Right. So if he if Ross wants scores for his favorite sports team, he can't just jump in and say, this is my favorite sports team. Start feeding me the scores. I want to know about their performance in the playoffs. Assuming they make the playoffs. He needs to go and check for those scores like three or four times and then Google now will wise up and say, yeah, this guy cares about this team, make the connection. So, yes, it's making these connections. And I know if you go to particular locations a bunch of times, you ask you, does this location matter to you? Is this where your dealer is? Is this where you do whatever you need to do, et cetera? And then you form it and it builds all of this information. But the point is, you get no control over it. You don't get to customize it. You know, to keep to keep. Yeah, the you can customize the sports teams, but you're over your larger point is is is actually completely correct that there's this tension where if they add a whole bunch of customization options, then it becomes a huge mess of settings. Right. And they're trying to do this thing where organically learns about you and then organically gives you the information you need. And it's a design decision and it's you know, it's a compromise one way or the other. And they decided to make the decision to have fewer settings for stuff. And it frustrates me. So even in four point two, you can't tell it that I don't need you to give me an alert for calendar A, B and C. I only needed for calendar D, E and F. I'm subscribed to a half a dozen calendars and I don't care that Vlad has a meeting. I care that I have a meeting. But Google now shows you your next appointment and it thinks my next appointment is Vlad's meeting. So that's really frustrating. But that said, it's like I said, it's it's one of these things where like you just sort of check it to see what's going on. And you can't you never get the sense that like if you by looking at it, you feel like you comprehensively have everything that you need. But you do often check it and you get something that you forgot that you needed. If that makes sense. It doesn't give you everything you need, but it often gives you something you forgot. Yeah, it does. It does. And I have a perfect example, which was I forgot about the the time change because the UK is back on GMT now, whereas the United States isn't keeping in step. So the difference between myself and you guys is an hour less. And that's why we're discussing that's why we're discussing Archimedes just for the podcast, because I had one I had literally a eureka moment where I was in the bathtub, sharing an intimate moment with the eight X. And then I realized that actually the podcast isn't starting in an hour and 10 minutes is starting in 10 minutes. And then I rushed over here. I'm actually quite fortunate to have got a show. Yeah. And there's some Google now. Sorry, what? And it's on Google now. Well, I mean, you know, so I haven't played 4.2 yet, so I can't contribute to intelligently to this conversation other than to say that, like, I, you know, I well, these are the updates should be rolling out to 4.1. Are they going to be rolling out to this five I'm using right now? Because if not, then I know. But yeah, you know, I I have so far found Google now to be creepier than it is useful. And not not creepy to the point where I want to turn it off, but just I'm I was looking at it and saying, you know, it's really weird that it thinks that I need to go home now. And and, you know, that's something that might be a generational shift where it's like, you know, 20, 30 years from now, people are going to be like, well, of course, my phone is going to going to just tell me what to do all day. But right now, it's just a little too strange for me, just like the self-driving cars. That's my point about being bovine. Like you told me, but that's my point about being bovine because maybe sheep like maybe that's that's more appropriate where you're just happy to be instructed and led along. Right. Our children will be milked by Google in ways that we are not. Yes. Like domesticated mammals. Yes. Exactly. We're on the same page now. We're on it. OK, well, I think audio listeners of the show aren't getting the benefit of seeing the expression on my face right now, but trust that that moment of silence was my complete abdication of responsibility for the previous two minutes of conversation. What I was going to say is we can probably leave the Nexus 10 discussion for the Verge cast and anybody else who cares about tablets. The only thing to say about that is that it is really hot. It is the best Android tablet, 10 inch Android tablet, bar none, that I've ever held. But you know, it's still a 10 inch Android tablet. Right. They've got some work to do. And I'm just going to veto it off the mobile podcast now because we talk about the Galaxy Note already, which is a tablet. You're not getting 10 inch tablets on here. Doesn't matter. OK, the charging wants to be, I guess. Maybe we got to talk about the charging or I'm all hopped up. So Matias showed us. The charging orb, it is a third of a sphere sheared off at an angle, and then you set the phone on it and it connects with magnets and the magnets align the phone and then it inductively charges. It looks like a touchstone. It looks like a, you know, a curvy sphere of a touchstone. It operates exactly like a touchstone. It aligns with magnets. And and in Android 4.2, there is a new feature called the dreamscape dreamland dreamy time. I forget what the what the exact thing is that they called it dreamy dreamtime. Anyway, it it's the same thing as this thing that was called exhibition mode in WebOS, where as soon as you set it on the dock, it would present you with like, you know, some kind of screensaver like a wallpaper or a time. It's daydream. That's what it's called or, you know, whatever. And eventually, you know, they open it up so third parties could add widgets to it and so on. And I'm sure they will do the same thing. So like it's it's completely hilarious how much of the whole ethos of their wireless charging solution just came straight out of Palm. And I don't know if it's any mistake that, you know, Matias came from Palm and then that's what happened. But that's just Matias. Like, there are a lot of ex Palm people at Google right now, a lot. And you know, I got to say that I prefer the way that they're handling the charging solution with magnets to what everybody else is doing with with Qi for charging. It's a Qi based solution because the magnets really do make a difference in terms of knowing that it's connected and it's charging and that it's aligned properly and in the right spot. It really does matter for lining it up. The thing I was going to say about this wireless charges is that I would just love it if we could standardize. I mean, I love it when we standardize on anything, but micro USB, micro Sims, which didn't last too long, but whatever. No, but there was just recently Power Mat who's a hang on Power Mat, who's a competing standard to Qi just formed yet another consort thing. I think the Alliance for Wireless Power. Forget them. We can just ignore them. But Starbucks and Google are backing it. The Power Matters Alliance. That's what it is. Yeah. So why is Google backing this competing standard that's putting charters into Starbucks just to see what happens while they're using a different standard on their flagship phone? I was wondering why this charger in Starbucks doesn't make as much sense as the thing that I was going to propose is my reason for caring, which is having one of those freaking things on my desk, because if you just sit down and think about how often you just sit down and you pop your phone on your desk, if there's a wireless charger under it there, then you just stop worrying about the phone's battery. You just do like you come to even if you're in the office for 30 minutes, you just put down your phone on the wireless charge, do your work, leave and you're pretty much fully recharged again. These things are freaking convenient. But again, if they're done right, like you were just saying. So if Google is doing it and it's using Qi and Qi is the thing that Verizon has been pushing and Verizon has extra covers that you can buy with Qi charging for most of its phones nowadays, just keep going with it. I don't care if it's not perfect. I mean, it works, right? It's functional. I see just no reason why any other standard should be pursued. We need to just push Qi on everybody and then it will be just such a beautiful world. I agree. The other thing is think about all the people that have multiple phones and all the families that could just, you could stick a few of these charges around the house and everybody can just drop their phones off onto them like that. I mean, these are handy things. I want more of that. I love that this dream world that you are describing is a dream world that I lived in for three years when I was using my voice phones almost exclusively. I had it touched on in my car. I had it on my desk. I had it by my bed. I had it by desk at the office and just wherever I went, just set it down. So all the pre-phones had ridiculously bad battery life, but it didn't bother me that much because I was always topping it off. That's how everything should be. Chris is, I don't know what Chris is doing. What is he doing? I'm taking in this fascinating conversation about wireless charging. I have demoted myself from participant to listener for this portion of the conversation. So I will say this. Um, I agree completely Vlad that like, you know, there are many things where competing standards as frustrating as they can be are actually to the benefit of everyone at the end of the day. But I don't think that wireless charging is one of those things because you're going to end up with like a world where, you know, you, you know, you go into this coffee shop and it's this standard and you go into another coffee shop and it's this standard, your phone might work, it might not. So like who's, who's losing out by there being just one dominant standard? The answer is nobody. Right. That's it. I'm sure it's a licensing thing. It's gotta be that like somebody, you know, whether it's, well, first of all, Powermatte probably has an ego coming into this because you know, they, they've been around forever. So they're like, well, screw Chi, we're going to do this ourselves. And they're, they're, they're just entrenched enough, like they have just enough momentum to gum up the works, which is exactly what they're doing now. Well, what I was just thinking is hopefully Jeff is still with us. Hopefully those HT employees are still watching us on their massive cinema screen in the Taipei offices so they can register this stuff from us. Wireless charging guys. I mean, you're doing it already. The eight X tomorrow, you might actually get the scoop on that eight X and Verizon is going to have wireless charging, which actually I'm pissed off about because the one in Europe doesn't, I suspect, I mean, we don't know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if that was Verizon saying, you know, if you want to sell this phone on our network and needs to support wireless charging. Cause they've been, I mean, Vlad, you mentioned it earlier. Verizon has been very strict about that ever since their first LTE phones came out. They've been like, you know, if you want to sell this LTE phone on our network, you need to either have cheap built in or you need to offer a cheap accessory. Which I think with very, very few exceptions they continue to do. I mean, obviously the iPhone five does not have a cheap back, but apart from that, I think pretty much every LTE phone they sell can be spec'd with a cheap back. Yeah. And from what Tom, well from the information Tom got, the change is going to be built straight into the eight X. So it won't make it any bulkier. It won't make it any different. It won't be an accessory. It would be just right in there. Right. Yeah. I'm coming over guys. I'm going to enjoy the eight X with LTE and Verizon. We're going to Chicago, man. This is the tech. This is the technology nexus of the United States. A lot of people don't realize that yet, but but there's a lot of momentum here and the real icing on the cake will be the news that Vlad's obviously moving here. Not quite yet, but soon. Yeah. One day. So as soon as somebody does a perfect phone and only releases it in the US, then I'll be OK. Deal. But then also quickly do it. Because you'll be like, well, we roll out. I want to I want to point out the we've got a really excellent feature about the add zero phone, the phone that's made out of bamboo. And if you haven't, you should go take a look at it. It's it's just an incredible story. Aaron did a really, really good job putting it together. And then we you know, we want to end on a happy note. So let's let's talk about the UK getting LTE. You know, yeah, let's talk about that. The first thing to say is. I don't have it. And it's not because I don't have a review phone. He very kindly provided me with a phone and a 4G SIM. But at home, I can only get three and a half G. I mean, admittedly, I've been messing around with all these vendors phones, so I haven't had the time to, you know, do a little tour of London with it. But at least at home, all I can get is three and a half G. And it's actually slower than I get on the free network. So that I think that is going to be the key to see for this whole E4G rollout here in the UK. Most of the spectrum is on higher frequency. And the key is here is going to be that it's just not going to be good at penetrating through walls. And that might well be the case. I mean, it might be the case that I step outside and oh, hello, I have 4G. But I don't know. I'm always like, OK, if you have really fast connectivity, but I can only use it when I'm out on the street. That just really limits the benefit of it. Because when I want to have a really fast connection, I'm usually working and I don't want to be out in the rain or the snow or the wind or the freaking hurricane to have some sort of connectivity. So I think maybe next week I can give you guys some legit feedback on the network. The thing that we know is super fast. I mean, it reaches speeds up to 30 megs down, probably because nobody's using it. And it's in 10 UK cities now. So I mean, look, give credit to the company for doing the rollout the way it promised it would do it. It's working really hard. It's getting things up and running really quickly. So at least in terms of execution, it's doing well. But I'm still dubious about the proposition. Also we got pricing, I think, a few days back, maybe a week ago. And nobody's been particularly impressed with it. It's been quite steep. So I don't know. Obviously LTE isn't the same sort of must have feature that is for you guys in the U.S. And I'm personally content to wait for Vodafone and O2 and 3 in particular, because 3 is usually the network that gives you the most and puts the fewest limitations on it. Vodafone will try and censor adult websites. O2 will try and sell your data. I'm being kind of libelous right now. But yeah, O2 had a bit of a privacy issue a few months back. Whereas 3 kind of just says, when we say unlimited data, we mean unlimited data. And you can go crazy. So it's my favorite carrier. It's the one that I use. So I want to see those guys get a hold of the 800 megahertz band and give me the real high quality 4G. Then I'll be like, OK, you can overprice that service, because then I need it. But for the moment, it's kind of... You'll complain about the lack of LTE on the Nexus 4, just like us. Yeah. Yeah. Although by that time, we're going to be talking about some Cortex A15 madness for Nexus. Sure. And we're going to be talking about LTE Advanced, because someone's going to launch LTE Advanced and then everyone else will be upset that they only have regular LTE. Yeah. If that happens in the US, just as soon as we get LTE in the UK, I'm going to scream. It's going to happen, man. I think AT&T and Verizon are saying 2014 for their LTE Advanced launch, I think. So... OK. I should be able to get a hold of some LTE before then. I'm pretty confident. My fingers are crossed for you. Thank you, sir. But I mean, yes, it's good news. It is good news. And the other thing is, all of these early adopters who pick up this LTE stuff, they're freeing up the networks for the rest of us. They're freeing up the free G networks. So it's actually trickle down economics. Theoretically, you're right. And I was hoping that that effect would kick in in Chicago to alleviate the stress on the HSPA network when the iPhone 5 came out. I haven't seen it yet. Like I still, in the middle of a business day, if I go out with the Galaxy Nexus into the heart of the city, I can't do anything. I can't browse to a website. I can't check my email. So I hope you're right. I hope that eventually that transition happens, but it hasn't happened yet. And you're calling this city the technological nexus of the US? Sounds like a technological black hole. Man, that's... Those are fighting words. You and I are going to have a whole new conversation. We're trying to wrap up the freaking podcast. Yeah, well, next time I'm calling next time we see each other. Okay. No, next time we see each other. Yes, please finish it. I was just going to say next time we see each other, which is probably going to be CES, you and I are definitely going to have a Donnybrook. The Verge Mobile Show. Thank you everybody for watching and listening. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you should. We're all at Verge. Vlad's at Backlund. Vlad's at that. Vlad's at Savov. Chris is on Facebook, I guess. So just go find him there because whatever. We'll be back next week and hopefully the inimitable Dan Seifert will join us. He's DC Seifert on Twitter. If you want to follow him. Bye everybody. Thanks guys.
 I'm here in Seattle for the build show, the developer conference from Microsoft.
 It's cold, it's rainy, I'm tired, cranky and my back hurts, but whatever man, it's awesome.
 We're going to push through, we've got a ton to talk about, it's going to be exciting,
 therefore you should stay tuned and be happy for the Virgin Mobile Show.
 Hi I'm Dieter Bohm.
 Hi I'm a Windows Phone fanboy.
 I'm Chris Ziegler.
 This is the Virgin Mobile Show, it's episode number 23 for the week of October 29th, 2012.
 Today the day we're recording is the well-known internationally beloved holiday, my father's
 birthday.
 Happy birthday dad, I know you're not watching, but there you go.
 Also it's holiday.
 Happy birthday Dieter's dad.
 Is that why everybody's coming to knock on my door to celebrate Dieter's dad's birthday?
 Yeah.
 It is a global holiday.
 He really missed the golden opportunity to troll me, to not tell me that Halloween existed
 and just make me believe that everybody was running around in costume for his birthday.
 That would have been really smart.
 Wow, that would have been good.
 I was probably looking for information for somebody to steal his identity.
 Everybody knows his birthday anyway.
 Missed the bone.
 Doctor Bohm, he is a doctor.
 And so is my sister.
 Everybody in my family has got doctorates except for me.
 You're the strong one in the family.
 Come on, Dieter is a doctor of mobile telephony.
 He's got enough knowledge.
 Geekiest doctorate ever.
 We need to start talking about phones because as I said at the outset, I'm cranky.
 Not really though.
 I'm happy.
 I'm happy because there is so much news to talk about and so many big announcements to
 talk about.
 And I'm happy that Vlad is happy about Windows Phone.
 So it's finally here.
 Can I do my little thing here?
 I want to do a little impromptu demo.
 Tap and send on Windows phones.
 Because I just set them up and they've got this, got a couple of Windows phones here
 in my hands.
 And they've got this crazy sound.
 Oh, it's not crazy anymore.
 Oh, there it is.
 So I tap to pair and nothing's happening.
 But the sound is cool.
 So I haven't been able to tap and send anything between these two phones.
 But the sound is cool.
 So I've confirmed that.
 Carry on.
 Cool demo, bro.
 Dude, the sound.
 You know what?
 No, I'll do it too.
 What's up?
 We're all just going to sit here and make noises.
 No, I'm not.
 Chris can't.
 I'm the only one here without a Windows phone.
 It's very upsetting to me.
 It really should be.
 Okay.
 I'm going to stop teasing people.
 I'm going to show these two phones side by side.
 And hopefully it's useful.
 Oh, no, my face is invisible.
 Oh, no, I've got my volume turned off so you can't hear it.
 Okay.
 Anyway.
 Yeah.
 So, Chris, how is life without a Libia 920?
 I hate you, Vlad.
 And you too, Dieter.
 And Tom Warren, if you're listening right now, I also hate you.
 Because all of these gentlemen have access to 920s.
 To my knowledge.
 I do not.
 What?
 Tom Warren does not have one yet, to my knowledge.
 No, but he's with you.
 Or he was with you.
 Yeah, he was.
 He is currently at the conference proper talking to developers and nerding it up about Microsoft.
 There's a lot to it up about, to be honest.
 Yeah, let's kick off with that.
 I mean, since I started off with this random exposition on Windows Phone and it's tapped
 send feature, let's kick off with Windows Phone 8, which Microsoft finally launched.
 Yeah.
 So they launched it in Seattle two days ago, three days ago.
 I've lost track of time.
 And we've been waiting and waiting and waiting to find out what the big secret is, why they
 wouldn't allow hardware manufacturers to show off the entire OS and so on and so forth.
 We actually talked to them about that.
 We talked to Joe Belfiore.
 And his answer was, we wanted to get the hardware manufacturers a chance to show off their wares,
 talk about their hardware on their own timeline.
 And we wanted to hold and have our own launch for Windows Phone 8.
 So it's not like there was a big conspiracy or mystery.
 They just wanted to try and see how it went this time around.
 I think it probably went OK for them.
 I think that we obviously knew what was going on a long time ago, but maybe general consumers
 didn't.
 But in terms of big, huge new features, it's sort of like nips and tucks in terms of actual
 user experience.
 The really big, big feature in Windows Phone 8 is that it shares the same, quote, core
 with Windows 8, which means that they'll be able to get hardware updates out more quickly
 and they can support faster processors and bigger screen sizes.
 And theoretically, it should enable more cross-platform code and collaboration between Windows 8 and
 Windows Phone 8 in the future.
 For now, though-
 Well, just briefly, I was just going to mention briefly, you're right.
 In terms of introducing brand new features at its launch event, I think the only thing
 that Microsoft showed off was the active lock screen where applications can take over the
 lock screen.
 And they talked about the fact that Facebook can do it, the Facebook application.
 They've got Bing and they've got a couple of other apps.
 But the list is really pretty short.
 And by the way, as silly of a feature as that is, I have to say I really like the Bing one.
 Because Bing, as much as I kind of vaguely dislike it as a search engine, the one thing
 Bing does very well is its homepage and their photography, the imagery that they use for
 their homepage.
 And if you turn on the Bing integration on Windows Phone 8's home screen, you get that
 daily Bing image automatically on the lock screen.
 So it's kind of cool.
 You turn on the phone, you see a new image every time, and it's always a really cool
 photo.
 Yeah, but the thing I was going to say is besides that, again, as Theodore says, there
 weren't that many surprises, but the thing that stood out for me actually is thinking
 about the way that things built up.
 Because usually when a company bumps a deadline or bumps a release back the way that Microsoft
 has been doing, I mean, we knew as a fact that it was because the software wasn't ready.
 But usually when a company is forced to do that, at the end, they release it and it's
 full of compromises, full of holes, there's bugs, there's issues, there's flaws, et cetera.
 Now you guys, you know, you got together and as a pair, you did our thorough Windows Phone
 8 review, and I want us to get into that.
 But the thing that stood out for me is that actually the stuff that is being shipped in
 these review devices, the HTC Windows Phone 8X and Lumia 920, is really robust and solid.
 So Windows Phone 8 might have things that still need to be refined and improved on,
 but in terms of just reliability and just functioning and doing the things it's supposed
 to do, I'm impressed.
 Microsoft hasn't added that much, but the things that it has added all seem to work.
 Mostly.
 Yeah, mostly.
 Yeah, there's a couple weird things.
 Yeah.
 Go ahead, Chris.
 Yeah.
 Well, yeah, I was going to say that I think the single biggest annoyance for me, I have
 a few friends, not many, but a few who use Windows Messenger.
 And if I'm talking to, Microsoft does not have their Windows Messenger story as together
 as Apple does with iMessages, now with, you know, between Mountain Lion and iOS 6.
 Because like, if you're assigned on to Windows Messenger on a desktop machine, and you also
 have your Windows Phone sitting next to you, it is completely random which messages go
 to the phone and which messages go to the PC.
 Like it's completely like insane and unusable.
 Well now, are you using an official messenger client on the PC, Chris?
 I'm using ADM, which for Windows users is Pigeon.
 I mean, it's the same code base as Pigeon.
 So yeah, but I think that might be true of Facebook chat as well.
 Yeah.
 I'm not sure how it works exactly with Facebook chat.
 Like actually, I really like the chat integration in the Outlook.com website, the new website.
 How the chat is just off to the right of your email.
 But when I was doing that with Facebook chat, I think messages actually duplicated.
 So yeah, I think Chris, you're onto something.
 Either the message is duplicated or I got them on my phone and then I got others on
 the Outlook site, which is an ideal.
 You're right.
 You can't be sure where the next message is going to come.
 Now I just-
 Right.
 But I don't want to concentrate on the negatives.
 There are a lot of good things in Windows Phone.
 The thing that I was talking about is just the basic core.
 It's like nothing is crashing for me.
 Nothing is freaking out.
 Well, again, nothing is kind of a maybe an overstatement, maybe a few things and a few
 oddities might sprout up.
 But I expected a mini disaster, to be honest.
 I just expected app crashes and issues and problems.
 This feature will be forthcoming soon, et cetera, et cetera.
 And that hasn't been the case.
 So it's encouraging.
 I think that's a very reasonable thing to say because as few user facing changes as
 there are in Windows Phone 8, they actually did completely extricate the kernel of Windows
 Phone and replace it with a completely different kernel.
 And it was basically a complete re-architecture of the system.
 So to be able to say that we reviewed these devices and the legacy apps worked fine and
 we didn't experience any crazy crashes is pretty impressive in its own right.
 Peter, what are your thoughts?
 Are you going to say Peter is still with us?
 I was watching the chat.
 I admit, the chat.
 Gmail is down for some people.
 It's fine for me.
 But yeah, no, all of my actually I should mention that I just noticed that all of my
 Google services simultaneously crashed.
 I don't have access to anything right now, which is interesting.
 I wonder if that's a Hurricane Sandy situation.
 Oh, man, I have to break up the podcast and start writing news items about this.
 Well, that's what that's actually what happened during our Google hangout.
 We did a hangout.
 I'm sure that some of our listeners were listening in when we did a hangout on Monday to talk
 about the day's news, because Monday was a big day and we'll get into all that shortly.
 But halfway through, Apple announced that Scott Forstall was leaving.
 And so our listeners kind of got a live peek at adverge editors freaking out at actual
 news breaking, which was, I'm sure, enlightening for some of you and confusing for others.
 So yes, if there is a massive Google services outage right now, you heard it here first.
 Yes.
 So I think the most impressive thing-
 I just confirmed it in the UK and in Chicago and in that Seattle hotel room.
 So there we go.
 That's Google.
 Back to Windows Phone.
 I was going to say, the most impressive thing, speaking of services about Windows Phone for
 me is the SkyDrive integration.
 I know that there was a bunch of it in Windows Phone previous, but this was the first time
 I really deeply used it.
 And Microsoft has done just an incredibly good job of making it feel seamless and connected
 and you don't have to think about stuff when it syncs to SkyDrive.
 And my favorite part about it, and I think I mentioned this in the review, is Apple's
 got iCloud and different apps can connect to iCloud.
 But Apple's being so aggressive at hiding the file system that it's really hard to feel
 like you've got access to the stuff that gets saved into iCloud, whereas with SkyDrive,
 it's very transparent.
 It saves to SkyDrive, you go to your SkyDrive and there it is, no problem.
 Vlad actually pointed out that the photo integration was really, really good.
 So I hadn't even realized that I- I left it on because that was the default, so I hadn't
 paid attention to it.
 But I went and I started playing around with it and it was like it had been invisibly uploading
 my photos into a folder that I could get to just without me even thinking about it, without
 me setting it up, without anything.
 And it was really impressive, really amazing.
 And that's an option, you can also disable the automatic uploads, which I have to do
 because I'm so picky about my photos that I usually take about six versions of them.
 And if every single one was uploaded to SkyDrive, then me going to SkyDrive would be just the
 most frustrating time in the world.
 So many duplicates.
 But anyway, yeah, SkyDrive very much for my purposes, again, strictly just for my purposes,
 can replace Dropbox.
 Well, for my purposes when using a mobile phone, which I primarily use Dropbox on my
 mobile phone to take photos and share them around so I can access them on a computer.
 I still prefer Dropbox for everything else, which includes sharing things with colleagues,
 sharing things with friends, et cetera.
 But the way the SkyDrive works, which has been saying, is really nice.
 And also the new SkyDrive website, which together with Outlook.com got overhauled during the
 summer is really, really nice.
 I never go to Dropbox.com.
 I always manage things from my devices.
 But also when I'm on Dropbox.com, I don't feel like it's particularly great layout or
 anything like that, whereas with SkyDrive, it's kind of a pleasure.
 You can drag things around.
 It's essentially a web app.
 And it's nice.
 But the thing that actually stands out for me with SkyDrive is I'm showing people sample
 photos from my reviews.
 And I'm sending them SkyDrive pictures.
 And they're like, whoa, a SkyDrive link.
 I haven't seen one of those.
 And that's going to be one thing that Microsoft is going to have to break through this, I
 don't know, prejudice or just expectation that it's not going to be as good as the
 leading services.
 Because as I say, if you're just uploading photos to the cloud, it's just at least as
 good as Dropbox.
 Speaking of Microsoft needing to break through and get people to take them legitimately in
 the smartphone space, I want to talk about Internet Explorer 10.
 I am really, really impressed with its speed and with how well it handles web pages.
 But I've had to switch it to full desktop mode because even though it's a fast web standards
 compliant browser, most of the mobile web is built for WebKit.
 It's built for Apple and it's built for Android browsers.
 And anybody else uses WebKit, Chrome, Safari, you name it.
 But of course, IE is not based on WebKit, just like Firefox is not based on WebKit.
 They've got their own rendering engine.
 And Google especially, but there are a few other sites who see this browser and they
 treat it like a second class citizen.
 They're like, now we're going to give you our old mobile page that we coded in 2002
 or whatever.
 It's like using IE 10 on Google's web pages.
 It's the same experience as if you're using Blazor on Palm OS.
 It's terrible.
 That was kind of an outdated analogy I have to say to Dieter.
 What?
 What?
 That analogy would have worked in 2006.
 Don't worry, I used an even older one on Twitter today and I got called out by a bunch of people.
 I think it was a good one, so I'm just going to recite it.
 I was saying that the Lumia 920, no actually never mind.
 That's a spoiler, I'm not going to repeat it.
 You can find it on Twitter.
 It's a really ancient Lumia 920 MBA related analogy.
 That's all I'm going to say.
 Anyway, as near as I can tell, IE 10 is a really good browser.
 It can't get no respect.
 That same exact thing of they need to get attention from outside of the Microsoft bubble
 in browser and people accepting SkyDrive as a first class citizen of the cloud of the
 web, and apps.
 Microsoft told us I think they've got 46 of the top 50 apps that they're targeting or
 something, whatever, that's great.
 They need more of those top apps.
 I know what's the number they hit, 120,000 or something.
 But the problem isn't the number of apps, because the numbers game is the numbers game.
 The problem is the quality of the apps and how well they're updated.
 And Chris, you actually made a really good point about this a while ago that they'll
 tick the box off of getting an app, and then a year later the app is still basically in
 the same state that it was and it hasn't been updated.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 And I can think of a bunch of examples of that where they obviously paid or otherwise
 encouraged a top tier developer to make a brand name app for the platform, or Microsoft
 just said screw it, we'll do it ourselves like they did Twitter and Facebook.
 But when they're reaching out to these third party developers to make their apps for Windows
 phone, I think they're just, like you say, Dieter, they're just ticking the box to get
 it on Windows phone, and then it's kind of like set it and forget it.
 And then you look back six months or a year later and the app is in the same state, maybe
 it's gotten one update to fix like a critical bug.
 But then meanwhile, on iOS and Android, they've been updated every two days.
 The running joke for a long time, Dieter, I think you noticed this as well, is that
 on Android, RDO for a while was being updated like, or was it Spotify or RDO?
 One of those two was being updated.
 It was RDO being updated every 25 minutes.
 It was ridiculous.
 Yeah.
 For like a month or two.
 And you will not see that on Windows phone, that's for sure.
 Yeah.
 What else do you want to say?
 The smart glass Xbox stuff seems pretty cool.
 I haven't played with it a ton.
 Chris, you were messing around with that more often than I was.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I went into it thinking, okay, this is going to be a silly gimmick that, you know,
 I mean, it'll be like cool, a whiz bang feature that I'll never use.
 But I could realistically see using smart glass as my full time Xbox controller, because
 I'm not really a gamer, you know, I don't have my Xbox to play games.
 Like I bought Fez and it's going to take me five years to beat it.
 But apart from Fez, I basically just used it for watching movies and whatnot.
 And so for that kind of stuff, the remote control that is in smart glass works great
 because it's basically a track pad for the Xbox that's on your phone or tablet.
 Now, long term, I don't necessarily see myself using smart glass on a Windows phone.
 But the cool thing about it is that Microsoft is going cross platform with it.
 They're launching clients for iOS, for Android, and of course, for Windows phone and for Windows
 8.
 So, but yeah, it works very well.
 My only complaint with it is that it never thought that it was on the same network as
 the Xbox.
 I don't know why, because they were on the same network.
 And when that happens, my first thought was, OK, this is kind of crazy cool that I can
 control my Xbox from anywhere in the world, basically, because they don't have to be on
 the same network.
 But the downside of that is that it disables the smart glass browser and the keyboard.
 You can't for some reason.
 So you can't type with it.
 And you also can't use it to browse websites using your phone projected onto the Xbox.
 And I was never able to solve that problem.
 I tried a bunch of, I turned off cellular data.
 I have three different Wi-Fi networks in my house.
 I tried all three.
 But it was on the same subnet as my Xbox the whole time.
 So I don't know what the deal was.
 But strictly as a remote control, it's awesome.
 Regardless of whether you're using an Android phone, an Android tablet, an iPhone, an iPad,
 whatever, get smart glass if you have an Xbox, for sure.
 So in terms of launch hardware, I mean, we should just get into it.
 There's a bunch of phones.
 We saw the 822 coming to Verizon.
 And it's just like whatever T-Mobile's got, the 820.
 I forget what T-Mobile's is.
 Is it the 810?
 All these mid-tier Nokia Lumia devices, they're all basically iterations on the same thing.
 It's a big, chunky phone.
 There's the Ativ S from Samsung, which basically feels like we got a hands-on with it finally.
 It basically feels like a Galaxy S2.
 It's like a plasticky Windows phone.
 It's super light.
 S2 or S3?
 S2, I would say.
 Maybe S3.
 It's like a little S3, I guess.
 It's not quite as big.
 But it's typical.
 The Ativ S is really weird to me because I seem to recall the big sales pitch from Samsung
 being that it had aluminum, excuse me, aluminum construction.
 It sure does feel like.
 Right.
 And I'm playing around with it.
 I took off its back cover, its classic thin plastic from Samsung and extremely flexible.
 I'm poking at it.
 I'm touching it from every angle.
 I don't feel any metal here.
 It pretty much is a Galaxy S3 running Windows phone, which probably some people will love,
 but it's underwhelming.
 We spoke to HTC at this launch event, and they explicitly said, we want to stop having
 our Windows phones basically be repackaged Android phones.
 And the first phone that we're doing that with, where we're designing it as a Windows
 phone from start to finish, was the 8X.
 There's two basically hero launch devices for Windows phone, the 8X and the Nokia 920,
 the Lumia 920.
 And we have already reviewed the 8X.
 And Vlad, is it fair to say that you are smitten?
 Is it fair to say that maybe you're so deeply in love that if you were walking on up here,
 you wouldn't notice if you walked off the end, you'd just keep going?
 Walking on the edge.
 Yeah, I was just holding both of them up like a salesman, and I just feel really dirty for
 doing that.
 I'm trying to be useful to the people who are actually watching the show, but then holding
 them up like that, it kind of starts to feel like an infomercial.
 Yeah, I mean, I really like the 8X.
 And I'm not alone.
 Aaron, PhoneDog, what's his surname?
 Baker.
 Baker, that's right.
 I just saw his Twitter handle, somebody retweeted him.
 And he was saying the same thing, that he's got the 8X on his desk, and he's just kind
 of randomly picking it up and playing with it and touching it and looking at it.
 It's still a phone we're talking about here.
 Keep your mind out of the gutter.
 I mean, I just think it's a really nicely designed phone.
 And Dita, this is something that you said first, and I've echoed a bunch of times.
 It seems to really flow very well with the ethos and the aesthetic of Windows Phone in
 general, right?
 Because to me, Windows Phone 8 is the maturation of the Windows Phone idea.
 The Windows Phone 7 and just the square tiles, which didn't have the size flexibility, it
 wasn't there.
 But now that you can resize the tiles, I mean, I've seen some of the PR people who are showing
 off these phones, and they've got some ridiculously nice patterns built into their home screens,
 just by having a square one, a number one, a tiny tile, and they just arrange them into
 really kick-ass patterns.
 But yeah, it's all kind of minimalist and stripped down and kind of modest in terms
 of it doesn't take up all this space.
 There's no skeuomorphism.
 There's no extra chrome and all of that junk.
 And Windows Phone 8 kind of involves that in a really nice way from Windows Phone 7.
 And frankly, if this phone was just running Windows Phone 7, I would be like, well, that's
 a great design with a sucky OS.
 But I do feel like there are so many little tweaks.
 I mean, maybe the home screen change seems smaller than it is in practice.
 That's the way that I feel.
 Like in practice, it just gives you so much more flexibility.
 So I'm excited about the OS.
 Like I feel it's fresh and it's different.
 And even though there's a massive, massive gap where the app ecosystem should be, to
 somebody like myself and you guys, it's just really new and fresh.
 And I just need to explore it.
 I don't just want to explore it, I need to.
 And just the design of the edX is brilliant.
 And it just feels so good in the hand and it's so ultra matte.
 I mean, I was saying it has some ergonomic issues.
 Like it's a 4.3 inch screen, but it's exactly as tall as the Lumia 920, which is a 4.5 inch
 screen.
 But the difference when you're holding the two in your hand is crazy.
 The edX just makes everything else feel so fat.
 Can I provide a counterpoint to absolutely everything that you just said, Vlad?
 Yes.
 So first of all, and if any HTC employees are listening right now, I apologize in advance
 because I'm going to sound a little cranky.
 And I want to emphasize that my views on this phone are not shared by pretty much anyone
 else on this team.
 And I also think that my negative views may have been influenced by the fact that I was
 set a sense of black one when everyone at HTC knows very well that I like colors.
 So I want to know, I want to know who at HTC is trolling me and why I got a blue one right
 here.
 Chris is very blue.
 I know, I know you have a one, believe me.
 And it has a logo on the bottom.
 It's LTE.
 No, that is how you're just trolling me.
 But look, so I will say a few things about the eight X one, the phone is too square.
 It's annoyingly square.
 So it, no matter where you're holding it, no matter where you're holding it up or down
 along the edge of the phone, one of the, the corners is always digging into your hand.
 It doesn't roll across the hand nicely as most phones do.
 Even squarish phones like the iPhone are rounded enough at the corners so that it isn't annoying,
 but that the, the eight X is square enough so that it does dig into your hand.
 That's the first problem to it's the soft touch is so soft touchy that I just got an
 email from Jeff at HTC saying yes, HTC employees are listening.
 So Jeff, I'm sorry for, for, for what I'm doing to the eight X right now.
 But I'm going to continue now that I know that I'm on a stage, the, the back of the
 phone is a little too rough.
 So it I had, I wouldn't call it difficulty, but it was like it, it was a little bit tougher
 to like put it into and pull it out of my pocket than I would normally expect with the
 phone, even a soft touch phone.
 And then third, and somebody else made this observation too.
 I can't remember who's you, Dieter or Josh, but I agree.
 Someone was pointing out that despite how thin it is, for some strange reason, it feels
 thicker than it actually is.
 Yeah, it does.
 It's weird.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 And, and so I guess those are my three big ones with the design.
 Don't get me wrong.
 Like it, you miss the really, you miss the real complaint about the design.
 There's only one genuine complaint that I have about the design and that's the power
 button, which is on the top.
 And I'm used to stuff than being on the side, but it's sort of, it's easier to hit from
 the front than on the back, which makes no sense.
 And like, I'm constantly missing it.
 I'm constantly like having to press in and like push harder than I ought to to get it.
 You know, if you're going to have this nice, you know, angled thing on the back, you should
 be able to sort of just tap on that, that Ridge on the back to get it.
 But instead you've got to like reach all the way up there and push down on it.
 And it's, that's the only legit complaint I've heard over the past three minutes though.
 Everything else is just crazy riffing.
 And I mean, it is, it is so soft touchy that I can't pull it out of my pocket.
 It's it's like, it's like, it's basically an adhesive back.
 Like I could probably stick it to the outside of my pants and it would just stay there.
 Like it's really adhesive.
 But but yeah, the power button is completely flush.
 And and Vlad, I think you pointed this out as well.
 The position of the power button relative to the volume buttons is such that it's very
 difficult for some strange reason.
 I found myself constantly pressing the power button and accidentally triggering the volume.
 So I'd be like, you know, jacking the volume up or down one point, you know, on the 30
 point scale that they use.
 No, no, that's true.
 That's true.
 And it happened to me the first day or so.
 But the other thing I would say is I'm adapting.
 And I'll give you I'll give you the point about the edge as well.
 It does dig into your palm a little bit.
 But then you just kind of adapt your grip a little bit.
 And I don't want to sound like Steve Jobs.
 I don't want to be like you're holding it wrong, Chris.
 Fix your grip.
 But I'm just saying you kind of adapt in it.
 These things fade into the background.
 Like they don't stop being an issue.
 I spoke with HTC people and I was saying to them, you need a side mount power button because
 everybody else is doing it.
 And it just makes so much more sense.
 Like Nokia, LG, Samsung, everybody's mounting on the side apart from Apple.
 And that's where the power button really belongs, particularly on this really tall phones, because
 there is no way that you can use any phone with a four point five inch screen or above
 or even the Aidex with one hand and not have to readjust your grip to reach the top and
 then come back down to the capacity keys to the very bottom.
 Whereas if the power button is on the side, then you've got no problem.
 But still, you know, go ahead, Chris.
 When Samsung first started doing those side power buttons, I was like, this is the dumbest
 thing ever.
 And I now kind of don't like it when a phone's power button isn't on the side, especially
 to your point, if it's like four and five inches or above.
 Like I get really annoyed if it's not on the side.
 Yeah.
 Just the other thing I was going to say flew out of my mind.
 Yeah.
 No, it was the fact that I made no secret.
 I've got a 920 here with me.
 And I can tell you the Aidex, in spite of its flaws that we just discussed, is the phone
 I keep returning to.
 Like I just want to, you know, it's the one I prefer.
 I mean, that's the other thing is I'm very open to the fact that a bunch of people might
 prefer the Lumia or something else.
 But the Aidex just kind of really appeals to me.
 And that's basically the end of the story.
 And I don't think I'm alone.
 I think it's a really well designed phone.
 I also think the thing that you mentioned about HTC not just taking its Android designs
 over to Windows phone or even flipping it around, just, you know, pausing designs between
 operating systems is a good thing.
 Because one of these designers, they need to be paid, they need to have jobs, and they
 need to do something fresh and innovative to keep us interested.
 I think the Aidex is totally one of those devices.
 Yes, I will agree with you on that.
 As many complaints as I have about specific design points on the Aidex, I do, you know,
 I have to give it to HTC for making something that is very notably different from their
 Android line.
 And that's something that, you know, I think that they are very cognizant of the fact that
 they fought in the 7.5 world.
 You know, if you look at like the Titan 2 from a distance, especially an average consumer
 walking into a store, I think the assumption would be that that's an Android device until
 you get close and realize that it's not running Android.
 Just a quick update here on our breaking news story about Google Apps.
 They seem to be back, first of all.
 Yeah, they're back.
 So that was like a little blip.
 But also, somebody tweeted at us saying Google Apps had to crash at the wrong time just as
 I'm meant to receive my bootloader unlock from HTC Dev.
 The thing that I will say to that person is that he's being way too optimistic.
 I registered to get a bootloader unlock and to get my, well, to get an account started
 on HTC Dev and it took them about three months and I need to get in touch with somebody for
 them to sort that out.
 So don't worry about it.
 You haven't got the HTC Dev and Buck stuff happening in your email.
 I'm pretty sure.
 But anyway, shall we talk about Android now?
 Do you want to switch it up?
 Yeah, I was just going to say the big crazy news in addition to Windows Phone is Android.
 We have got the Nexus 4, the Nexus 10, the Nexus 7, 32 GB plus mobile, whatever, and
 Android 4.2.
 We went to Google's campus.
 We got a deep dive on Google Now.
 We got a very close look at the phones and the tablet.
 And it all got announced despite Hurricane Sandy.
 And I mean, I don't even know where to start.
 The Nexus 4 is based on the Optimus G as we expected.
 It looks like an LG version of the Galaxy Nexus.
 It's got glass on the front and the back.
 It's got wireless charging, which I'm going to have a little freak out about later.
 And it's got Android 4.2.
 It's crazy fast.
 It looks really, really good.
 It's remarkable how much better it feels than any of the Optimus G variants that I've held.
 I've held the Sprint one, the AT&T one, and the International one.
 And it's markedly better.
 It feels way better than all of them.
 The way that they did the rim with the soft touch plastic that just barely goes over the
 glass so it's less likely to scratch when you set it on a table.
 Matias convinced me that they got into the design.
 I mean, the Nexus program is funny because they work with other manufacturers.
 And I was like, oh, this is just a rebranded G. Oh, this is just a rebranded Galaxy S2
 or whatever it is.
 But the amount of design work that went into, especially the Nexus 4, makes it feel like
 a completely different phone.
 And I desperately love it.
 I desperately want to make it my next phone.
 But I'm desperately unhappy about the lack of LTE, which is something we really need
 to talk about.
 Maybe we put that off.
 I'm wondering what your guys' general impression of the Nexus 4 was from what you've seen.
 Chris?
 I absolutely, I mean, it's a very, from a distance, I should qualify this.
 I haven't touched the phone.
 I haven't seen it in person.
 But from a distance, judging from the pictures and the impressions that Josh posted and everything
 that I know about the device, it seems like exactly the upgrade from last year's Galaxy
 Nexus that Google needed to put out there.
 And I'm cautiously optimistic at this point that LG, a company that I don't associate
 with great hardware, is going to pull off this phone in a way that everybody's happy
 with.
 But yeah, the dream killer.
 I mean, there's zero question that if this phone had LTE, that it would be my next phone.
 There's absolutely no question.
 And I think that that sentiment is echoed by several people on our staff, D.D. included.
 But it's a dream killer.
 I mean, especially in Chicago, where AT&T's HSPA network is completely worthless and continues
 to be, it's just not feasible for me to use an HSPA-only device.
 I can't do it.
 So, OK, I mean, let's just get into it.
 Go ahead, Vlad.
 Sorry.
 Well, I mean, I was going to say, Chris's point is fair enough.
 If you're stuck without LTE, you're stuck.
 But as the international member of the show, I have to give voice to all the crazy people
 who have freaked out at the price.
 Because Google is selling this phone unlocked.
 So it doesn't have LTE, which is a major issue in the United States.
 But for most of the rest of the world, it's not.
 And selling this unlocked, and I understand it's £279 in the UK.
 It's £299 in the US.
 That's crazy price.
 And I forget, is it a 16-gig version that's £299?
 I think it starts at £8.
 Is it £8?
 Yeah.
 Which is ridiculously cheap for a phone of this caliber to be charging that straight
 up without a contract.
 Yeah, £299 for £8 and £349 for £16.
 If you're on T-Mobile in the US, this is the phone to buy.
 Because especially since T-Mobile charges more than AT&T and Verizon do for equivalent
 devices subsidized, I think T-Mobile has several phones that are £299 or more on contract.
 You can get this phone off contract, and then you can go on under one of their value plans
 that are actually lower per month because you're not taking a subsidy.
 It's a no-brainer.
 Yeah.
 OK.
 Damn it.
 That person who was expecting the AC dev email got it.
 So I was completely wrong.
 I'm a troll.
 I'm a terrible troll, and I apologize.
 Well, but I mean, to that point, you guys have this £199 price point in the US, and
 it's kind of nice and straightforward.
 You can't...
 On contract pricing in the UK is like a full zero to try and keep track of.
 It's ridiculous.
 You can get this phone if you pay £50 in advance, and it will give you £60 cash back,
 and then you need to sign up for two years, and after two years, we get to name your first
 child, et cetera, et cetera.
 It's a mess, right?
 But the thing with the £199 on contract price is that ultimately, if you don't get some
 sort of random amnesty from AT&T or Verizon or whatever, or you don't upgrade before the
 contract expires, in order to use and enjoy the phone with your service, you're paying,
 I don't know, thousands of dollars by the end of the full contract.
 Whereas with this new Nexus 4, you're getting a top-spec Android device, and I can vouch
 for the specs and the experience of the Optimus G. I was using the...
 Well, basically, I guess Korean version, the international version of the Optimus G just
 before this deluge of Windows Phone 8 devices took over my life, and I was really enjoying
 it.
 As far as I was concerned, the Optimus G is the nicest Android that we've got going on
 at the moment.
 I mean, maybe not the nicest camera necessarily, but I was really enjoying the user experience.
 Even LG's skin.
 I know, I'm nuts.
 But yeah, the Nexus 4 being stock in all of that.
 I mean, the Nexus 4 is, yeah, it's stacked on good things, and it's cheap compared to
 pretty much everything else.
 So the OT thing, again, might be a big deal in the US.
 It's not gonna get in its way.
 It's not gonna stand in its way as far as Android taking over the rest of the world,
 I don't think.
 I mean, the price point is just the crazy thing.
 That's the really standout thing for me.
 So in terms of it not having LTE, we talk to Google a lot about this, and it basically
 comes down to a few issues.
 One, there's the battery life issue, which I think is a red herring, because we've seen
 plenty of other companies handle this.
 And so Google wants the Nexus program to be sort of like pure Google, and morally pure,
 ethically pure.
 I don't even know what the right word is for it, but they wanna push their software updates
 out without carrier intervention, and without having to wait for that.
 And basically, they didn't feel like they could do that if they released a version with
 LTE, because if you're gonna release a version with LTE on Verizon, you've gotta release,
 it's gotta have CDMA.
 And if it's on CDMA or LTE on Verizon, Verizon gets to vet your software updates.
 What's interesting is that on AT&T, we talked to AT&T about this, and they're like, whatever,
 bring it on lock phone to our LTE network, totally cool.
 We have zero problem with that.
 So why didn't they?
 We assume it's economics, that there's just not a big enough addressable market on AT&T's
 LTE to make it worth it for them to create the device, I guess.
 But basically, we talked about this in the Hangout, that my feeling is like, Apple's
 pulled this off, because Apple's able to do it.
 Google apparently isn't.
 They don't have the clout in the mobile space with this Nexus line of phones to demand software
 updates without carrier intervention.
 And so they had two choices.
 They could stick with the purity of the Nexus program, or they could get their hands dirty
 with the carriers, either to force through the update issue or to accept the delay.
 And they just decided not to get their hands dirty.
 Yeah, ironically, and Dieter, I think that you made this point earlier in the week.
 I don't know if we were talking or if you said it in a post or something.
 But ironically, if Android was a closed system that they had kept to themselves and developed
 over the years, I think that they would have the same level of clout at Apple in this situation.
 They'd be able to throw that weight around.
 But because Android is open, carriers are like, who cares about this Nexus?
 We'll go tell Motorola or LG or whomever that we want these ridiculous changes to the software,
 and we'll get it exactly our way, and we won't have to deal with you.
 And goodbye.
 Yeah.
 And I mean, AT&T has got the Optimus G. What did Verizon get?
 They got something from LG that's not the Optimus G, but it's pretty good.
 It's Spectrum 2 or something?
 Nah, I don't think it's very good.
 I think it's the Optimus Nitro Achieve Max HD.
 Oh, that one.
 I remember that one.
 You know, if it only had one fewer name, I might have forgotten about it because it has
 so many.
 I've got no problem.
 Yeah, so I mean, I was thinking, OK, you know what?
 I'm just going to use the Optimus G on AT&T.
 I'll just accept that.
 But then you can't uninstall AT&T's junk.
 And that's insane that you were supposed to like Google reneged on that promise that you'd
 be able to uninstall stuff after ice cream sandwich.
 You can't uninstall stuff, and that's not OK.
 Windows Phone, there's a whole bunch of AT&T junk on an AT&T phone.
 No problem.
 Just uninstall it.
 Gone, gone, gone, gone.
 Not an issue at all.
 So like, I don't know what I'm going to do.
 Am I going to go with the Lumia 920?
 Am I going to go with the Optimus G?
 Am I going to suck it up and not have LTE?
 It's hard for me not to get LTE because I use it for tethering all the time when I'm
 working.
 It's one of my things I need for work.
 You know, the thing I was going to mention, guys, is building up the argument for going
 without LTE, if we're going with T-Mobile, mobile T-Mobile is apparently well, at least
 as my understanding, T-Mobile had the best reception during the hurricane in New York.
 Like it stayed up the best out of all the networks.
 Am I correct in this?
 I think that's the thing that our colleagues were saying.
 Yeah, yeah, I think it might be.
 I don't know.
 T-Mobile is a non starter.
 I have bad signal.
 Yeah, Kimber lives.
 I believe Kimber lives in New Jersey.
 Kimber, if you're listening and you don't live in New Jersey, I apologize.
 But wherever Kimber was, she had T-Mobile go down.
 I mean, it's not a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, which actually we'll talk about this
 a little bit more later, but that is part of the reason why T-Mobile is sharing their
 network with, with, with AT&T through this disaster, because I think that some networks
 are having better luck in some neighborhoods than others and vice versa.
 So it kind of works out.
 Right.
 Okay, fine.
 That wasn't a great argument for me, I guess.
 But still, I mean, if you want to help out the underdog, like if I'm in the US, I would
 work really hard to get on Sprint or to get on T-Mobile just to undermine the oligopoly
 happening or even the duopoly happening up top.
 You know, do my little thing so that our children can have a choice of mobile characters.
 Being against the machine is a fool's game in the US wireless business.
 I mean, you're only hurting yourself.
 It's like, you know, I look, I mean, T-Mobile is, is great.
 And I love what T-Mobile is trying to do.
 They have a very, very pro consumer policy, largely because they have to, because they're
 the underdog.
 But at the end of the day, I want LTE.
 And Josh made this point in our hangout on Monday.
 I think that the difference is not insignificant in many parts of the country, right?
 Like we're not talking about five versus seven megabits down.
 We're talking about like 20 megabits down versus two or three.
 And to Dieter's point, like when you're using the phone for work and you're using it for
 tethering and that's something that you need to be able to rely on, that makes a big difference.
 Not to mention the latency difference.
 Yeah.
 Very unhappy.
 Let me actually bring us back to Nexus 4 for a moment because I am really hesitant about
 the geo glass stuff.
 I've heard all the arguments about, yes, there's glass in front, there's glass in the back,
 we'll protect the glass really well, blah, blah, blah, blah.
 I am not a fan of that.
 Like I would need to, again, I'm kind of like Chris insofar as I've only seen the pictures
 and the videos of it.
 I haven't seen it in person yet.
 But I would be really surprised to see a phone with glass on both the front and the back
 and for it not to lose some durability, some endurance, for it not to be more fragile than
 one that is made out of plastic or metal.
 I mean, how do you guys feel about that?
 Dieter, you've got to say.
 I never broke an iPhone 4 for us.
 I never shattered the back or the front on a 4 for us.
 So apparently, apparently it's not a problem for me.
 It doesn't give me pause.
 Yeah, neither did I. And I actually have to be honest.
 I'm actually back on an iPhone 5 for the moment.
 And I would actually prefer, like as good as the phone looks and as good as the aluminum
 looks, I would prefer the glass of the 4S because I don't care about drop durability.
 I care about set it on a table and it doesn't get like micro scratches durability.
 And that's something that I can't like I always have to make sure to set the iPhone 5 down
 on a like a soft surface.
 Like if I'm setting it on a table, I set it on a book or a magazine or something.
 I don't set it on the table itself because I know that I'm going to lift it up and find
 some micro scratches.
 That's something that you don't worry about with glass.
 So I would I would much prefer that a phone be durable to that and not be able to survive
 a six foot fall, then vice versa.
 And I'm just imagining right now how you facilitate all of these soft surfaces.
 And I'm thinking because you didn't tell us when you complained about the 8X and how it
 how it's a pain to take out of your trousers.
 You didn't tell us whether they were silk, but it made out of silk.
 Was that the issue?
 It's silk trousers.
 First of all, I have to tell you that there's no such thing as trousers in in in in America
 or in other freedom loving countries.
 We call them pants.
 Pants.
 Yeah.
 But other people call pants underwear or other underwear pants.
 What no underpants.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 That stuff.
 There's a difference between pants and underpants.
 Also, we could call them pantalons.
 I was going to say pantaloons.
 We could.
 Yeah, we were pantaloons.
 The image, the composite image that I'm getting from this podcast today is that Chris is this
 shadow is going crazy.
 Suave silk wearing gentleman who has this little, you know, silk.
 Okay.
 But he lays out on a table every time he's put down his iPhone.
 Yes.
 He's like, be careful people.
 Micro scratches.
 I'm pulling my iPhone five out of my silk pantaloons and setting it on a silk handkerchief
 on my table.
 That's right.
 That is exactly the image that I'm getting.
 That's that's it.
 You figured it out.
 Are you the Scarlett Pimpernel?
 Yes.
 Yes.
 Yes, I am.
 This is Chris.
 He is Chris.
 Oh, my God.
 Can we talk about Android 4.2?
 I think it's a really nice PIP update for Android.
 They they just added a whole bunch of like, I don't know, random features, but they did
 some good stuff.
 So I MiraCast, I guess is interesting.
 I got swipe typing, gesture typing.
 They've got quick settings so you can swipe down from twice or there's a button in the
 notification area to toggle quick settings.
 What am I forgetting?
 There's the photo sphere thing.
 You know, that's fine for panorama stuff.
 Oh, the lock screen improvements.
 I think that's really interesting.
 So you can swipe left or right to get to different widgets or to go straight to the camera, even
 if you have a password on it, finally.
 And then, of course, you know, we did this deep dive on on all the stuff they've added
 to Google now that makes it just, you know, be able to do more.
 It can read your inbox now and can give you hotel and flight package information from
 stuff that was emailed to you.
 And this isn't Android 4.2 thing, but we got really deep into their voice search stuff
 and how how well they are able to recognize voice based on their neural network, which
 actually applies to the iPhone, too, because the voice search app for iOS just got released
 and it's amazing.
 Anyway, you know, it doesn't look like it's as crazy big as either ice cream sandwich
 or jelly bean in terms of, oh, my gosh, I must have all these features.
 But you know, I want it.
 And I am looking forward to spending the next 18 months complaining about waiting for updates
 to 4.2 from every single manufacturer on the planet.
 Can I be the first to predict that the Galaxy Note 2 will get its 4.2 update roughly three
 months after Keyline Pie comes out on the next Nexus phone?
 That's my prediction.
 And Keyline Pie being the thing the thing that comes after 4.2.
 Right.
 Because 4.2 is still a jelly bean, technically, in Google's parlance.
 But I mean, I'm intrigued now.
 There's a couple of questions here.
 So Google now can now read your inbox, you said.
 How like first of all, how does that integrate into the whole set of information that Google
 now presents to you?
 And secondly, I know that Chris, like myself, still hasn't gotten into using Google now
 on a regular basis.
 So can you give us the fresh sales pitch for Google now?
 The email features actually, they have been trialing these email features on Google search
 on the desktop for, you know, you could sign up for the trial.
 And basically, it doesn't happen on your phone, it happens in Google's cloud.
 And it just, you know, every time you get an email, Google now, Google reads it.
 And if it sees something in a certain set of categories, hotel reservations, flight
 reservations, package tracking, I think, like event tickets and concert tickets, it just
 takes that information and it puts it into, you know, Google now's database of things
 that knows about you.
 And then when you land in a city, or your flights coming up, or your, you know, use
 time for you to leave to go to the concert or whatever, the next time you check Google
 now, it, you know, a card for that piece of information will just be there.
 And then you'll be able to use it to get to where you're going.
 So like you land in a new city, you pull out your phone, you check Google now, and the
 first card, oh, look at that, there's there's my hotel, I don't have to go looking into
 my email for it's just sitting there.
 And that really fits in with, you know, you guys say you haven't like made Google now
 part of your life.
 And like, that's okay, like, I don't think anybody should try and completely depend on
 Google now yet.
 But it's sort of one of these things where, you know, every now and then it like, pushes
 a piece of information in front of you that's like, oh, man, I needed that.
 That's great.
 Thank you.
 And so it just feels very serendipitous.
 But it's not like a utility.
 It's just sort of a nice like, oh, hey, now I you know, I know I need to leave to get
 home in time.
 Or oh, you know, this is the weather or my, you know, baseball team lost or you know,
 whatever.
 It's, but what's interesting about Google now is that Google has got all the pieces
 to enable this futuristic vision of computing.
 And they're like, moving in that direction slowly, like, Siri's a personal assistant,
 but Google now actually knows the stuff about you that you'd want a personal assistant to
 know like, it's able to check your email like personal assistant.
 Right.
 Of course, you can opt out of all the stuff.
 The issue for me, though, the issue for me is that as soon as Google introduced now,
 it made it just kind of too ubiquitous for a thing exactly as you describe it.
 And I think I totally agree that you can't necessarily rely on it can't be your personal
 organizer.
 It can be a helpful system and a sidekick, I guess.
 But then Google now just way too easy to access and accidentally we've talked about it on
 previous shows.
 And Google is kind of pushing on to people.
 Whereas again, I agree with you and still much agreement for a podcast.
 To be honest, we need to disagree on something.
 We tried to have an argument this morning.
 Yeah, we've completely failed.
 We're like, we're gonna fight.
 And then we just agreed with each other.
 It was great.
 We flunked it.
 But well, it's it's too much respect, man.
 It's we need to I don't know, start disrespecting each other start trolling each other a bit
 more.
 But anyway, like I said, I agree with you insofar as Google is building towards his
 vision.
 I guess you remember Amit Singha, one of the Google fellows, he did a talk in London.
 And he was saying Google's kind of, you know, its ultimate goal, the pinnacle of where it's
 going is to do search without search.
 And this is what Google now is building towards.
 It's not there yet.
 It's not complete.
 But that's what Google wants to be.
 That's what Google wants to evolve into.
 And I find that an admirable goal.
 And I think that will be an exponential use of things to people, even if it makes us dumber.
 And it kind of builds into that wall-e scenario where we're just kind of being rolled around
 on autonomous cars that know everything we need to do.
 And we just kind of bovine about the whole situation.
 But OK, see, now I forgot what it was.
 Oh, did you did you say bovine?
 Bovine.
 Yes.
 So you're saying that people become cows because of Google?
 No, it's a.
 You want to be trolled, man?
 Yeah, sure.
 OK, it's Nietzsche.
 Nietzsche was the guy who was saying that.
 Well, he used the term bovine to describe just people who.
 Don't have.
 You know, the interest or the mental.
 I don't know, who are just really calm and impassive about the world around them.
 You know, just bovine.
 You're like a cow.
 Google is milking people.
 I'm sorry, continue.
 Let me make my point, man.
 Let me make my point and then we'll get back to the troll.
 Let's do that.
 But but yeah, the point I was going to make is Russ Miller brought this up and it's a
 great point.
 There's no setting where you can just punch in a few quick settings for yourself and get
 going.
 Right.
 So if he if Ross wants scores for his favorite sports team, he can't just jump in and say,
 this is my favorite sports team.
 Start feeding me the scores.
 I want to know about their performance in the playoffs.
 Assuming they make the playoffs.
 He needs to go and check for those scores like three or four times and then Google now
 will wise up and say, yeah, this guy cares about this team, make the connection.
 So, yes, it's making these connections.
 And I know if you go to particular locations a bunch of times, you ask you, does this location
 matter to you?
 Is this where your dealer is?
 Is this where you do whatever you need to do, et cetera?
 And then you form it and it builds all of this information.
 But the point is, you get no control over it.
 You don't get to customize it.
 You know, to keep to keep.
 Yeah, the you can customize the sports teams, but you're over your larger point is is is
 actually completely correct that there's this tension where if they add a whole bunch of
 customization options, then it becomes a huge mess of settings.
 Right.
 And they're trying to do this thing where organically learns about you and then organically
 gives you the information you need.
 And it's a design decision and it's you know, it's a compromise one way or the other.
 And they decided to make the decision to have fewer settings for stuff.
 And it frustrates me.
 So even in four point two, you can't tell it that I don't need you to give me an alert
 for calendar A, B and C. I only needed for calendar D, E and F. I'm subscribed to a half
 a dozen calendars and I don't care that Vlad has a meeting.
 I care that I have a meeting.
 But Google now shows you your next appointment and it thinks my next appointment is Vlad's
 meeting.
 So that's really frustrating.
 But that said, it's like I said, it's it's one of these things where like you just sort
 of check it to see what's going on.
 And you can't you never get the sense that like if you by looking at it, you feel like
 you comprehensively have everything that you need.
 But you do often check it and you get something that you forgot that you needed.
 If that makes sense.
 It doesn't give you everything you need, but it often gives you something you forgot.
 Yeah, it does.
 It does.
 And I have a perfect example, which was I forgot about the the time change because the
 UK is back on GMT now, whereas the United States isn't keeping in step.
 So the difference between myself and you guys is an hour less.
 And that's why we're discussing that's why we're discussing Archimedes just for the podcast,
 because I had one I had literally a eureka moment where I was in the bathtub, sharing
 an intimate moment with the eight X.
 And then I realized that actually the podcast isn't starting in an hour and 10 minutes is
 starting in 10 minutes.
 And then I rushed over here.
 I'm actually quite fortunate to have got a show.
 Yeah.
 And there's some Google now.
 Sorry, what?
 And it's on Google now.
 Well, I mean, you know, so I haven't played 4.2 yet, so I can't contribute to intelligently
 to this conversation other than to say that, like, I, you know, I well, these are the updates
 should be rolling out to 4.1.
 Are they going to be rolling out to this five I'm using right now?
 Because if not, then I know.
 But yeah, you know, I I have so far found Google now to be creepier than it is useful.
 And not not creepy to the point where I want to turn it off, but just I'm I was looking
 at it and saying, you know, it's really weird that it thinks that I need to go home now.
 And and, you know, that's something that might be a generational shift where it's like, you
 know, 20, 30 years from now, people are going to be like, well, of course, my phone is going
 to going to just tell me what to do all day.
 But right now, it's just a little too strange for me, just like the self-driving cars.
 That's my point about being bovine.
 Like you told me, but that's my point about being bovine because maybe sheep like maybe
 that's that's more appropriate where you're just happy to be instructed and led along.
 Right.
 Our children will be milked by Google in ways that we are not.
 Yes.
 Like domesticated mammals.
 Yes.
 Exactly.
 We're on the same page now.
 We're on it.
 OK, well, I think audio listeners of the show aren't getting the benefit of seeing the expression
 on my face right now, but trust that that moment of silence was my complete abdication
 of responsibility for the previous two minutes of conversation.
 What I was going to say is we can probably leave the Nexus 10 discussion for the Verge
 cast and anybody else who cares about tablets.
 The only thing to say about that is that it is really hot.
 It is the best Android tablet, 10 inch Android tablet, bar none, that I've ever held.
 But you know, it's still a 10 inch Android tablet.
 Right.
 They've got some work to do.
 And I'm just going to veto it off the mobile podcast now because we talk about the Galaxy
 Note already, which is a tablet.
 You're not getting 10 inch tablets on here.
 Doesn't matter.
 OK, the charging wants to be, I guess.
 Maybe we got to talk about the charging or I'm all hopped up.
 So Matias showed us.
 The charging orb, it is a third of a sphere sheared off at an angle, and then you set
 the phone on it and it connects with magnets and the magnets align the phone and then it
 inductively charges.
 It looks like a touchstone.
 It looks like a, you know, a curvy sphere of a touchstone.
 It operates exactly like a touchstone.
 It aligns with magnets.
 And and in Android 4.2, there is a new feature called the dreamscape dreamland dreamy time.
 I forget what the what the exact thing is that they called it dreamy dreamtime.
 Anyway, it it's the same thing as this thing that was called exhibition mode in WebOS,
 where as soon as you set it on the dock, it would present you with like, you know, some
 kind of screensaver like a wallpaper or a time.
 It's daydream.
 That's what it's called or, you know, whatever.
 And eventually, you know, they open it up so third parties could add widgets to it and
 so on.
 And I'm sure they will do the same thing.
 So like it's it's completely hilarious how much of the whole ethos of their wireless
 charging solution just came straight out of Palm.
 And I don't know if it's any mistake that, you know, Matias came from Palm and then that's
 what happened.
 But that's just Matias.
 Like, there are a lot of ex Palm people at Google right now, a lot.
 And you know, I got to say that I prefer the way that they're handling the charging solution
 with magnets to what everybody else is doing with with Qi for charging.
 It's a Qi based solution because the magnets really do make a difference in terms of knowing
 that it's connected and it's charging and that it's aligned properly and in the right
 spot.
 It really does matter for lining it up.
 The thing I was going to say about this wireless charges is that I would just love it if we
 could standardize.
 I mean, I love it when we standardize on anything, but micro USB, micro Sims, which didn't last
 too long, but whatever.
 No, but there was just recently Power Mat who's a hang on Power Mat, who's a competing
 standard to Qi just formed yet another consort thing.
 I think the Alliance for Wireless Power.
 Forget them.
 We can just ignore them.
 But Starbucks and Google are backing it.
 The Power Matters Alliance.
 That's what it is.
 Yeah.
 So why is Google backing this competing standard that's putting charters into Starbucks just
 to see what happens while they're using a different standard on their flagship phone?
 I was wondering why this charger in Starbucks doesn't make as much sense as the thing that
 I was going to propose is my reason for caring, which is having one of those freaking things
 on my desk, because if you just sit down and think about how often you just sit down and
 you pop your phone on your desk, if there's a wireless charger under it there, then you
 just stop worrying about the phone's battery.
 You just do like you come to even if you're in the office for 30 minutes, you just put
 down your phone on the wireless charge, do your work, leave and you're pretty much fully
 recharged again.
 These things are freaking convenient.
 But again, if they're done right, like you were just saying.
 So if Google is doing it and it's using Qi and Qi is the thing that Verizon has been
 pushing and Verizon has extra covers that you can buy with Qi charging for most of its
 phones nowadays, just keep going with it.
 I don't care if it's not perfect.
 I mean, it works, right?
 It's functional.
 I see just no reason why any other standard should be pursued.
 We need to just push Qi on everybody and then it will be just such a beautiful world.
 I agree.
 The other thing is think about all the people that have multiple phones and all the families
 that could just, you could stick a few of these charges around the house and everybody
 can just drop their phones off onto them like that.
 I mean, these are handy things.
 I want more of that.
 I love that this dream world that you are describing is a dream world that I lived in
 for three years when I was using my voice phones almost exclusively.
 I had it touched on in my car.
 I had it on my desk.
 I had it by my bed.
 I had it by desk at the office and just wherever I went, just set it down.
 So all the pre-phones had ridiculously bad battery life, but it didn't bother me that
 much because I was always topping it off.
 That's how everything should be.
 Chris is, I don't know what Chris is doing.
 What is he doing?
 I'm taking in this fascinating conversation about wireless charging.
 I have demoted myself from participant to listener for this portion of the conversation.
 So I will say this.
 Um, I agree completely Vlad that like, you know, there are many things where competing
 standards as frustrating as they can be are actually to the benefit of everyone at the
 end of the day.
 But I don't think that wireless charging is one of those things because you're going to
 end up with like a world where, you know, you, you know, you go into this coffee shop
 and it's this standard and you go into another coffee shop and it's this standard, your phone
 might work, it might not.
 So like who's, who's losing out by there being just one dominant standard?
 The answer is nobody.
 Right.
 That's it.
 I'm sure it's a licensing thing.
 It's gotta be that like somebody, you know, whether it's, well, first of all, Powermatte
 probably has an ego coming into this because you know, they, they've been around forever.
 So they're like, well, screw Chi, we're going to do this ourselves.
 And they're, they're, they're just entrenched enough, like they have just enough momentum
 to gum up the works, which is exactly what they're doing now.
 Well, what I was just thinking is hopefully Jeff is still with us.
 Hopefully those HT employees are still watching us on their massive cinema screen in the Taipei
 offices so they can register this stuff from us.
 Wireless charging guys.
 I mean, you're doing it already.
 The eight X tomorrow, you might actually get the scoop on that eight X and Verizon is going
 to have wireless charging, which actually I'm pissed off about because the one in Europe
 doesn't, I suspect, I mean, we don't know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if that
 was Verizon saying, you know, if you want to sell this phone on our network and needs
 to support wireless charging.
 Cause they've been, I mean, Vlad, you mentioned it earlier.
 Verizon has been very strict about that ever since their first LTE phones came out.
 They've been like, you know, if you want to sell this LTE phone on our network, you need
 to either have cheap built in or you need to offer a cheap accessory.
 Which I think with very, very few exceptions they continue to do.
 I mean, obviously the iPhone five does not have a cheap back, but apart from that, I
 think pretty much every LTE phone they sell can be spec'd with a cheap back.
 Yeah.
 And from what Tom, well from the information Tom got, the change is going to be built straight
 into the eight X.
 So it won't make it any bulkier.
 It won't make it any different.
 It won't be an accessory.
 It would be just right in there.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 I'm coming over guys.
 I'm going to enjoy the eight X with LTE and Verizon.
 We're going to Chicago, man.
 This is the tech.
 This is the technology nexus of the United States.
 A lot of people don't realize that yet, but but there's a lot of momentum here and the
 real icing on the cake will be the news that Vlad's obviously moving here.
 Not quite yet, but soon.
 Yeah.
 One day.
 So as soon as somebody does a perfect phone and only releases it in the US, then I'll
 be OK.
 Deal.
 But then also quickly do it.
 Because you'll be like, well, we roll out.
 I want to I want to point out the we've got a really excellent feature about the add zero
 phone, the phone that's made out of bamboo.
 And if you haven't, you should go take a look at it.
 It's it's just an incredible story.
 Aaron did a really, really good job putting it together.
 And then we you know, we want to end on a happy note.
 So let's let's talk about the UK getting LTE.
 You know, yeah, let's talk about that.
 The first thing to say is.
 I don't have it.
 And it's not because I don't have a review phone.
 He very kindly provided me with a phone and a 4G SIM.
 But at home, I can only get three and a half G. I mean, admittedly, I've been messing around
 with all these vendors phones, so I haven't had the time to, you know, do a little tour
 of London with it.
 But at least at home, all I can get is three and a half G. And it's actually slower than
 I get on the free network.
 So that I think that is going to be the key to see for this whole E4G rollout here in
 the UK.
 Most of the spectrum is on higher frequency.
 And the key is here is going to be that it's just not going to be good at penetrating through
 walls.
 And that might well be the case.
 I mean, it might be the case that I step outside and oh, hello, I have 4G.
 But I don't know.
 I'm always like, OK, if you have really fast connectivity, but I can only use it when I'm
 out on the street.
 That just really limits the benefit of it.
 Because when I want to have a really fast connection, I'm usually working and I don't
 want to be out in the rain or the snow or the wind or the freaking hurricane to have
 some sort of connectivity.
 So I think maybe next week I can give you guys some legit feedback on the network.
 The thing that we know is super fast.
 I mean, it reaches speeds up to 30 megs down, probably because nobody's using it.
 And it's in 10 UK cities now.
 So I mean, look, give credit to the company for doing the rollout the way it promised
 it would do it.
 It's working really hard.
 It's getting things up and running really quickly.
 So at least in terms of execution, it's doing well.
 But I'm still dubious about the proposition.
 Also we got pricing, I think, a few days back, maybe a week ago.
 And nobody's been particularly impressed with it.
 It's been quite steep.
 So I don't know.
 Obviously LTE isn't the same sort of must have feature that is for you guys in the U.S.
 And I'm personally content to wait for Vodafone and O2 and 3 in particular, because 3 is usually
 the network that gives you the most and puts the fewest limitations on it.
 Vodafone will try and censor adult websites.
 O2 will try and sell your data.
 I'm being kind of libelous right now.
 But yeah, O2 had a bit of a privacy issue a few months back.
 Whereas 3 kind of just says, when we say unlimited data, we mean unlimited data.
 And you can go crazy.
 So it's my favorite carrier.
 It's the one that I use.
 So I want to see those guys get a hold of the 800 megahertz band and give me the real
 high quality 4G.
 Then I'll be like, OK, you can overprice that service, because then I need it.
 But for the moment, it's kind of...
 You'll complain about the lack of LTE on the Nexus 4, just like us.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Although by that time, we're going to be talking about some Cortex A15 madness for Nexus.
 Sure.
 And we're going to be talking about LTE Advanced, because someone's going to launch LTE Advanced
 and then everyone else will be upset that they only have regular LTE.
 Yeah.
 If that happens in the US, just as soon as we get LTE in the UK, I'm going to scream.
 It's going to happen, man.
 I think AT&T and Verizon are saying 2014 for their LTE Advanced launch, I think.
 So...
 OK.
 I should be able to get a hold of some LTE before then.
 I'm pretty confident.
 My fingers are crossed for you.
 Thank you, sir.
 But I mean, yes, it's good news.
 It is good news.
 And the other thing is, all of these early adopters who pick up this LTE stuff, they're
 freeing up the networks for the rest of us.
 They're freeing up the free G networks.
 So it's actually trickle down economics.
 Theoretically, you're right.
 And I was hoping that that effect would kick in in Chicago to alleviate the stress on the
 HSPA network when the iPhone 5 came out.
 I haven't seen it yet.
 Like I still, in the middle of a business day, if I go out with the Galaxy Nexus into
 the heart of the city, I can't do anything.
 I can't browse to a website.
 I can't check my email.
 So I hope you're right.
 I hope that eventually that transition happens, but it hasn't happened yet.
 And you're calling this city the technological nexus of the US?
 Sounds like a technological black hole.
 Man, that's...
 Those are fighting words.
 You and I are going to have a whole new conversation.
 We're trying to wrap up the freaking podcast.
 Yeah, well, next time I'm calling next time we see each other.
 Okay.
 No, next time we see each other.
 Yes, please finish it.
 I was just going to say next time we see each other, which is probably going to be CES,
 you and I are definitely going to have a Donnybrook.
 The Verge Mobile Show.
 Thank you everybody for watching and listening.
 If you want to follow us on Twitter, you should.
 We're all at Verge.
 Vlad's at Backlund.
 Vlad's at that.
 Vlad's at Savov.
 Chris is on Facebook, I guess.
 So just go find him there because whatever.
 We'll be back next week and hopefully the inimitable Dan Seifert will join us.
 He's DC Seifert on Twitter.
 If you want to follow him.
 Bye everybody.
 Thanks guys.