 Hello. Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show. I am Dieter Bohn. We have a whole group of people, a whole huge group of people here. So let's just run through everybody that's here. It's going to be amazing. I'm Vlad Savov. I'm Dan Seifert. I'm Chris Ziegler. And we have a special guest, David Pierce. Welcome, David. Hello. I'm David Pierce. Yay. Welcome to my horrendous intro because I was being a little bit waiting to start for the past two minutes and then it kind of came and I wasn't ready at all. I just want to point out that at this point, David Pierce's fame and infamy has exceeded our own due to the premiere of his own program, his own weekly program, which I think we're all pretty excited about. Fame is a little strong, I think. Don't be modest. It's fame. It's just straight up fame. Well, thanks. The program is a little bit different. It's so professional it makes us look like the morons that we are. True. The beauty of that is I have literally nothing to do with that. That's like all these people behind me who I come down here and like swear into a camera for an hour and then suddenly it looks good. It's wonderful. I actually disagree with you. I think we're exactly as professional as David. It's just that we spread it out among all four of us. Combined. That makes sense. Yes. And the fact that we're all so professional is a little bit of a shock. Combined. And the problem is that we also magnify our unprofessionalism by four times. It's true. Right. So last week you guys did Sony, yeah? And can you tell us what's coming next week or is it a big secret? Well, coming this week we have some of the same stuff we're going to talk about today, actually. The HTC One and the Xperia Z. And we're also going to talk with Tom Warren about some of the coolest stuff you saw at Microsoft this week. Or last week, I guess. So that's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it. But I'm way more excited about this, if I'm being honest. Top shelf is whatever. But this is way better. Actually, as long as we're talking about ourselves and we're just going to continue doing it, David has the New York office behind him, which is really exciting. Yes. It's awesome. You should all move to New York immediately and just come hang out with me. It's basically a 24-hour love fest over there. I was talking to Jordan, one of our esteemed video guys, who was saying that if only the new office had a shower, he would literally never leave. And he wasn't joking. He wasn't kidding around. Okay. I'm done talking about us. We should talk about mobile stuff, I think. And I think the most important news is from a couple of weeks ago. I got my orange iPhone. I would agree. So our last broadcast, we unfortunately couldn't do video. So Dieter could not show off his orange iPhone. So it's been bugging him for two weeks now. Like three weeks now. How's the power button, Dieter? Yeah, it's a little bit janky. It didn't get fully cleaned out. But other than that, it's great. But no, okay. The really big news is that we have reviews. And I think there's two big reviews. There's the HTC One and the Sony Xperia Z. Let's start with the One, I think. Because I think O2 is selling pre-orders. So it's available to some people now in Europe. But HTC kind of just said that everybody else is going to have to wait a little bit longer than they had planned. But they didn't have a firm release date anyway. So it's delayed from a thing that we didn't know about in the first place. Yeah, they haven't said anything at all about the US yet, right? No. Nope. Not that I'm aware of. Oh, Vlad's got one too. Hey. I've got one. But let's let David talk about it because he's had a whole love affair with the phone. I don't know if it's a love affair. I mean, so the thing to me was it's a really good phone. Like I'm personally kind of a sucker for hardware design. And I kind of had this like visceral reaction to this phone where I just keep like touching it and I just want to use it for things. And like it's not a very good TV remote. Yet I forced myself to use it as my TV remote because I just like holding it. But the thing that was really interesting to me was HTC really pitched two things as like the future of HTC and the reason this phone is the best. And one is the camera and one is sense and blink feed and stuff like that. And I actually think those are in some ways the weaker parts of the phone. Like they're fine. The camera I think is good and does a lot of interesting things. And I'm actually curious what you guys think because there's been some interesting debate about what makes a good cell phone camera. But I think that blink feed is sort of cool like this flip board thing on your home screen is nifty but I wound up moving it to a second home screen and going back to a normal home screen. And I think the camera is fine but it's not nearly as good as I wanted it to be. Yeah, I want to get way into the camera because there was a ton of hope that HTC was finally going to blow up the megapixel myth and we're going to stop this race to more and more megapixels. We don't need 13 megapixel cameras or 16 megapixel cameras or whatever. So they went down to four and they're ultra pixels. Everybody knows the story. But like the proof is in the pictures and the pictures look pretty soft to me. Yeah, I mean that's the thing I keep coming back to. Like it's incredible in low light. Their big pitch was we have these bigger pixels that take in more light at a time. And that's true. It takes in a ton of light and I took a bunch of pictures with the iPhone 5 and then with the One. And universally in every case the One photo was brighter and a lot of times the iPhone 5 just wasn't usable because it was dark and the One would look totally passable. And that's great and I'm psyched about that and in a lot of ways that's better than what any other camera out there offers. But photos are just soft and like you zoom in and you get this kind of mushy noise reduction thing that just doesn't look sharp. And it to me kind of kills the vibe of the whole photo when nothing looks particularly clear and crisp. In terms of low light performance would you take the One over a 920? It's hit or miss I think. They're both really, really good is the point. And I think the One to me is I think a little bit better because it's, I don't know, it just seemed to render colors a little better than the Lumia 920. But they're both really good and they're both leaps and bounds beyond any of their competitors. So what's your take on the Zoe? The Zoe is, I don't know. It was another thing that I wanted to be cool and it is. And like for action shots and stuff it's nifty and it's fun to actually scrub back through a video and then be like, that's the shot I wanted to get. And I've always kind of wondered why you couldn't do that in just regular video footage and now you can and it works great. But they have this whole sharing setup that I just don't think people are ever going to really use. And you have to remember to turn it off which is sort of annoying because I would take like landscape shots that you don't need the Zoe's for. And I would take like 67 shots before I knew what I was doing and then going back through all those was kind of a pain. Well the button to toggle Zoe's like all the way on the other side of the phone from the rest of the controls, right? So like you've got your camera, you've got your video and then you've got to toggle for Zoe like completely separate which seems insane to me. Yeah, totally. But again it's really cool. I was playing soccer on Saturday and shooting with it then and being able to get like you get these action shots of like the moment somebody's foot hits the ball that you wouldn't get with a phone otherwise because there's always shutter lag and weirdness like that. So it's a great thing to have but again I don't know if it's like this game changing feature that HTC is kind of setting it up to be. So I just took a Zoe of David talking about the Zoe which was fun. David, take a Zoe of Vlad showing the Zoe when you're talking about the Zoe. My mind is blowing right now. I do. Wow. David's way too excited about the Zoe. Okay, hang on. So here's our gallery and there's David. And that's the other thing, the gallery is now kind of customized so you've got Zoes coming to life and just kind of doing little animations for you. And there's David still talking about the Zoe. He can't stop talking about it. And all right, well the display actually looks over-exposed in the webcam but I agree with David. These Zoe things are fun. They're kind of like vines insofar as because they're limited. I mean they're like three seconds. We had this discussion with Dieter. Is it three seconds or four seconds, man? I don't know. But the point is you get these really brief video clips and just like vines you kind of have to start coming up with creative ways to use them. And the thing I noticed, the first few Zoe's that I took was I would press the capture button and then the Zoe would capture me turning the phone around to review the photo, which was fun. No, but seriously, like having this invitation of three or four seconds and having to do something fun with it and then coming up with something that is coherent and makes sense and that you can post to Twitter or wherever is actually quite satisfying. So I agree. It's a gimmick but it's one of those gimmicks that you can definitely see yourself fooling around with for quite a bit of time. Definitely. So I want to go back and talk about the low light performance a little bit because Zoe's are cool and all but that's a novelty that's going to wear off. So it seems to me what happened here with the One's camera is that HCC wanted to be the best in low light so it's doing these ultra pixels which are bigger pixels and supposed to let in more light but I don't think that just the pixels alone were enough for HCC to get where it wanted to be as far as the low light capture. So then it layered on all of this noise reduction and that's what's ruining the sharpness on all of these photos and really kind of the worst thing in the world. Whereas if they had scaled back on the noise reduction and maybe not quite made it as impressive on the extreme low light end we probably would have had better pictures overall from the bright to the dark and whatever. Couldn't they have dynamically adjusted depending on lighting conditions? Oh I'm sure they do. I'm sure as it raises up sensitivity the noise reduction gets greater but it seems to be too strong on all levels. Dita, they all do dynamic adjustments it's just that they all kind of suck. That's pretty much standard for all of their software. But I mean that raises a really good point and the other thing is it's really disappointing at 4 megapixels to see the noise reducing blur smudging things up and getting the way of sharpness and detail because you can forgive it with a 12 megapixel camera or 12 megapixels in air quotes because once you step it down to 4 or 5 megapixels the pictures look sharp. Whereas with these guys it's essentially either you get a really high quality picture at 4 megapixels or you screw. And broadly speaking I do find that camera technology seems to have kind of stagnated and either not advanced or even taken a step back. Because I remember maybe when we had the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, the Galaxy S2, the Galaxy S3, those were some really excellent cameras. I'm not actually convinced the iPhone 5 has a better camera. I don't know how you guys feel. The Galaxy S2 had a fantastic camera. Exactly. So when we had those phones it was very natural. The Progression was always better image quality. But now I feel like guys might be compromising on quality to make the phones better. Well as far as the iPhone 5 goes I can say that comparative to the 4 and the 4S in extreme low light conditions it's much better. I've taken side by side photos with them and the 5, I don't know if it's a software tweak or just a boosting of the sensor, the 5 lets in a lot more light in extreme low light situations. In normal situations it's negligible difference. As far as breakthroughs in the technology, I think the HTC is on the right track as far as minimizing the pixels and increasing the pixel size. I just think that they went a step too far to try and be the absolute best in low light and beat the line 20 and maybe even get to where the 808 is as far as low light capabilities are and they went way too far with the noise reduction. Which is a little disappointing because I would have rather had good low light photos that aren't the best I've ever seen on the extremely low light spectrum of just taking a picture with one candle but had better pictures all across the board. Are we basically saying the camera is fine but it doesn't live up to what we were hoping? It's not a swing and a miss but it's like a ground rule double. Yeah, I would even go so far as to call it an above average camera for where we are now. HTC made what's kind of a calculated bet that most people are not going to look at the 100% view of their photos. Most people want to take pictures and put them on Instagram or Facebook. In that case, these photos mostly look fine. You're putting up a 1024x1024 picture on Instagram. So you're not zooming in and seeing the softness and the mushiness and you are getting a brighter picture than you would get otherwise. So that's a totally worthy trade off but for people who really care about the quality of their photos, whether you're posting them to Flickr or just saving them and wanting to use them, it's definitely a step down from some of the best cameras out there. Even the One X or the Droid DNA both take good sharp pictures and they got away from that, in this case, to do something else. I think it works in a lot of situations and doesn't work in others. Just to say, that was a really complicated baseball analogy you had. I had to think way through with these ground doubles and whatnot. That's because you're not American, Vlad. Oh, so it just comes naturally to everybody else. It's like a nature when you're eating apple pie and watching baseball. I'm kidding. I'm cheese. We had a hot dog on top. What's it like actually using BlinkFeed? I'm curious about this. I don't think any of us did. I think everybody, with that exception, just turned on this phone, looked at BlinkFeed, and then was like, okay, how do I set my home screen to be not BlinkFeed? Which is exactly what I did. I did exactly the same thing as David. I actually want to talk about the display on this phone because, again, you're just kind of getting washed up by my terrible, terrible webcam. But it is great, too stunning. I think there's universal agreement among all of us that this might be, once again, the best display in mobile devices. That crown was held by the HT1X, which Chris reviewed and basically wrote an ode to how beautiful it is. This is still 4.7 inches, but changes resolution from 720 to 1080p. It's beautiful. One thing that concerned me in your review, David, was when you said that you found that you had to cup your hand over the display to see it in direct light. Is that a serious problem? No, I think most phones are that way. But it's funny, every time I meet with a company that makes anything with a screen, which is constantly, they talk about how it's better laminated and so the glare is down 28% and you'll see it. And it's just not true. These things are still super reflective. You can't laminate this any more than it is. No, you can't. I think it's just, this is the world we live in. If you're outside and it's super sunny, you're going to have trouble seeing your phone unless it's so bright that you can watch the battery die. This is not that. It's no worse than any other phone. We have, for sure. Yeah, go grab a visor prism and take it outside and come back and talk to it. No, I don't want to do that. I'm not doing that. Okay, you can actually really see the view at angles now where I'm showing it. And it's just stupid. You can't laminate it any more. It's on the glass. The image is on the glass. Vlad, what's going to happen is that at next year's HTC event, they're going to be like, you're thinking about lamination all wrong. Like, we fundamentally rethought lamination. This is ultra-lamination. Where the glass is the display. They're one and the same. I mean, basically, in order to step up lamination from here, you have to do magnetic levitation above the display. You have to do a hologram. It's like that. But, I mean, David's point is true. Reflectivity is reflectivity. Lamination can only go so far to rectify. These are glossy displays. If we want really saturated, color rich, punchy, exciting devices that when you walk into a store, grab your attention, we have to deal with the reflectivity. Otherwise, I keep talking about the old IBM ThinkPad displays, which were color accurate, but they were muted and matte. And nobody was particularly excited or gasp about them. So nobody's making that choice. Nobody's offering us matte displays. Other than actually screen protectors, there's some really nice screen protectors that turn the display matte. Yeah, but screen protectors are the worst things ever, and we all know that. Wait, why aren't there matte screen displays? Now that I'm thinking about this, every time I review a laptop that has a matte display, I'm like, yes, matte displays. Why aren't they on phones? Well, I mean, glossy displays make your blacks look deeper, makes your contrast higher and everything. So when it's in a store, it's on a display shelf, everything looks better with a glossy display. All matte displays are plastic anyway, right? Yeah. I mean, I guess if you had a ground glass of some sort. The glass is reflective. Yeah, and they're heavier and thicker too, I guess, so it's fair enough. But let's cut off talking about hardware, because there's a bunch of people who code us about being too hardware-centric and how the hardware and the specs don't match, it's part of the user experience and yada, yada, yada. And this is where actually I think David and I might disagree, because I feel like every new Android phone is kind of like the old Android phones. I just can't build up any excitement, whereas David has fallen in love. So instead of listening to me bitch about about it, let's hear why David is so psyched. Well, so, I mean, you just defeated my whole argument for why I'm excited. I mean, if hardware genuinely doesn't matter, then this phone is not super exciting. But I really believe hardware does matter. But on the software front, I think what HTC has done, and they've talked about bringing a lot of their Sense 5 stuff to some of their other phones in coming months, and actually in the most part, that's a really good thing. They've scaled Sense back, and there's still some messy stuff. I remember when I first got this phone, Dieter was like, open the People app, it's terrible on every Sense device ever since the history of the world. And that's true, it's still bad and confusing and kind of clunky, but it's better. And there are a lot of easier ways to get around, and the hardware is so good that even if Sense is overbearing and big and heavy, it doesn't totally destroy the performance of the phone. And I feel like software's job in a case like this is just to kind of get out of the way and let Android do its thing and let apps work and let the hardware work. And it does, there's some stuff about Sense I don't like, but it's not nearly as much of a pain as it used to be. Like I would turn on the One X and just hate the world and my life and everyone in it, and I don't get that at all with this phone. Well, this is the story of Sense for the past two years now. It's where we keep saying it's okay, but it's not as bad as it used to be, but it's still Sense, right? Essentially that's the same thing we said about Sense 4, comparing it to Sense 3.5 and 3.6. It's still Sense, but it's not as bad as it used to be, but it's not as good as it could be. So here's my take on Sense. It was solving problems that we had when we were using three, three and a half inch screens and Android 2.3. It fixed those problems. It added context to the 1.5. Right, it fixed all those problems. But now those problems have been taken care of in the core stock UI of Android. Google fixed those problems. Right, so it was up to Sense to decide what problems it actually wants to fix now. And I suppose it's still fixing some contact stuff when social integration in there. They fixed the home screen with BlinkFeed. But just updating the UI so it's actually appropriate to a screen this size made a world of difference. And also throwing in a wicked fast processor so that it didn't feel bogged down. Yeah, I have to say this phone just feels very nice and quick. I don't think it's necessarily down to the processor. I think we can give HC credit for their own software, but it is very quick and responsive. So I like that. And HC did do a couple of things I actually really like. So this is the, I don't know if you can see it very well, but this is the multitasking menu. It's tiled instead of having the one list going up. And so you get nine apps at a time and it just looks better. Like the home button is kind of ugly. That's a marked improvement over the one on Sense 4. Yeah, which was like the weird 3D thing you had to scroll and it was awful. And then there's like really good lock screen notifications and you can swipe right into them. And so like, HTC's done some things, but then like why did you change the icons? Like they look worse now and you didn't need to do that. And that's kind of HTC's end game. It's like let's change a bunch of things you don't need to. And I can't use Dash Clock widget on the lock screen because it's not Android 4.2. Yeah, well that's the other problem is that this is probably never going to get updates. And I said, like I said in the review, I was like I want this phone. And then somebody's like should you get this or the Nexus 4? And I was like well I'd buy this, but then ask me again when the Nexus 4 gets keyline pie and this doesn't and I'm sobbing uncontrollably on top of this phone warning up here. No, I mean the other thing to consider and it's something that we tend to forget is that the Nexus 4 is dramatically cheaper. I do believe. Yeah. I'm not actually sure what the HTC One pricing is at the moment, but I imagine it's priced the normal way whereas the Nexus 4 is priced to be awesome. Price to move, man. Yeah. Move it does. Unless you're Chris Ziegler and you triple overpay for it. No, I... Dude, whatever. I had a Nexus 4 before you did, so whatever. Yeah, you paid like 600 bucks for it, man. No, I only paid like, I don't know, I paid like 400 or something. I don't know. I had to sign up for a month of T-Mobile prepaid to buy it. I couldn't buy it without an account, which kind of bugged me. Wow. I'm pretty sure the T-Mobile sales rep just like took you on that one. It's possible. If somebody gets a Nexus 4 right now, they will have a Nexus 4 before I do as well. I've never gotten a hold of one. What I do have, and here's my kickass segue, is an Xperia ZZ... I'm going to start talking about this just by showing you its viewing angles exactly as I did with the HT1. Is the screen on? No, that's my point. It has terrible viewing angles. And you know what? I think half the comments on my review have been, what do the viewing angles matter, man? You're just looking at it directly. I don't know why I'm denigrating our commenters by giving them a terrible answer. I'm just making myself... I'm very friendly in the presence. But seriously, viewing angles do matter in phones. One thing, we don't appreciate how often we turn our phones on. I think when HT were doing the HT1 briefings, they were saying that people activate their phones an average of something like 200 times a day. 400 times. It was some crazy, crazy number in the hundreds. I was like, wait guys, are you serious? What sort of addicted freaks are you getting this data from? And it's just what we do. You check the weather, you turn the phone on, then you forget that you also wanted to know the time, so you turn the phone on again. You might do like seven times in quick succession. So we do that a bunch without realizing it. And another thing we do without realizing is we look at the phone from side angles a ton. So many times I have the phone on my desk, stretch a hand out, just turn it on and check for notifications or whatever. I'm not tilting it so I'm looking directly at it, I'm looking at it from the side. And that's where these viewing angles, that's where these issues come in. And Sony has just a chronic problem with this. And it just drives me crazy because the experience that everybody looks at it just in pictures is like, this is one of the most attractive, most beautiful phones. It has a great design, it stands out from anything else. It doesn't copy or hate the iPhone, it does its own thing. It's beautiful and in turn it's play on and it lets it down. But Vlad, I thought that the Xperia Z had a Bravia Engine 2. How could Sony let us down like this? Yeah, it's Bravia Engine X2 because it's like two times as awesome. I think you're missing a branding name in there. There's another one in there too. Oh there is. There's a Reality Engine. Yes, the Reality Engine. Listen, Reality has bad viewing angles. That may well be true. There's also Clear Audio Plus, whatever that is, I don't know. Who is worse on the branding of their features? Is it HTC or is it Sony? Oh man, that is tough. Boom Sound is pretty bad. Boom Sound is, and this is camo-cased. It's one word but camo-cased. But then you also have Beats Audio and it's like, what the heck is going on here? Boom Sound with Beats, man. That's the only way to go. It's very aggressive if you think about it. Boom and Beats. I don't want my phone to hurt me. Do you remember that HTC ReSound commercial from a while ago where the guy is walking down the street and the world is literally exploding around? That's what they want to happen here. Yeah, I mean, wow. We really need to actually get our heads together and come up with a ranking here because Samsung is pretty atrocious as well. No, LG is the worst. LG just takes what Samsung has whatever named it and then they like... They replace Q, I think it's with Q. No, they run it through a translator and then they run it back into its original language so things like Smart Stay become Wise Screen. And it just happens over and over again with all these features that are just the same feature but with a corny name. I don't know, it's pretty hard to be putting S in front of every noun on the planet and calling it a Samsung product. Except for the Swollet. The Samsung Wallet is still the Samsung Wallet. I'm still waiting for the music app S-Hits. I think there's not a third there. I tell you what, in terms of branding actually, and I raise this point in the review, Sony is really abusing the PlayStation brand in a terrible way with its PlayStation Mobile thing. Sony is just killing the PlayStation brand, like slowly with every new PlayStation mobile device. Yes, and that kills me. It's heartbreaking to me, seriously. Somebody actually commented on Reddit saying the Verge have been anti-Sony for so long and they're so wrong. Because myself and Neelai are like the biggest Sony fanboys, I pretty much have to wrestle with Ross Miller to get into a Sony keynote. There's Mudge Wrestling, Greco-Roman style, etc. And Ross Miller is a surprisingly powerful guy. He's five feet. Most of us have grown up with Sony in the 90s and just having that as our top tier brand forever. I just want to say, with regards to the Xperia Z, so many of us on staff are like, we want to play with it and we want to actually like this and check it out. And we're really curious about it and we've been waiting for this review and we've been anticipating it and we had high hopes for it, of course. And we love its industrial design, but I'll let Vlad continue because we totally derailed this discussion of the review. But it lets us down on so many levels and it's because we want it to succeed, not because we hate Sony or have a bad vibe against Sony or whatever. Yeah, and my biggest problem is that these are fixable issues. If Sony just fixed a couple of things, this phone could make the HTC One irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned. The first thing I would fix is give it a better screen, give it a smaller screen, because this thing is five inches as well. That merits saying it's just about as tall as the HTC One, but it's wider and it's less ergonomic because the sides are just so angular and straight-edged. Which is kind of a sacrifice to the really attractive design, we can kind of live with it. But if you stick a really nice display in the One, and the thing that a few people have mentioned to me is that Sony is making some of the displays in the HTC One, which is just inexcusable. Wow. You're making the best display on phones with somebody else and not sticking it in your own phone. But it's not branded Mobile Bravia 2. Yeah, I guess maybe... So basically, hang on, so Vlad, you're saying fix the display, I'm assuming you're going to get to fix the camera and then fix the software. So basically, fix all the things that make a phone what a phone is and then it would be better? Just build a different phone that's better and then it'll be better. Ah, but you see, it has the extra features, it has the extra goodies. Well, listen, as far as I'm concerned, I'm guessing the reason PlayStation Mobile and PlayStation Certification haven't taken off is because Sony underestimated how much its licensing cost would be for those classic PlayStation games. And nobody actually wanted to play ball with Sony and just give those games away for free. I don't know what the situation there is. But if you can't make it, if you can't do it justice, just throw it away because PlayStation Mobile at the moment is like this crappy-ass secondary app store for just completely disposable random games. There is no PlayStation action going on there. It was such a huge opportunity that was just completely squandered by Sony. Leading up to the announcement of the original Xperia Play, there was so much hype around the possibility of what a PlayStation phone could be and they've just completely blown it on every level, including the certification. Yeah, but what I would say is that's fixable. Either you do a less ambitious version or you just get rid of it so you don't embarrass yourself in this fashion. The rest of the software is actually really nice. I'm a fan of Sony's Android skin because it's so light. It might be the one that's closest to stock. It just does a few tweaks on top. So I like the skin. It's got some funky animations, but otherwise I agree. I find it to be one of the more tolerable customizations of Android. I don't think the responsiveness on this device is good enough. It has another quad-core processor exactly like the HTC One. But whereas the One feels futuristically fast and smooth and all those good things, this is not as responsive. It's not as fast, so Sony needs to sort that out. Like Dieter says, okay, you have to fix the software. And the camera can be so easily fixed. Don't give me a 13 megapixel monstrosity with supposedly HDR built into the sensor. It's an Xmore R. No, it's an Xmore RS, Dan. It's an Xmore RS, I'm sorry. The front-facing camera is Xmore R. That's the old stuff. It's with more S. Now it's with an S. Which like the iPhone 4S is almost indistinguishable from the non-S version. But yeah. I'm just waiting for them to call the camera an alpha mount. Just go all the way. Yeah, I mean, this is the other thing. Sony makes awesome displays. It doesn't have one here. Sony makes awesome cameras and sensors because every awesome Nikon sensor you can think of is made by Sony basically. Yes, Chris. I'm not disputing that. There's nothing wrong with that. If this show turns into me and Dan debating Canon versus Nikon, I'm quitting. I'm not going to let that happen. Please continue, Vlad. And just finally, this phone is waterproof. Well, they call it water resistant. But you can take it down to a depth of one meter for as long as 30 minutes. And you can take it in the shower. That's what I want to know. That's what I want to know about this phone. Does that actually make a meaningful difference in how you use the phone or what you do with it or where you take it? Or is it just that if I get drunk and drop it in the toilet, it maybe won't be a huge problem? It's still a huge problem. Let's be real, David. No, I mean, we laugh about it, but it wouldn't be any problem. You literally could drop it. I dropped my iPhone in the urinal once, and I thought long and hard about whether to retrieve it. Believe me. It was a serious debate whether to leave that thing in the urinal. And yes, the philosophical aspect of that is difficult. The thing with the waterproofing is that it can withstand the water exposure, but it's not a rugged phone. I think the average user is still going to probably want to put a case on this thing anyways because it's glass. But they're going to drop it and it'll shatter. I dropped it twice, maybe three times. But like, people put cases on things because they're afraid it's going to shatter. Because they're babies. This is really soft glass. I'm not joking, this is really soft glass. And the way it's been put together is that the side parts wrap around the glass, so both on the front and the back. It just feels really robust. When I hold this and use it and drop it because it's awkward to hold, it feels like any plastic phone in terms of durability. Like, good plastic phones, not like a really terrible one. So I've got no complaints about that. I feel like this is one of the most rugged flagship Android phones around. And this is what drives me nuts. This waterproofing stuff, again, it's a novelty that we're off, but it's just so much fun. If you actually want a high quality phone that you can literally take with you to the beach without worrying, this is it. I've done that. I've taken a Galaxy Nexus to the beach and it's like sticking it in a bag, sticking it in a bag inside another bag so sand doesn't get in it. It's a pain, man. I know it's a first world problem, but it's a pain. I will say, Vlad, that your header, beat rocking black, was one of the best things that's ever appeared on the site. That's David's inspiration. He's been asking me to be more creative. It's pretty amazing. So, the experience of Z is like, it just, overall it feels like it's like, meh, okay. Which is what I expect from LG. Why are you buying into the communism of Z, Dieter? I don't understand why you're expecting this. Look, it's easier to say than Z. Easier to understand exactly what I mean. I mean, what if I were saying a sentence and I was talking about the sea. Maybe you thought, the experience sea, right? Z. Yeah, but you realize that this is a gateway drug. Before long you're going to be talking in kilometers and all this nonsense. Yeah, you're going to be using the metric system. Yeah, measuring your weight in stone. Driving on the wrong side of the road. Now you're just getting your nationalities mixed up by it. It doesn't work at all. Listen, we're in America. We can do what we want. You can't eat Oreo mega-stuffs anymore though, right? Yes. My world came to an end this weekend and I was very upset. Does anybody have anything else they want to say about the Z? I still want to use one, regardless of Vlad's review. So, AT&T has announced the Z, right? Am I crazy or did that happen? I want to say that it was rumored or likely to come, but I don't think there's been an official announcement. I could be crazy though. AT&T and Sony have been friends for years now, so it makes total sense that that would be the case. Right. I'm just wondering, in the US, how these phones are going to be positioned. I worry about Sony because I feel like they really put their heart and soul into the Xperia Z and put what they perceive to be the best possible product they could on the market. It's going to do nothing compared to the One and the Galaxy S4. I mean, nothing. It's going to be a drop in the bucket. Just to raise a couple of extra points. At the moment, it's already on sale here in the UK and I expect across Europe. I haven't checked. Somebody needs to send me out on a flight to Milan and Geneva and places like that just to make sure this thing is on store shelves. Check the Sony store. People who pre-ordered it, and I think there's some others, they get these MDR-1 Bluetooth headphones as well, which are like £399 or something. These are really good headphones. So that's a nice bonus. The box is really barren, which I want to congratulate Sony for. Just keep it in a really minimal box. There's a USB cable. Then there's these headphones, which are also really nice. It's a headset. It's XP-something 300. It's got a really horrible name. So they've got a really nice headset and just a charger in the box and everything else is recyclable paper. So I feel like Sony gets a ton of things right with this phone. And then gets, like Dieter says, some of the core crux issues badly wrong. Did I say a ton of things right? Yes. It gets a ton of things on the side right and then gets the main things wrong. And that's the really frustrating part. So Chris brought this up. It's the Spectre that's hanging over this entire conversation, which is we're almost exactly 48 hours away from the announcement of the Galaxy S4. Yes. Yeah, I believe we're 50 hours away. 50 hours away, okay, whatever. 49, 48 minutes. I hate you all. So we saw a leak. We saw a video leak. So we do need to be a little bit careful because we saw leaks of the S3 that turned out to just be like dummy boxes and not the actual phone. But if these pan out, it looks exactly like the Galaxy S3. Okay, here's my thing though. Why would they change it? This phone has been a giant smashing success. They have taken over Android. They've ceded Android to Samsung. I'll tell you why. It's a phone that has all these issues with it, but why would they change it? I'll tell you why they'd change it because when people buy a new phone, they want it to look new. And if it looks exactly like their old phone, Apple didn't have too much of an issue going from the 4, 4S design to the 5, but at the same time, why upgrade my phone if it looks exactly the same? I don't think Samsung is after people who bought GS3s. I think Samsung is after people who bought Galaxy S2s or don't own a smartphone. I think Samsung is, like Apple plays to this crowd who buys a new phone every year, and Samsung is like, you have that Apple, we'll take the billion people who don't have that. I think it's a mix. I do think that Samsung, you know, I mean, of course, Samsung has a long and storied reputation of borrowing from Apple's playbook. I think that to a certain extent, this is a continuation of that. They're saying, hey, we can play the 4S, 5S game. We can make a phone that's basically a revised GS3 and get away with it because we are Samsung. And so it wouldn't surprise me at all if the phone that we see on Thursday does look like the GS3. Yeah, a couple months ago. I'm sorry, but just briefly to clarify, because there's been kind of a cold war happening between one tipster slash a leakster in a forum in China who evidently does have a new Samsung device in his hand, and then Samsung itself trying to drop little teases and hints. So Samsung's teaser today, which is just a picture, kind of shadowy with a little light cast on it, is basically the Galaxy S3. You overlay a picture on top of the Galaxy S3 and that's what it is. The only thing that's missing is the earpiece and the front-facing camera and all those sensors which Samsung's... It's going to have bone conduction, man. No earpiece needed. Right, so that... That would be wild. That's the Galaxy S4. It's the Galaxy S3 with bone conduction. Done. That gives us the possibility of the Galaxy S4 being essentially unchanged from the Galaxy S3 design and just saying straight up, this design is great, we're going to wow you guys with something else. And another piece of evidence that that is going to happen is the fact that the Note 8 was literally just announced two weeks ago with the same ID. And to go just two weeks before changing ID would be very strange. Right. Well, I mean, there's nothing suggesting that Samsung is going to change designs because the leaks of the person who has the phone, his phone is evidently or at least looks to be a 5-inch device. It's bigger, it has a smaller bezel around the display, but its actual look and design is exactly the same. It's completely consistent with the latest Galaxy devices and with the Galaxy S3. So either one, whether you go with Samsung's teaser or with the leaks, there's images and video, we're still looking at the same design. It's just a matter of size. I just find that, I mean, I know that we were not super enthused about the S3 and it turned out to take the world by storm. Well, I wouldn't say that. I think at the time when Vlad reviewed the S3 originally, it got the highest score of any Android phone that we'd ever reviewed. Yeah, I meant at the announce. But the phone itself just doesn't inspire a ton of passion. It's just a really good phone. And I think that the S4 is going to, again, just be a really good phone. I think that my hesitance to talk about it is like, or get excited about it, is I just don't think that their industrial design is all that great. It just doesn't look awesome. It looks, oh hey, it's a Samsung and that works. It doesn't feel awesome in your hand either. Well, there's that. It works maybe ergonomically, but the materials are not, it doesn't feel like it has a craftsmanship that other devices have, especially when we just talk about the One. And at the end of the day, the S3 was the phone that I used at CES, right, because it had a replaceable battery and it filled the slots that I needed for a phone that does the job. And I think that the S4 is going to be another Android phone that does the job and Samsung's going to market the hell out of it. It's going to sell fine. But it's not going to, for me, I don't think it inspires a ton of passion. I think I've got a really good metaphor for this, because I share Aditya's feelings on this. And it's, if you think about space travel, there's no friction in space. But every time we have sci-fi movies and, you know, graphic novels and art about space travel, what do we get? We get these really sharp looking spaceships which are just like needle-like, like Concorde, and it looks so beautiful and they're firing flames out of the back even though they're more efficient forms of getting traction and locomotion and all these things. So the Samsung phone is like this chunky, shapeless mess that just gets from point A to B. It just does space travel well. Vlad, there is actually friction in space. I'm going to challenge your thesis here. There is? There's not much. But in interstellar space there is a certain, I mean, you can go look at the data coming back from the Voyager spaceships right now and see that there is in fact, you know, there are molecules in space. Fair enough. I don't claim to know much more beyond sci-fi movies, but that was my point. Like, Sony, HTC, those guys are the ones that make the really pretty spaceships which actually break down. And Samsung is the one that just gets you from point A to B and does really good marketing. So the S4 is what? It's a Firefly, Kaisa, spaceship? Yeah, that would be a really good one because the, what was the movie Firefly? Serenity? That's what it was called? The only bad thing about that movie is that they use Papyrus as the font as the typeface on the title. Like, don't do that. Man, they had their reasons. I mean, did you watch the show? Did you watch? I haven't watched the show. I've only watched the movie. Oh, man. Don't even. Can I kick you off this podcast? Yeah, you should. Then I could go and actually catch up with it. I just watched the whole series right now. So, okay, is there anything else to say? I mean, we're expecting maybe eye tracking, I guess? I feel like, yeah, it's going to be, you know, the design of it is probably not going to thrill us based on what we've seen so far. We're not going to be in love with the additional design, but as far as software goes, it's going to have everything in the kitchen sink. Yeah, I just hope that when they do the software that it's not like, like with the S3, it was just like exhausting. Here's another crazy feature. Here's another crazy feature. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And there was no coherency to any of it. There's eight ways to share your photos. Right. I just want Smart Stay 2. As long as they bring a new Smart Stay to the table, I'm a happy camper. Which actually they're going to, right? That's one of the rumored features is that you'll be able to scroll with your eyeballs. Which is like the last thing that I want. Like I think of all these features and like the first thing I do to extend my battery life is turn off all of these features. So it's like maybe they can blow me away with some revolutionary battery technology that allows me to keep all of these whizbang features on and still get good battery life. I just want to point out, scrolling with your eyeballs is a great way to like break whatever muscles control your eyeballs. Like it's so wrong. Think about it. Every time you scroll, whether by touch or by mouse or scroll wheel, whatever, you pull the page up and your eyes look immediately down at the thing you just pulled up to see what it is. Right? Whereas in order to scroll with your eyeballs, you have to look at a given point and then pull it up with your eyes and then look back down. You don't know exactly how it's going to work. They could build in a lag there. No, I think the idea was that it'll scroll automatically when it figures out you're down at the bottom of the page. So you just like keep reading those last three lines and it'll keep jogging with you. Which would be cool. But I feel like all of these features, like watching Samsung's ads over the last however many months since the GS3 came out, has been really interesting because I feel like all Samsung does is say how many things can we have that nobody else has so that we can make ads about them. So people are like, huh, that's cool. And then they go into a Verizon store and they're like, I want that Galaxy phone. And it's like that seems like it's the ball game and that's how Samsung won so much. I remember it used to be you would either buy an iPhone or a Droid. Right? So it was either that was the game. And that has completely changed. You now either buy an iPhone or you buy a Galaxy. Like that's what people think. And Samsung did that by saying like all they advertised was NFC because everybody who had an iPhone was like, I want that. That's cool. And then they took off. And so they've advertised all these features that they just they have. And they don't spend a ton of time talking about the look and feel of the phone because that doesn't play on a commercial. They are like, here's a thing that our phone does that nobody else's does and then people buy it. And like that works. And it's kind of smart and it sucks for us as people who like care and pay attention and get to try a lot of these. But it's kind of a smart move it seems like. Well, and the features don't even need to work. Right? Like nobody actually uses NFC. We know that because they don't. I just think of those crazy photo sharing features where everybody in the room is supposed to own a Galaxy S3 and then you hit share and it beams the photo to all your friends in the room. It's on Wi-Fi directs. Just the most ridiculous. But like that's one of those things that is like, oh, it looks really cool in commercial and you never actually use it in real life. Right. Well, we'll find out on Thursday. Oh, do you want to talk about the Ativ Odyssey? I reviewed the Ativ Odyssey. Do you want to say anything about it or should we just move? I reviewed it. Okay. You know, it's like yet another Windows phone for Verizon. That was kind of the whole issue that we had when kind of constructing this review was that Verizon's already got the HTC 8X which is a higher end Windows phone. I think they're pricing it like $100 now. And they've got the Lumia 822 which is taking care of their low to mid range which you can get for free now. And now there's this Samsung which is not as good as either of those and it's priced at $50. So this is definitely an example of Samsung just, you know, pumping out another phone out of its like massive factory of continuous phones to fill a carrier's request that didn't feel like there was any innovation or input here on Samsung's end. Wah, wah, wah. Yeah. Unfortunately. Okay, we got other Windows phone rumors. The Lumia 928 on Verizon. That's not a rumor, man. Well. That's a little more exclusive. That's scoop. That's scoopage, man. Scooper Rooney. I just said that. Just call Tom Ice Cream, man. Tom two scoops more. Wow. That's pretty good. Aluminum body, Xeon flash. A little bit thinner and lighter than the 928. This sounds like it would make an awesome Android phone. Yeah. A Xeon flash would be excited because you never see that anymore except on old Nokias. Can somebody explain Verizon's strategy here to me? I don't get it at all. Verizon continues to say we want your phone, your best phone, but kind of a little worse and we want you to change these four things so that nobody will buy it. And we want to wait six months to put it out. Right. No, like really, why? Verizon seems like they have the clout to do whatever the hell they want. Like if they ask for the 920, I'm sure they'd get the 920. So what are they doing? Well, they wanted it to be exclusive only on Verizon. That matters. But is this worse? What's worse about it? This sounds like a better phone. Well, I think it's worse is that it's coming out later. Right. It's thicker. It's incremental against the 920 and presumably it's not going to ship with a new version of Windows Phone. It will ship with some service release of Windows Phone 8, which is fine I guess if you're into that sort of thing. No, I think it's going to be a very, very good Windows Phone. It will be the best Windows Phone on the market. It will be on Verizon. And Verizon won't do what's necessary to sell it. To market it, yeah. Classic Verizon. Verizon is a very – Verizon is, of all the carriers in the world, Verizon is definitely the most possessive about brands and about building its own image as the purveyor of the hardware. You know what I mean? Even more so than AT&T, which itself is a very meddling carrier obviously. But Verizon is really concerned about brands. Right. They created and they own the Droid brand. This goes back for years. The original story is Verizon rejected the iPhone because Apple wouldn't let Verizon Verizon it up. So this is definitely Verizon's reason to be. Yep. Okay. I'm excited to see an aluminum Nokia phone though because I love Nokia's hardware and their build quality and what they've done with the polycarbonate. So very excited to see what the company does with aluminum. I'm less stoked about that because I think – I mean, Nokia never gave me the one thing I wanted, which was an N9 running – In cyan. Yes, running Windows Phone 8. And if you go back to the N8, which I think, correct me if I'm wrong, was the last aluminum phone they made. No, it was the E7 came out after it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, good point. Yeah. But yeah, sure. But if you look – those two phones were of the same ID though, right? Sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, birds of a feather. They did not inspire me in the same way that the N9 and the Lumia 800 did from an ID perspective. But when the N9 and the 800 came out, like nobody was doing that with polycarbonate, right? Like that was like – when we first saw that and people were saying it's like plastic, we're like, well, it's not really plastic because if you go look at another plastic phone, it doesn't look anything like another – or feel anything like another plastic phone. So they've been doing that for a couple of years. So maybe they can apply that type of manufacturing technique to aluminum, which would be pretty cool. Well, I think what really set apart their plastic phones, which let's just be very blunt about it, that's what they are. They're plastic. I think what set them apart was the fact that they're built using a unibody approach. Like the 920, the 900, the 800, the N9, they're kind of like milled from a single block of plastic as far as I can tell. And that's what really made them what they were and made them how they felt. And I'm sure that they'll be able to apply some of those techniques to aluminum. I mean, other companies certainly have. I don't know. I just – I feel like – I think Tom Warren mentioned on our last show from MWC that he felt like the – was it the 720? It was kind of like the ultimate execution of that. I'm not sure that I agree. I think that they could have continued along that path for a while yet. It gave them a lot of flexibility in terms of coloration, and maybe they'll continue doing that with aluminum. They can anodize it certainly the way Dieter has his iPhone. But we'll see. Well, clearly they're just afraid of a surface phone. Yeah, the surface phone, yep, as it should be. An aluminum-cyan Nokia would be pretty amazing in my opinion. Yes. So is there anything else we want to talk about with Nokia? I mean, I guess we could – this ridiculous pressure they're trying to put on Instagram, to Insta with love. No, we don't want to talk about that. It just drives me crazy. I think that's Nokia trying to own the whole movement and brand it itself and put its own branding on it. Yeah, but I mean, this is just – it's kind of sad to be honest. It's really sad. It's like looking at somebody with a physical disability struggling along and – Oh my God. It's not something you want to watch. So let's put a number to this. The company, both Nokia and Microsoft, both of them are really struggling to get apps. And until they do, what's the point in discussing this? It's just grown increasingly desperate. So you know what's really sad about this is that Microsoft is a major investor in Facebook. They don't appear to be able to get Instagram on Windows Phone. Blackberry is getting it though. Well, kind of. Kind of. The most backdoor way of getting it that you can come up with. Right. So with Windows Phone, how much do you guys think Microsoft and or Nokia would have to pay Facebook to get them to port Instagram? I don't think they should spend it. I don't think that's their strategy. I thought Microsoft, one of those companies was already building an Instagram app. Yeah, I think they're just going to build it and then be like, listen, we've already built this. Give us an idea. Yeah, so just plug into it, guys. No, but if I'm Facebook, then I say, well, is it built to our standards? Do we want to license you our name? Let me just say this. Facebook's mobile app standards are pretty low. If you ever use Facebook for Android and Facebook for iOS, the apps are built in-house. Fair enough. I don't really think Facebook cares as far as standards go. Fair enough. Hang on. So we've gone an hour, which is good for us. We usually have been short lately. But we're running over, so David Pearce has to run. I don't want to keep him here if he's got other more important things to do than yammer on with us. I have to go build Instagram for Windows Phone. I'll be back. I'll tell you all about it. Well, thanks for being on, David. We appreciate it. Thank you, David, for putting up with our super professional broadcast. Anytime. Bye, guys. All right, so now it's a quote-unquote broadcast. There we go. Time to talk smack about David. We've gotten rid of the fifth core, the what did Nvidia call their? The companion core. The companion core. That's perfect. Which actually runs most of the show. Because it's the one that's used most of the time. Okay, we can't roll out without talking about T-Mobile and Metro PCS. Their merger has been approved by the FCC. They still have got a few more steps to go, but this is basically like this is going to happen. Yeah. I mean, there's no major roadblocks. Like I think the biggest comparison that we have always to compare this type of merger to is with AT&T's attempt to purchase T-Mobile a couple years ago and how that was famously stopped in its tracks by pressure from both the DOJ and the FCC. And so far for the Metro PCS and T-Mobile deal, the Department of Justice backed down a couple of weeks ago, said it's not going to pursue any more investigation. And just today the FCC said that it's gotten the green light. So I mean, there's a little bit of things left. I think the FTC technically has to green light it and the handshakes and papers have to be signed. But for all intents and purposes, it feels like this is a done deal. In terms of size difference, I feel like this is a closer arrangement to Verizon's acquisition of Altel than AT&T's attempt at acquisition of T-Mobile. And I think that the fact that the FCC green lit this with so little opposition speaks to that and this recognition that even as a combined company, there's no threat of them creating an anti-trust situation. It's not going to be an issue. And I think this is going to be – it's a big win for T-Mobile. And I think that – it's really funny to me. If you look back 18 or even 12 months, T-Mobile really looked desperate and like they were in very, very bad shape for a variety of reasons. They didn't have the spectrum they needed. Deutsche Telekom seemed desperate to shed them. And it wasn't clear how they were going to really carry on. And now I think that they are looking in many ways like the most competitive major carrier in the U.S. This is a huge spectrum acquisition for them. They're going to pretty rapidly deploy LTE in 2013. They've already got HSPA 42 in a lot of if not most major markets in the U.S. at this point. And they're doing some really creative things with subsidies and prepaid versus postpaid that I think are going to end up being bellwethers for the entire industry. I think that in the long term you're going to see AT&T and Verizon go the same way. Oh, wow. You think Verizon? That would be awesome. Someday. I'm not saying this is a 2013 thing, but I think that – I've been saying for five years that the subsidy model is not sustainable. I mean I don't want to say that I informed T-Mobile on this decision, but I informed T-Mobile on this decision. Chris used his clairvoyance and his Jedi mind powers to predict five years ago. You're following a Jedi mind meld. But it's been eating – the subsidy model has been eating itself alive for years now and it's going to continue to do so. And I think that T-Mobile has really done some pretty ballsy things to try to break out of that. And I mean, you know, hats off. I think that they've put themselves in a position where they aren't being particularly offensive to customers who are trying to buy phones affordably, and yet they've still gotten out of that model. So that's good and that's healthy. And I think that it's looking a lot better than signing up for a two-year contract and getting a heavily subsidized phone every two years. Chris, I have to just challenge you quickly on the point about the subsidy model being unsustainable. I mean, it is what AT&T and Verizon practice and those guys just keep rolling in massive profits every quarter. Yeah, but it's like – have you seen the movie Fast and Furious? No. If you go too fast, somebody's going to get furious and then you crash. Well, I'll just come up with that thought, Chris. That's how that works. I'll rebut that, Vlad, because actually if you look at the major carriers, AT&T's, Verizon's last fourth quarter results, both of them attributed a big loss to – You guys, Chris is making his Google face right now. Like, I'm sorry to interrupt, but he's concentrating so hard. Yeah, I'm Googling things out of this. He's actually Googling. But I mean, they actually are on the books saying that subsidies are causing – AT&T lost a lot of money last quarter for a couple of reasons, but they specifically mentioned the subsidies that they had to pay out because of all the smartphones that they sold. And as the iteration and the pace of development has greatly accelerated in smartphones over the past couple of years, people want the new smartphones faster and they want them more often, and that's where the subsidy model really starts to fall apart. So while Chris is finishing up his Google job – Margin Call. Margin Call. Margin Call is the movie. I've never heard of that movie. But let's quickly mention that the BlackBerry Z10 got announced by AT&T for $199.99, which presumably doesn't have too much of a subsidy on it. Everyone was like, that's a terrible price. It's probably got some kind of subsidy. It also doesn't have a chance in hell. Solovay is selling it subsidy-free in the US for, what is it, $629 now? Yeah, $689 I think they dropped the price today. It was $999. So anyway, the point I was trying to make about Margin Call is that this hedge fund business looks like it's going really well, but one of their risk assessment guys notices that there's some trend happening that nobody else sees, that the business is about to collapse entirely. I'll stop there because I don't want to spoil it for everybody. It was called what happened to the US economy. It was the dramatization. There's no spoiler. It's like, spoiler alert, Bill Clinton won in 1992. I mean, come on. I'm talking about a movie. I'm not talking about IRL. I like that movie. Boiler Room is one of my favorite movies. Boiler Room is a top five movie for it. It really is. Are there race cars in Boiler Room? Yes, actually. There are race cars in Boiler Room because all the guys working at the firm have Ferraris and stuff. But anyway, so the point I was trying to make is that you can tell, there's just some delays in the industry because customers and carriers have become so heavily dependent on the concept of not paying full price for the hardware that they're owning. It's unhealthy, especially if the rate people are dropping their phones. Then what? I don't know. It's bad. The fact that T-Mobile is trying to break out of that I think is extremely healthy for the industry and for their consumers. We've heard AT&T say, I don't know if it was Randall Stevenson or Ralph Hale Bay, I think it was Stevenson, said just very recently that they were looking at the subsidy model and reevaluating how that's going to play out in the coming years. So it's definitely on their minds. They're looking at what T-Mobile is doing. Right, I think they're going to look and see how well it's working for T-Mobile and formulate their plans. Well, listen, as an outsider, I'm still getting over the fact that T-Mobile was nearly lost into the AT&T giant globe of white and blue evil. So I'm happy that that carrier still exists. I'm delighted to hear that now they're stepping up and actually acquiring new spectrum and new opportunities. And since Chris said it, it's basically a fact that Verizon and AT&T are following in his footsteps. And you guys are going to get a better deal, I think, out of it. I mean, if everybody follows in T-Mobile's footsteps, US, UK, Europe, etc., that would be brilliant. Look, I'm basically the Nostradamus of the phone industry. I'm just going to come out with that. Yeah, I mean, you say it as a joke, but when eventually the freaking Amazon slash Kindle phone comes out, you know. Doesn't that mean you'll be right about 20% of the time or something, Chris? No, it means I'll be right 100% of the time, as usual. Just like I'm right about Nikon over Canon. Wait, which are you, Chris? I don't even know. Enjoy dropping your $1,100 on a Coolpix A, man. You're going to Canon? It's going to be the best point shoot I've ever owned. Whatever, man. Nikon plus Sony right here. Forget about plus. It's all about Sony. You guys are having last century's conversation, Nikon versus Canon. It's about Sony. I'm sorry, but when you say it's about Sony, you mean it's about Nikon since they're using Sony sensors. No, I mean it's about Sony's mirrorless cameras, and I mean it's about the RX1. Right, Dan? No, the RX1 is an amazing, phenomenal camera. That's what I'm talking about. And you know what else? I'm just going to say it openly to Sony so it hears me. I would actually pay a higher price than any other smartphone if they fixed all the things I mentioned that need to be fixed with the Xperia Z. I would pay it just because it's Sony and just because I trust them. But they don't trust themselves to charge the premiums that they used to, and I don't know. I'm going to start ranting. Sony needs to love itself. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. Sony, it's not your fault. It is Sony's fault. That's our mobile show for the week. Thank you so much everybody for listening. Sony's Matt David. Yes, thanks especially to David Pearce for coming on. If you want to follow him, and you should, he's Pearce David on Twitter. He's at CompanionCore. At Pearce David at CompanionCore. Reversing his name makes it pretty suggestive. Anyway, I'm a back lawn on Twitter, Vlad is Vlad Saabov. Dan is DC Seifert. Chris is ZPower. We are all at Verge. And if you want to talk to us, you can. You can leave a comment on this post. You can go talk to us in the forums. You can message us on Twitter. And we'll see you guys maybe next week probably. Thanks. Bye bye.
 Hello.
 Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show.
 I am Dieter Bohn.
 We have a whole group of people, a whole huge group of people here.
 So let's just run through everybody that's here.
 It's going to be amazing.
 I'm Vlad Savov.
 I'm Dan Seifert.
 I'm Chris Ziegler.
 And we have a special guest, David Pierce.
 Welcome, David.
 Hello.
 I'm David Pierce.
 Yay.
 Welcome to my horrendous intro because I was being a little bit
 waiting to start for the past two minutes and then it kind of came and I wasn't ready at all.
 I just want to point out that at this point, David Pierce's fame and infamy has exceeded our own
 due to the premiere of his own program, his own weekly program, which I think we're all pretty excited about.
 Fame is a little strong, I think.
 Don't be modest.
 It's fame.
 It's just straight up fame.
 Well, thanks.
 The program is a little bit different.
 It's so professional it makes us look like the morons that we are.
 True.
 The beauty of that is I have literally nothing to do with that.
 That's like all these people behind me who I come down here and like swear into a camera for an hour
 and then suddenly it looks good.
 It's wonderful.
 I actually disagree with you.
 I think we're exactly as professional as David.
 It's just that we spread it out among all four of us.
 Combined.
 That makes sense.
 Yes.
 And the fact that we're all so professional is a little bit of a shock.
 Combined.
 And the problem is that we also magnify our unprofessionalism by four times.
 It's true.
 Right.
 So last week you guys did Sony, yeah?
 And can you tell us what's coming next week or is it a big secret?
 Well, coming this week we have some of the same stuff we're going to talk about today, actually.
 The HTC One and the Xperia Z.
 And we're also going to talk with Tom Warren about some of the coolest stuff you saw at Microsoft this week.
 Or last week, I guess.
 So that's going to be fun.
 I'm looking forward to it.
 But I'm way more excited about this, if I'm being honest.
 Top shelf is whatever.
 But this is way better.
 Actually, as long as we're talking about ourselves and we're just going to continue doing it,
 David has the New York office behind him, which is really exciting.
 Yes.
 It's awesome.
 You should all move to New York immediately and just come hang out with me.
 It's basically a 24-hour love fest over there.
 I was talking to Jordan, one of our esteemed video guys, who was saying that if only the new office had a shower,
 he would literally never leave.
 And he wasn't joking.
 He wasn't kidding around.
 Okay.
 I'm done talking about us.
 We should talk about mobile stuff, I think.
 And I think the most important news is from a couple of weeks ago.
 I got my orange iPhone.
 I would agree.
 So our last broadcast, we unfortunately couldn't do video.
 So Dieter could not show off his orange iPhone.
 So it's been bugging him for two weeks now.
 Like three weeks now.
 How's the power button, Dieter?
 Yeah, it's a little bit janky.
 It didn't get fully cleaned out.
 But other than that, it's great.
 But no, okay.
 The really big news is that we have reviews.
 And I think there's two big reviews.
 There's the HTC One and the Sony Xperia Z.
 Let's start with the One, I think.
 Because I think O2 is selling pre-orders.
 So it's available to some people now in Europe.
 But HTC kind of just said that everybody else is going to have to wait
 a little bit longer than they had planned.
 But they didn't have a firm release date anyway.
 So it's delayed from a thing that we didn't know about in the first place.
 Yeah, they haven't said anything at all about the US yet, right?
 No.
 Nope.
 Not that I'm aware of.
 Oh, Vlad's got one too.
 Hey.
 I've got one.
 But let's let David talk about it because he's had a whole love affair with the phone.
 I don't know if it's a love affair.
 I mean, so the thing to me was it's a really good phone.
 Like I'm personally kind of a sucker for hardware design.
 And I kind of had this like visceral reaction to this phone
 where I just keep like touching it and I just want to use it for things.
 And like it's not a very good TV remote.
 Yet I forced myself to use it as my TV remote because I just like holding it.
 But the thing that was really interesting to me was HTC really pitched two things
 as like the future of HTC and the reason this phone is the best.
 And one is the camera and one is sense and blink feed and stuff like that.
 And I actually think those are in some ways the weaker parts of the phone.
 Like they're fine.
 The camera I think is good and does a lot of interesting things.
 And I'm actually curious what you guys think because there's been some interesting debate
 about what makes a good cell phone camera.
 But I think that blink feed is sort of cool like this flip board thing on your home screen is nifty
 but I wound up moving it to a second home screen and going back to a normal home screen.
 And I think the camera is fine but it's not nearly as good as I wanted it to be.
 Yeah, I want to get way into the camera because there was a ton of hope
 that HTC was finally going to blow up the megapixel myth
 and we're going to stop this race to more and more megapixels.
 We don't need 13 megapixel cameras or 16 megapixel cameras or whatever.
 So they went down to four and they're ultra pixels.
 Everybody knows the story.
 But like the proof is in the pictures and the pictures look pretty soft to me.
 Yeah, I mean that's the thing I keep coming back to.
 Like it's incredible in low light.
 Their big pitch was we have these bigger pixels that take in more light at a time.
 And that's true.
 It takes in a ton of light and I took a bunch of pictures with the iPhone 5 and then with the One.
 And universally in every case the One photo was brighter
 and a lot of times the iPhone 5 just wasn't usable because it was dark
 and the One would look totally passable.
 And that's great and I'm psyched about that
 and in a lot of ways that's better than what any other camera out there offers.
 But photos are just soft and like you zoom in
 and you get this kind of mushy noise reduction thing that just doesn't look sharp.
 And it to me kind of kills the vibe of the whole photo
 when nothing looks particularly clear and crisp.
 In terms of low light performance would you take the One over a 920?
 It's hit or miss I think.
 They're both really, really good is the point.
 And I think the One to me is I think a little bit better
 because it's, I don't know, it just seemed to render colors a little better than the Lumia 920.
 But they're both really good and they're both leaps and bounds beyond any of their competitors.
 So what's your take on the Zoe?
 The Zoe is, I don't know.
 It was another thing that I wanted to be cool and it is.
 And like for action shots and stuff it's nifty
 and it's fun to actually scrub back through a video and then be like,
 that's the shot I wanted to get.
 And I've always kind of wondered why you couldn't do that in just regular video footage
 and now you can and it works great.
 But they have this whole sharing setup that I just don't think people are ever going to really use.
 And you have to remember to turn it off which is sort of annoying
 because I would take like landscape shots that you don't need the Zoe's for.
 And I would take like 67 shots before I knew what I was doing
 and then going back through all those was kind of a pain.
 Well the button to toggle Zoe's like all the way on the other side of the phone
 from the rest of the controls, right?
 So like you've got your camera, you've got your video
 and then you've got to toggle for Zoe like completely separate which seems insane to me.
 Yeah, totally.
 But again it's really cool.
 I was playing soccer on Saturday and shooting with it then
 and being able to get like you get these action shots of like the moment somebody's foot hits the ball
 that you wouldn't get with a phone otherwise because there's always shutter lag and weirdness like that.
 So it's a great thing to have but again I don't know if it's like this game changing feature
 that HTC is kind of setting it up to be.
 So I just took a Zoe of David talking about the Zoe which was fun.
 David, take a Zoe of Vlad showing the Zoe when you're talking about the Zoe.
 My mind is blowing right now.
 I do.
 Wow.
 David's way too excited about the Zoe.
 Okay, hang on.
 So here's our gallery and there's David.
 And that's the other thing, the gallery is now kind of customized
 so you've got Zoes coming to life and just kind of doing little animations for you.
 And there's David still talking about the Zoe.
 He can't stop talking about it.
 And all right, well the display actually looks over-exposed in the webcam
 but I agree with David.
 These Zoe things are fun.
 They're kind of like vines insofar as because they're limited.
 I mean they're like three seconds.
 We had this discussion with Dieter.
 Is it three seconds or four seconds, man?
 I don't know.
 But the point is you get these really brief video clips
 and just like vines you kind of have to start coming up with creative ways to use them.
 And the thing I noticed, the first few Zoe's that I took was I would press the capture button
 and then the Zoe would capture me turning the phone around to review the photo, which was fun.
 No, but seriously, like having this invitation of three or four seconds
 and having to do something fun with it
 and then coming up with something that is coherent and makes sense
 and that you can post to Twitter or wherever is actually quite satisfying.
 So I agree.
 It's a gimmick but it's one of those gimmicks that you can definitely see yourself fooling around with for quite a bit of time.
 Definitely.
 So I want to go back and talk about the low light performance a little bit
 because Zoe's are cool and all but that's a novelty that's going to wear off.
 So it seems to me what happened here with the One's camera is that HCC wanted to be the best in low light
 so it's doing these ultra pixels which are bigger pixels and supposed to let in more light
 but I don't think that just the pixels alone were enough for HCC to get where it wanted to be as far as the low light capture.
 So then it layered on all of this noise reduction
 and that's what's ruining the sharpness on all of these photos and really kind of the worst thing in the world.
 Whereas if they had scaled back on the noise reduction and maybe not quite made it as impressive on the extreme low light end
 we probably would have had better pictures overall from the bright to the dark and whatever.
 Couldn't they have dynamically adjusted depending on lighting conditions?
 Oh I'm sure they do. I'm sure as it raises up sensitivity the noise reduction gets greater but it seems to be too strong on all levels.
 Dita, they all do dynamic adjustments it's just that they all kind of suck.
 That's pretty much standard for all of their software.
 But I mean that raises a really good point and the other thing is it's really disappointing at 4 megapixels to see the noise reducing blur
 smudging things up and getting the way of sharpness and detail because you can forgive it with a 12 megapixel camera
 or 12 megapixels in air quotes because once you step it down to 4 or 5 megapixels the pictures look sharp.
 Whereas with these guys it's essentially either you get a really high quality picture at 4 megapixels or you screw.
 And broadly speaking I do find that camera technology seems to have kind of stagnated and either not advanced or even taken a step back.
 Because I remember maybe when we had the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, the Galaxy S2, the Galaxy S3, those were some really excellent cameras.
 I'm not actually convinced the iPhone 5 has a better camera. I don't know how you guys feel.
 The Galaxy S2 had a fantastic camera.
 Exactly. So when we had those phones it was very natural. The Progression was always better image quality.
 But now I feel like guys might be compromising on quality to make the phones better.
 Well as far as the iPhone 5 goes I can say that comparative to the 4 and the 4S in extreme low light conditions it's much better.
 I've taken side by side photos with them and the 5, I don't know if it's a software tweak or just a boosting of the sensor,
 the 5 lets in a lot more light in extreme low light situations. In normal situations it's negligible difference.
 As far as breakthroughs in the technology, I think the HTC is on the right track as far as minimizing the pixels and increasing the pixel size.
 I just think that they went a step too far to try and be the absolute best in low light and beat the line 20
 and maybe even get to where the 808 is as far as low light capabilities are and they went way too far with the noise reduction.
 Which is a little disappointing because I would have rather had good low light photos that aren't the best I've ever seen
 on the extremely low light spectrum of just taking a picture with one candle but had better pictures all across the board.
 Are we basically saying the camera is fine but it doesn't live up to what we were hoping?
 It's not a swing and a miss but it's like a ground rule double.
 Yeah, I would even go so far as to call it an above average camera for where we are now.
 HTC made what's kind of a calculated bet that most people are not going to look at the 100% view of their photos.
 Most people want to take pictures and put them on Instagram or Facebook.
 In that case, these photos mostly look fine. You're putting up a 1024x1024 picture on Instagram.
 So you're not zooming in and seeing the softness and the mushiness and you are getting a brighter picture than you would get otherwise.
 So that's a totally worthy trade off but for people who really care about the quality of their photos,
 whether you're posting them to Flickr or just saving them and wanting to use them,
 it's definitely a step down from some of the best cameras out there.
 Even the One X or the Droid DNA both take good sharp pictures and they got away from that, in this case, to do something else.
 I think it works in a lot of situations and doesn't work in others.
 Just to say, that was a really complicated baseball analogy you had.
 I had to think way through with these ground doubles and whatnot.
 That's because you're not American, Vlad.
 Oh, so it just comes naturally to everybody else.
 It's like a nature when you're eating apple pie and watching baseball.
 I'm kidding. I'm cheese.
 We had a hot dog on top.
 What's it like actually using BlinkFeed?
 I'm curious about this.
 I don't think any of us did.
 I think everybody, with that exception, just turned on this phone, looked at BlinkFeed,
 and then was like, okay, how do I set my home screen to be not BlinkFeed?
 Which is exactly what I did.
 I did exactly the same thing as David.
 I actually want to talk about the display on this phone because, again,
 you're just kind of getting washed up by my terrible, terrible webcam.
 But it is great, too stunning.
 I think there's universal agreement among all of us that this might be, once again,
 the best display in mobile devices.
 That crown was held by the HT1X, which Chris reviewed and basically wrote an ode to how beautiful it is.
 This is still 4.7 inches, but changes resolution from 720 to 1080p.
 It's beautiful.
 One thing that concerned me in your review, David, was when you said that you found that you had to cup
 your hand over the display to see it in direct light.
 Is that a serious problem?
 No, I think most phones are that way.
 But it's funny, every time I meet with a company that makes anything with a screen, which is constantly,
 they talk about how it's better laminated and so the glare is down 28% and you'll see it.
 And it's just not true. These things are still super reflective.
 You can't laminate this any more than it is.
 No, you can't. I think it's just, this is the world we live in.
 If you're outside and it's super sunny, you're going to have trouble seeing your phone unless it's so bright
 that you can watch the battery die.
 This is not that. It's no worse than any other phone. We have, for sure.
 Yeah, go grab a visor prism and take it outside and come back and talk to it.
 No, I don't want to do that. I'm not doing that.
 Okay, you can actually really see the view at angles now where I'm showing it.
 And it's just stupid. You can't laminate it any more.
 It's on the glass. The image is on the glass.
 Vlad, what's going to happen is that at next year's HTC event, they're going to be like,
 you're thinking about lamination all wrong.
 Like, we fundamentally rethought lamination. This is ultra-lamination.
 Where the glass is the display. They're one and the same.
 I mean, basically, in order to step up lamination from here,
 you have to do magnetic levitation above the display.
 You have to do a hologram. It's like that.
 But, I mean, David's point is true. Reflectivity is reflectivity.
 Lamination can only go so far to rectify. These are glossy displays.
 If we want really saturated, color rich, punchy, exciting devices
 that when you walk into a store, grab your attention,
 we have to deal with the reflectivity.
 Otherwise, I keep talking about the old IBM ThinkPad displays,
 which were color accurate, but they were muted and matte.
 And nobody was particularly excited or gasp about them.
 So nobody's making that choice. Nobody's offering us matte displays.
 Other than actually screen protectors, there's some really nice screen protectors
 that turn the display matte.
 Yeah, but screen protectors are the worst things ever, and we all know that.
 Wait, why aren't there matte screen displays?
 Now that I'm thinking about this, every time I review a laptop that has a matte display,
 I'm like, yes, matte displays. Why aren't they on phones?
 Well, I mean, glossy displays make your blacks look deeper,
 makes your contrast higher and everything.
 So when it's in a store, it's on a display shelf, everything looks better with a glossy display.
 All matte displays are plastic anyway, right?
 Yeah.
 I mean, I guess if you had a ground glass of some sort.
 The glass is reflective.
 Yeah, and they're heavier and thicker too, I guess, so it's fair enough.
 But let's cut off talking about hardware, because there's a bunch of people who code us
 about being too hardware-centric and how the hardware and the specs don't match,
 it's part of the user experience and yada, yada, yada.
 And this is where actually I think David and I might disagree,
 because I feel like every new Android phone is kind of like the old Android phones.
 I just can't build up any excitement, whereas David has fallen in love.
 So instead of listening to me bitch about about it, let's hear why David is so psyched.
 Well, so, I mean, you just defeated my whole argument for why I'm excited.
 I mean, if hardware genuinely doesn't matter, then this phone is not super exciting.
 But I really believe hardware does matter.
 But on the software front, I think what HTC has done,
 and they've talked about bringing a lot of their Sense 5 stuff to some of their other phones in coming months,
 and actually in the most part, that's a really good thing.
 They've scaled Sense back, and there's still some messy stuff.
 I remember when I first got this phone, Dieter was like, open the People app,
 it's terrible on every Sense device ever since the history of the world.
 And that's true, it's still bad and confusing and kind of clunky, but it's better.
 And there are a lot of easier ways to get around,
 and the hardware is so good that even if Sense is overbearing and big and heavy,
 it doesn't totally destroy the performance of the phone.
 And I feel like software's job in a case like this is just to kind of get out of the way
 and let Android do its thing and let apps work and let the hardware work.
 And it does, there's some stuff about Sense I don't like,
 but it's not nearly as much of a pain as it used to be.
 Like I would turn on the One X and just hate the world and my life and everyone in it,
 and I don't get that at all with this phone.
 Well, this is the story of Sense for the past two years now.
 It's where we keep saying it's okay, but it's not as bad as it used to be,
 but it's still Sense, right?
 Essentially that's the same thing we said about Sense 4, comparing it to Sense 3.5 and 3.6.
 It's still Sense, but it's not as bad as it used to be, but it's not as good as it could be.
 So here's my take on Sense.
 It was solving problems that we had when we were using three,
 three and a half inch screens and Android 2.3.
 It fixed those problems.
 It added context to the 1.5.
 Right, it fixed all those problems.
 But now those problems have been taken care of in the core stock UI of Android.
 Google fixed those problems.
 Right, so it was up to Sense to decide what problems it actually wants to fix now.
 And I suppose it's still fixing some contact stuff when social integration in there.
 They fixed the home screen with BlinkFeed.
 But just updating the UI so it's actually appropriate to a screen this size made a world of difference.
 And also throwing in a wicked fast processor so that it didn't feel bogged down.
 Yeah, I have to say this phone just feels very nice and quick.
 I don't think it's necessarily down to the processor.
 I think we can give HC credit for their own software, but it is very quick and responsive.
 So I like that.
 And HC did do a couple of things I actually really like.
 So this is the, I don't know if you can see it very well, but this is the multitasking menu.
 It's tiled instead of having the one list going up.
 And so you get nine apps at a time and it just looks better.
 Like the home button is kind of ugly.
 That's a marked improvement over the one on Sense 4.
 Yeah, which was like the weird 3D thing you had to scroll and it was awful.
 And then there's like really good lock screen notifications and you can swipe right into them.
 And so like, HTC's done some things, but then like why did you change the icons?
 Like they look worse now and you didn't need to do that.
 And that's kind of HTC's end game.
 It's like let's change a bunch of things you don't need to.
 And I can't use Dash Clock widget on the lock screen because it's not Android 4.2.
 Yeah, well that's the other problem is that this is probably never going to get updates.
 And I said, like I said in the review, I was like I want this phone.
 And then somebody's like should you get this or the Nexus 4?
 And I was like well I'd buy this, but then ask me again when the Nexus 4 gets keyline pie and this doesn't
 and I'm sobbing uncontrollably on top of this phone warning up here.
 No, I mean the other thing to consider and it's something that we tend to forget is that the Nexus 4 is dramatically cheaper.
 I do believe.
 Yeah.
 I'm not actually sure what the HTC One pricing is at the moment, but I imagine it's priced the normal way
 whereas the Nexus 4 is priced to be awesome.
 Price to move, man.
 Yeah.
 Move it does.
 Unless you're Chris Ziegler and you triple overpay for it.
 No, I...
 Dude, whatever.
 I had a Nexus 4 before you did, so whatever.
 Yeah, you paid like 600 bucks for it, man.
 No, I only paid like, I don't know, I paid like 400 or something.
 I don't know.
 I had to sign up for a month of T-Mobile prepaid to buy it.
 I couldn't buy it without an account, which kind of bugged me.
 Wow.
 I'm pretty sure the T-Mobile sales rep just like took you on that one.
 It's possible.
 If somebody gets a Nexus 4 right now, they will have a Nexus 4 before I do as well.
 I've never gotten a hold of one.
 What I do have, and here's my kickass segue, is an Xperia ZZ...
 I'm going to start talking about this just by showing you its viewing angles exactly as I did with the HT1.
 Is the screen on?
 No, that's my point.
 It has terrible viewing angles.
 And you know what?
 I think half the comments on my review have been, what do the viewing angles matter, man?
 You're just looking at it directly.
 I don't know why I'm denigrating our commenters by giving them a terrible answer.
 I'm just making myself...
 I'm very friendly in the presence.
 But seriously, viewing angles do matter in phones.
 One thing, we don't appreciate how often we turn our phones on.
 I think when HT were doing the HT1 briefings, they were saying that people activate their phones an average of something like 200 times a day.
 400 times.
 It was some crazy, crazy number in the hundreds.
 I was like, wait guys, are you serious?
 What sort of addicted freaks are you getting this data from?
 And it's just what we do.
 You check the weather, you turn the phone on, then you forget that you also wanted to know the time, so you turn the phone on again.
 You might do like seven times in quick succession.
 So we do that a bunch without realizing it.
 And another thing we do without realizing is we look at the phone from side angles a ton.
 So many times I have the phone on my desk, stretch a hand out, just turn it on and check for notifications or whatever.
 I'm not tilting it so I'm looking directly at it, I'm looking at it from the side.
 And that's where these viewing angles, that's where these issues come in.
 And Sony has just a chronic problem with this.
 And it just drives me crazy because the experience that everybody looks at it just in pictures is like, this is one of the most attractive, most beautiful phones.
 It has a great design, it stands out from anything else.
 It doesn't copy or hate the iPhone, it does its own thing.
 It's beautiful and in turn it's play on and it lets it down.
 But Vlad, I thought that the Xperia Z had a Bravia Engine 2.
 How could Sony let us down like this?
 Yeah, it's Bravia Engine X2 because it's like two times as awesome.
 I think you're missing a branding name in there. There's another one in there too.
 Oh there is. There's a Reality Engine.
 Yes, the Reality Engine.
 Listen, Reality has bad viewing angles.
 That may well be true.
 There's also Clear Audio Plus, whatever that is, I don't know.
 Who is worse on the branding of their features? Is it HTC or is it Sony?
 Oh man, that is tough.
 Boom Sound is pretty bad.
 Boom Sound is, and this is camo-cased. It's one word but camo-cased.
 But then you also have Beats Audio and it's like, what the heck is going on here?
 Boom Sound with Beats, man. That's the only way to go.
 It's very aggressive if you think about it. Boom and Beats.
 I don't want my phone to hurt me.
 Do you remember that HTC ReSound commercial from a while ago where the guy is walking down the street and the world is literally exploding around?
 That's what they want to happen here.
 Yeah, I mean, wow. We really need to actually get our heads together and come up with a ranking here because Samsung is pretty atrocious as well.
 No, LG is the worst.
 LG just takes what Samsung has whatever named it and then they like...
 They replace Q, I think it's with Q.
 No, they run it through a translator and then they run it back into its original language so things like Smart Stay become Wise Screen.
 And it just happens over and over again with all these features that are just the same feature but with a corny name.
 I don't know, it's pretty hard to be putting S in front of every noun on the planet and calling it a Samsung product.
 Except for the Swollet. The Samsung Wallet is still the Samsung Wallet.
 I'm still waiting for the music app S-Hits. I think there's not a third there.
 I tell you what, in terms of branding actually, and I raise this point in the review, Sony is really abusing the PlayStation brand in a terrible way with its PlayStation Mobile thing.
 Sony is just killing the PlayStation brand, like slowly with every new PlayStation mobile device.
 Yes, and that kills me. It's heartbreaking to me, seriously.
 Somebody actually commented on Reddit saying the Verge have been anti-Sony for so long and they're so wrong.
 Because myself and Neelai are like the biggest Sony fanboys, I pretty much have to wrestle with Ross Miller to get into a Sony keynote.
 There's Mudge Wrestling, Greco-Roman style, etc.
 And Ross Miller is a surprisingly powerful guy.
 He's five feet.
 Most of us have grown up with Sony in the 90s and just having that as our top tier brand forever.
 I just want to say, with regards to the Xperia Z, so many of us on staff are like, we want to play with it and we want to actually like this and check it out.
 And we're really curious about it and we've been waiting for this review and we've been anticipating it and we had high hopes for it, of course.
 And we love its industrial design, but I'll let Vlad continue because we totally derailed this discussion of the review.
 But it lets us down on so many levels and it's because we want it to succeed, not because we hate Sony or have a bad vibe against Sony or whatever.
 Yeah, and my biggest problem is that these are fixable issues. If Sony just fixed a couple of things, this phone could make the HTC One irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned.
 The first thing I would fix is give it a better screen, give it a smaller screen, because this thing is five inches as well.
 That merits saying it's just about as tall as the HTC One, but it's wider and it's less ergonomic because the sides are just so angular and straight-edged.
 Which is kind of a sacrifice to the really attractive design, we can kind of live with it.
 But if you stick a really nice display in the One, and the thing that a few people have mentioned to me is that Sony is making some of the displays in the HTC One, which is just inexcusable.
 Wow.
 You're making the best display on phones with somebody else and not sticking it in your own phone.
 But it's not branded Mobile Bravia 2.
 Yeah, I guess maybe...
 So basically, hang on, so Vlad, you're saying fix the display, I'm assuming you're going to get to fix the camera and then fix the software.
 So basically, fix all the things that make a phone what a phone is and then it would be better?
 Just build a different phone that's better and then it'll be better.
 Ah, but you see, it has the extra features, it has the extra goodies.
 Well, listen, as far as I'm concerned, I'm guessing the reason PlayStation Mobile and PlayStation Certification haven't taken off is because Sony underestimated how much its licensing cost would be for those classic PlayStation games.
 And nobody actually wanted to play ball with Sony and just give those games away for free.
 I don't know what the situation there is.
 But if you can't make it, if you can't do it justice, just throw it away because PlayStation Mobile at the moment is like this crappy-ass secondary app store for just completely disposable random games.
 There is no PlayStation action going on there.
 It was such a huge opportunity that was just completely squandered by Sony.
 Leading up to the announcement of the original Xperia Play, there was so much hype around the possibility of what a PlayStation phone could be and they've just completely blown it on every level, including the certification.
 Yeah, but what I would say is that's fixable.
 Either you do a less ambitious version or you just get rid of it so you don't embarrass yourself in this fashion.
 The rest of the software is actually really nice.
 I'm a fan of Sony's Android skin because it's so light.
 It might be the one that's closest to stock.
 It just does a few tweaks on top.
 So I like the skin.
 It's got some funky animations, but otherwise I agree.
 I find it to be one of the more tolerable customizations of Android.
 I don't think the responsiveness on this device is good enough.
 It has another quad-core processor exactly like the HTC One.
 But whereas the One feels futuristically fast and smooth and all those good things, this is not as responsive.
 It's not as fast, so Sony needs to sort that out.
 Like Dieter says, okay, you have to fix the software.
 And the camera can be so easily fixed.
 Don't give me a 13 megapixel monstrosity with supposedly HDR built into the sensor.
 It's an Xmore R.
 No, it's an Xmore RS, Dan.
 It's an Xmore RS, I'm sorry.
 The front-facing camera is Xmore R.
 That's the old stuff.
 It's with more S.
 Now it's with an S.
 Which like the iPhone 4S is almost indistinguishable from the non-S version.
 But yeah.
 I'm just waiting for them to call the camera an alpha mount.
 Just go all the way.
 Yeah, I mean, this is the other thing.
 Sony makes awesome displays.
 It doesn't have one here.
 Sony makes awesome cameras and sensors because every awesome Nikon sensor you can think of is made by Sony basically.
 Yes, Chris.
 I'm not disputing that.
 There's nothing wrong with that.
 If this show turns into me and Dan debating Canon versus Nikon, I'm quitting.
 I'm not going to let that happen.
 Please continue, Vlad.
 And just finally, this phone is waterproof.
 Well, they call it water resistant.
 But you can take it down to a depth of one meter for as long as 30 minutes.
 And you can take it in the shower.
 That's what I want to know.
 That's what I want to know about this phone.
 Does that actually make a meaningful difference in how you use the phone or what you do with it or where you take it?
 Or is it just that if I get drunk and drop it in the toilet, it maybe won't be a huge problem?
 It's still a huge problem.
 Let's be real, David.
 No, I mean, we laugh about it, but it wouldn't be any problem.
 You literally could drop it.
 I dropped my iPhone in the urinal once, and I thought long and hard about whether to retrieve it.
 Believe me.
 It was a serious debate whether to leave that thing in the urinal.
 And yes, the philosophical aspect of that is difficult.
 The thing with the waterproofing is that it can withstand the water exposure, but it's not a rugged phone.
 I think the average user is still going to probably want to put a case on this thing anyways because it's glass.
 But they're going to drop it and it'll shatter.
 I dropped it twice, maybe three times.
 But like, people put cases on things because they're afraid it's going to shatter.
 Because they're babies.
 This is really soft glass.
 I'm not joking, this is really soft glass.
 And the way it's been put together is that the side parts wrap around the glass, so both on the front and the back.
 It just feels really robust.
 When I hold this and use it and drop it because it's awkward to hold, it feels like any plastic phone in terms of durability.
 Like, good plastic phones, not like a really terrible one.
 So I've got no complaints about that.
 I feel like this is one of the most rugged flagship Android phones around.
 And this is what drives me nuts.
 This waterproofing stuff, again, it's a novelty that we're off, but it's just so much fun.
 If you actually want a high quality phone that you can literally take with you to the beach without worrying, this is it.
 I've done that.
 I've taken a Galaxy Nexus to the beach and it's like sticking it in a bag, sticking it in a bag inside another bag so sand doesn't get in it.
 It's a pain, man.
 I know it's a first world problem, but it's a pain.
 I will say, Vlad, that your header, beat rocking black, was one of the best things that's ever appeared on the site.
 That's David's inspiration. He's been asking me to be more creative.
 It's pretty amazing.
 So, the experience of Z is like, it just, overall it feels like it's like, meh, okay.
 Which is what I expect from LG.
 Why are you buying into the communism of Z, Dieter? I don't understand why you're expecting this.
 Look, it's easier to say than Z.
 Easier to understand exactly what I mean.
 I mean, what if I were saying a sentence and I was talking about the sea.
 Maybe you thought, the experience sea, right? Z.
 Yeah, but you realize that this is a gateway drug.
 Before long you're going to be talking in kilometers and all this nonsense.
 Yeah, you're going to be using the metric system.
 Yeah, measuring your weight in stone.
 Driving on the wrong side of the road.
 Now you're just getting your nationalities mixed up by it.
 It doesn't work at all.
 Listen, we're in America. We can do what we want.
 You can't eat Oreo mega-stuffs anymore though, right?
 Yes.
 My world came to an end this weekend and I was very upset.
 Does anybody have anything else they want to say about the Z?
 I still want to use one, regardless of Vlad's review.
 So, AT&T has announced the Z, right?
 Am I crazy or did that happen?
 I want to say that it was rumored or likely to come,
 but I don't think there's been an official announcement.
 I could be crazy though.
 AT&T and Sony have been friends for years now,
 so it makes total sense that that would be the case.
 Right.
 I'm just wondering, in the US, how these phones are going to be positioned.
 I worry about Sony because I feel like they really put their heart and soul
 into the Xperia Z and put what they perceive to be the best possible product
 they could on the market.
 It's going to do nothing compared to the One and the Galaxy S4.
 I mean, nothing. It's going to be a drop in the bucket.
 Just to raise a couple of extra points.
 At the moment, it's already on sale here in the UK and I expect across Europe.
 I haven't checked. Somebody needs to send me out on a flight to Milan and Geneva
 and places like that just to make sure this thing is on store shelves.
 Check the Sony store.
 People who pre-ordered it, and I think there's some others,
 they get these MDR-1 Bluetooth headphones as well, which are like £399 or something.
 These are really good headphones.
 So that's a nice bonus.
 The box is really barren, which I want to congratulate Sony for.
 Just keep it in a really minimal box.
 There's a USB cable.
 Then there's these headphones, which are also really nice.
 It's a headset.
 It's XP-something 300. It's got a really horrible name.
 So they've got a really nice headset and just a charger in the box
 and everything else is recyclable paper.
 So I feel like Sony gets a ton of things right with this phone.
 And then gets, like Dieter says, some of the core crux issues badly wrong.
 Did I say a ton of things right? Yes.
 It gets a ton of things on the side right and then gets the main things wrong.
 And that's the really frustrating part.
 So Chris brought this up.
 It's the Spectre that's hanging over this entire conversation,
 which is we're almost exactly 48 hours away from the announcement of the Galaxy S4.
 Yes.
 Yeah, I believe we're 50 hours away.
 50 hours away, okay, whatever.
 49, 48 minutes.
 I hate you all.
 So we saw a leak. We saw a video leak.
 So we do need to be a little bit careful because we saw leaks of the S3
 that turned out to just be like dummy boxes and not the actual phone.
 But if these pan out, it looks exactly like the Galaxy S3.
 Okay, here's my thing though.
 Why would they change it?
 This phone has been a giant smashing success.
 They have taken over Android.
 They've ceded Android to Samsung.
 I'll tell you why.
 It's a phone that has all these issues with it, but why would they change it?
 I'll tell you why they'd change it because when people buy a new phone,
 they want it to look new.
 And if it looks exactly like their old phone,
 Apple didn't have too much of an issue going from the 4, 4S design to the 5,
 but at the same time, why upgrade my phone if it looks exactly the same?
 I don't think Samsung is after people who bought GS3s.
 I think Samsung is after people who bought Galaxy S2s or don't own a smartphone.
 I think Samsung is, like Apple plays to this crowd who buys a new phone every year,
 and Samsung is like, you have that Apple,
 we'll take the billion people who don't have that.
 I think it's a mix.
 I do think that Samsung, you know, I mean, of course,
 Samsung has a long and storied reputation of borrowing from Apple's playbook.
 I think that to a certain extent, this is a continuation of that.
 They're saying, hey, we can play the 4S, 5S game.
 We can make a phone that's basically a revised GS3 and get away with it
 because we are Samsung.
 And so it wouldn't surprise me at all if the phone that we see on Thursday
 does look like the GS3.
 Yeah, a couple months ago.
 I'm sorry, but just briefly to clarify,
 because there's been kind of a cold war happening between one tipster
 slash a leakster in a forum in China who evidently does have a new Samsung device
 in his hand, and then Samsung itself trying to drop little teases and hints.
 So Samsung's teaser today, which is just a picture, kind of shadowy
 with a little light cast on it, is basically the Galaxy S3.
 You overlay a picture on top of the Galaxy S3 and that's what it is.
 The only thing that's missing is the earpiece and the front-facing camera
 and all those sensors which Samsung's...
 It's going to have bone conduction, man. No earpiece needed.
 Right, so that...
 That would be wild.
 That's the Galaxy S4. It's the Galaxy S3 with bone conduction.
 Done.
 That gives us the possibility of the Galaxy S4 being essentially unchanged
 from the Galaxy S3 design and just saying straight up,
 this design is great, we're going to wow you guys with something else.
 And another piece of evidence that that is going to happen is the fact that
 the Note 8 was literally just announced two weeks ago with the same ID.
 And to go just two weeks before changing ID would be very strange.
 Right.
 Well, I mean, there's nothing suggesting that Samsung is going to change designs
 because the leaks of the person who has the phone,
 his phone is evidently or at least looks to be a 5-inch device.
 It's bigger, it has a smaller bezel around the display,
 but its actual look and design is exactly the same.
 It's completely consistent with the latest Galaxy devices and with the Galaxy S3.
 So either one, whether you go with Samsung's teaser
 or with the leaks, there's images and video,
 we're still looking at the same design.
 It's just a matter of size.
 I just find that, I mean, I know that we were not super enthused about the S3
 and it turned out to take the world by storm.
 Well, I wouldn't say that.
 I think at the time when Vlad reviewed the S3 originally,
 it got the highest score of any Android phone that we'd ever reviewed.
 Yeah, I meant at the announce.
 But the phone itself just doesn't inspire a ton of passion.
 It's just a really good phone.
 And I think that the S4 is going to, again, just be a really good phone.
 I think that my hesitance to talk about it is like,
 or get excited about it,
 is I just don't think that their industrial design is all that great.
 It just doesn't look awesome.
 It looks, oh hey, it's a Samsung and that works.
 It doesn't feel awesome in your hand either.
 Well, there's that.
 It works maybe ergonomically, but the materials are not,
 it doesn't feel like it has a craftsmanship that other devices have,
 especially when we just talk about the One.
 And at the end of the day, the S3 was the phone that I used at CES, right,
 because it had a replaceable battery and it filled the slots that I needed
 for a phone that does the job.
 And I think that the S4 is going to be another Android phone that does the job
 and Samsung's going to market the hell out of it.
 It's going to sell fine.
 But it's not going to, for me, I don't think it inspires a ton of passion.
 I think I've got a really good metaphor for this,
 because I share Aditya's feelings on this.
 And it's, if you think about space travel, there's no friction in space.
 But every time we have sci-fi movies and, you know, graphic novels
 and art about space travel, what do we get?
 We get these really sharp looking spaceships which are just like needle-like,
 like Concorde, and it looks so beautiful and they're firing flames out of the back
 even though they're more efficient forms of getting traction and locomotion
 and all these things.
 So the Samsung phone is like this chunky, shapeless mess
 that just gets from point A to B. It just does space travel well.
 Vlad, there is actually friction in space.
 I'm going to challenge your thesis here.
 There is? There's not much.
 But in interstellar space there is a certain, I mean, you can go look at the data
 coming back from the Voyager spaceships right now
 and see that there is in fact, you know, there are molecules in space.
 Fair enough. I don't claim to know much more beyond sci-fi movies,
 but that was my point.
 Like, Sony, HTC, those guys are the ones that make the really pretty spaceships
 which actually break down.
 And Samsung is the one that just gets you from point A to B
 and does really good marketing.
 So the S4 is what? It's a Firefly, Kaisa, spaceship?
 Yeah, that would be a really good one because the, what was the movie Firefly?
 Serenity? That's what it was called?
 The only bad thing about that movie is that they use Papyrus as the font
 as the typeface on the title.
 Like, don't do that.
 Man, they had their reasons. I mean, did you watch the show? Did you watch?
 I haven't watched the show. I've only watched the movie.
 Oh, man. Don't even. Can I kick you off this podcast?
 Yeah, you should. Then I could go and actually catch up with it.
 I just watched the whole series right now.
 So, okay, is there anything else to say?
 I mean, we're expecting maybe eye tracking, I guess?
 I feel like, yeah, it's going to be, you know, the design of it
 is probably not going to thrill us based on what we've seen so far.
 We're not going to be in love with the additional design,
 but as far as software goes, it's going to have everything in the kitchen sink.
 Yeah, I just hope that when they do the software that it's not like,
 like with the S3, it was just like exhausting.
 Here's another crazy feature. Here's another crazy feature.
 Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And there was no coherency to any of it.
 There's eight ways to share your photos.
 Right.
 I just want Smart Stay 2.
 As long as they bring a new Smart Stay to the table, I'm a happy camper.
 Which actually they're going to, right?
 That's one of the rumored features is that you'll be able to scroll with your eyeballs.
 Which is like the last thing that I want.
 Like I think of all these features and like the first thing I do
 to extend my battery life is turn off all of these features.
 So it's like maybe they can blow me away with some revolutionary battery technology
 that allows me to keep all of these whizbang features on
 and still get good battery life.
 I just want to point out, scrolling with your eyeballs is a great way to like
 break whatever muscles control your eyeballs.
 Like it's so wrong.
 Think about it. Every time you scroll, whether by touch or by mouse or scroll wheel, whatever,
 you pull the page up and your eyes look immediately down at the thing you just pulled up to see what it is.
 Right?
 Whereas in order to scroll with your eyeballs, you have to look at a given point
 and then pull it up with your eyes and then look back down.
 You don't know exactly how it's going to work.
 They could build in a lag there.
 No, I think the idea was that it'll scroll automatically when it figures out you're down at the bottom of the page.
 So you just like keep reading those last three lines and it'll keep jogging with you.
 Which would be cool.
 But I feel like all of these features, like watching Samsung's ads over the last however many months
 since the GS3 came out, has been really interesting because I feel like all Samsung does
 is say how many things can we have that nobody else has so that we can make ads about them.
 So people are like, huh, that's cool.
 And then they go into a Verizon store and they're like, I want that Galaxy phone.
 And it's like that seems like it's the ball game and that's how Samsung won so much.
 I remember it used to be you would either buy an iPhone or a Droid.
 Right? So it was either that was the game.
 And that has completely changed.
 You now either buy an iPhone or you buy a Galaxy.
 Like that's what people think.
 And Samsung did that by saying like all they advertised was NFC because everybody who had an iPhone was like,
 I want that. That's cool.
 And then they took off.
 And so they've advertised all these features that they just they have.
 And they don't spend a ton of time talking about the look and feel of the phone
 because that doesn't play on a commercial.
 They are like, here's a thing that our phone does that nobody else's does and then people buy it.
 And like that works.
 And it's kind of smart and it sucks for us as people who like care and pay attention
 and get to try a lot of these.
 But it's kind of a smart move it seems like.
 Well, and the features don't even need to work. Right?
 Like nobody actually uses NFC.
 We know that because they don't.
 I just think of those crazy photo sharing features where everybody in the room is supposed to own a Galaxy S3
 and then you hit share and it beams the photo to all your friends in the room.
 It's on Wi-Fi directs. Just the most ridiculous.
 But like that's one of those things that is like,
 oh, it looks really cool in commercial and you never actually use it in real life.
 Right.
 Well, we'll find out on Thursday.
 Oh, do you want to talk about the Ativ Odyssey?
 I reviewed the Ativ Odyssey.
 Do you want to say anything about it or should we just move?
 I reviewed it.
 Okay.
 You know, it's like yet another Windows phone for Verizon.
 That was kind of the whole issue that we had when kind of constructing this review
 was that Verizon's already got the HTC 8X which is a higher end Windows phone.
 I think they're pricing it like $100 now.
 And they've got the Lumia 822 which is taking care of their low to mid range
 which you can get for free now.
 And now there's this Samsung which is not as good as either of those
 and it's priced at $50.
 So this is definitely an example of Samsung just, you know,
 pumping out another phone out of its like massive factory of continuous phones
 to fill a carrier's request that didn't feel like there was any innovation
 or input here on Samsung's end.
 Wah, wah, wah.
 Yeah.
 Unfortunately.
 Okay, we got other Windows phone rumors.
 The Lumia 928 on Verizon.
 That's not a rumor, man.
 Well.
 That's a little more exclusive.
 That's scoop.
 That's scoopage, man.
 Scooper Rooney.
 I just said that.
 Just call Tom Ice Cream, man.
 Tom two scoops more.
 Wow.
 That's pretty good.
 Aluminum body, Xeon flash.
 A little bit thinner and lighter than the 928.
 This sounds like it would make an awesome Android phone.
 Yeah.
 A Xeon flash would be excited because you never see that anymore except on old Nokias.
 Can somebody explain Verizon's strategy here to me?
 I don't get it at all.
 Verizon continues to say we want your phone, your best phone,
 but kind of a little worse and we want you to change these four things so that nobody will buy it.
 And we want to wait six months to put it out.
 Right.
 No, like really, why?
 Verizon seems like they have the clout to do whatever the hell they want.
 Like if they ask for the 920, I'm sure they'd get the 920.
 So what are they doing?
 Well, they wanted it to be exclusive only on Verizon.
 That matters.
 But is this worse?
 What's worse about it?
 This sounds like a better phone.
 Well, I think it's worse is that it's coming out later.
 Right.
 It's thicker.
 It's incremental against the 920 and presumably it's not going to ship with a new version of Windows Phone.
 It will ship with some service release of Windows Phone 8, which is fine I guess if you're into that sort of thing.
 No, I think it's going to be a very, very good Windows Phone.
 It will be the best Windows Phone on the market.
 It will be on Verizon.
 And Verizon won't do what's necessary to sell it.
 To market it, yeah.
 Classic Verizon.
 Verizon is a very – Verizon is, of all the carriers in the world, Verizon is definitely the most possessive about brands
 and about building its own image as the purveyor of the hardware.
 You know what I mean?
 Even more so than AT&T, which itself is a very meddling carrier obviously.
 But Verizon is really concerned about brands.
 Right.
 They created and they own the Droid brand.
 This goes back for years.
 The original story is Verizon rejected the iPhone because Apple wouldn't let Verizon Verizon it up.
 So this is definitely Verizon's reason to be.
 Yep.
 Okay.
 I'm excited to see an aluminum Nokia phone though because I love Nokia's hardware and their build quality
 and what they've done with the polycarbonate.
 So very excited to see what the company does with aluminum.
 I'm less stoked about that because I think – I mean, Nokia never gave me the one thing I wanted,
 which was an N9 running –
 In cyan.
 Yes, running Windows Phone 8.
 And if you go back to the N8, which I think, correct me if I'm wrong, was the last aluminum phone they made.
 No, it was the E7 came out after it.
 Oh, yeah.
 Yeah, good point.
 Yeah.
 But yeah, sure.
 But if you look – those two phones were of the same ID though, right?
 Sure.
 Yeah, yeah.
 Yeah, birds of a feather.
 They did not inspire me in the same way that the N9 and the Lumia 800 did from an ID perspective.
 But when the N9 and the 800 came out, like nobody was doing that with polycarbonate, right?
 Like that was like – when we first saw that and people were saying it's like plastic, we're like,
 well, it's not really plastic because if you go look at another plastic phone,
 it doesn't look anything like another – or feel anything like another plastic phone.
 So they've been doing that for a couple of years.
 So maybe they can apply that type of manufacturing technique to aluminum, which would be pretty cool.
 Well, I think what really set apart their plastic phones, which let's just be very blunt about it,
 that's what they are.
 They're plastic.
 I think what set them apart was the fact that they're built using a unibody approach.
 Like the 920, the 900, the 800, the N9, they're kind of like milled from a single block of plastic
 as far as I can tell.
 And that's what really made them what they were and made them how they felt.
 And I'm sure that they'll be able to apply some of those techniques to aluminum.
 I mean, other companies certainly have.
 I don't know.
 I just – I feel like – I think Tom Warren mentioned on our last show from MWC that he felt like the –
 was it the 720?
 It was kind of like the ultimate execution of that.
 I'm not sure that I agree.
 I think that they could have continued along that path for a while yet.
 It gave them a lot of flexibility in terms of coloration,
 and maybe they'll continue doing that with aluminum.
 They can anodize it certainly the way Dieter has his iPhone.
 But we'll see.
 Well, clearly they're just afraid of a surface phone.
 Yeah, the surface phone, yep, as it should be.
 An aluminum-cyan Nokia would be pretty amazing in my opinion.
 Yes.
 So is there anything else we want to talk about with Nokia?
 I mean, I guess we could – this ridiculous pressure they're trying to put on Instagram, to Insta with love.
 No, we don't want to talk about that.
 It just drives me crazy.
 I think that's Nokia trying to own the whole movement and brand it itself and put its own branding on it.
 Yeah, but I mean, this is just – it's kind of sad to be honest.
 It's really sad.
 It's like looking at somebody with a physical disability struggling along and –
 Oh my God.
 It's not something you want to watch.
 So let's put a number to this.
 The company, both Nokia and Microsoft, both of them are really struggling to get apps.
 And until they do, what's the point in discussing this?
 It's just grown increasingly desperate.
 So you know what's really sad about this is that Microsoft is a major investor in Facebook.
 They don't appear to be able to get Instagram on Windows Phone.
 Blackberry is getting it though.
 Well, kind of.
 Kind of.
 The most backdoor way of getting it that you can come up with.
 Right.
 So with Windows Phone, how much do you guys think Microsoft and or Nokia would have to pay Facebook to get them to port Instagram?
 I don't think they should spend it.
 I don't think that's their strategy.
 I thought Microsoft, one of those companies was already building an Instagram app.
 Yeah, I think they're just going to build it and then be like, listen, we've already built this.
 Give us an idea.
 Yeah, so just plug into it, guys.
 No, but if I'm Facebook, then I say, well, is it built to our standards?
 Do we want to license you our name?
 Let me just say this.
 Facebook's mobile app standards are pretty low.
 If you ever use Facebook for Android and Facebook for iOS, the apps are built in-house.
 Fair enough.
 I don't really think Facebook cares as far as standards go.
 Fair enough.
 Hang on.
 So we've gone an hour, which is good for us.
 We usually have been short lately.
 But we're running over, so David Pearce has to run.
 I don't want to keep him here if he's got other more important things to do than yammer on with us.
 I have to go build Instagram for Windows Phone.
 I'll be back.
 I'll tell you all about it.
 Well, thanks for being on, David.
 We appreciate it.
 Thank you, David, for putting up with our super professional broadcast.
 Anytime.
 Bye, guys.
 All right, so now it's a quote-unquote broadcast.
 There we go.
 Time to talk smack about David.
 We've gotten rid of the fifth core, the what did Nvidia call their?
 The companion core.
 The companion core.
 That's perfect.
 Which actually runs most of the show.
 Because it's the one that's used most of the time.
 Okay, we can't roll out without talking about T-Mobile and Metro PCS.
 Their merger has been approved by the FCC.
 They still have got a few more steps to go, but this is basically like this is going to happen.
 Yeah.
 I mean, there's no major roadblocks.
 Like I think the biggest comparison that we have always to compare this type of merger to is with AT&T's attempt to purchase T-Mobile a couple years ago
 and how that was famously stopped in its tracks by pressure from both the DOJ and the FCC.
 And so far for the Metro PCS and T-Mobile deal, the Department of Justice backed down a couple of weeks ago,
 said it's not going to pursue any more investigation.
 And just today the FCC said that it's gotten the green light.
 So I mean, there's a little bit of things left.
 I think the FTC technically has to green light it and the handshakes and papers have to be signed.
 But for all intents and purposes, it feels like this is a done deal.
 In terms of size difference, I feel like this is a closer arrangement to Verizon's acquisition of Altel than AT&T's attempt at acquisition of T-Mobile.
 And I think that the fact that the FCC green lit this with so little opposition speaks to that and this recognition that even as a combined company,
 there's no threat of them creating an anti-trust situation.
 It's not going to be an issue.
 And I think this is going to be – it's a big win for T-Mobile.
 And I think that – it's really funny to me.
 If you look back 18 or even 12 months, T-Mobile really looked desperate and like they were in very, very bad shape for a variety of reasons.
 They didn't have the spectrum they needed.
 Deutsche Telekom seemed desperate to shed them.
 And it wasn't clear how they were going to really carry on.
 And now I think that they are looking in many ways like the most competitive major carrier in the U.S.
 This is a huge spectrum acquisition for them.
 They're going to pretty rapidly deploy LTE in 2013.
 They've already got HSPA 42 in a lot of if not most major markets in the U.S. at this point.
 And they're doing some really creative things with subsidies and prepaid versus postpaid that I think are going to end up being bellwethers for the entire industry.
 I think that in the long term you're going to see AT&T and Verizon go the same way.
 Oh, wow.
 You think Verizon?
 That would be awesome.
 Someday.
 I'm not saying this is a 2013 thing, but I think that – I've been saying for five years that the subsidy model is not sustainable.
 I mean I don't want to say that I informed T-Mobile on this decision, but I informed T-Mobile on this decision.
 Chris used his clairvoyance and his Jedi mind powers to predict five years ago.
 You're following a Jedi mind meld.
 But it's been eating – the subsidy model has been eating itself alive for years now and it's going to continue to do so.
 And I think that T-Mobile has really done some pretty ballsy things to try to break out of that.
 And I mean, you know, hats off.
 I think that they've put themselves in a position where they aren't being particularly offensive to customers who are trying to buy phones affordably,
 and yet they've still gotten out of that model.
 So that's good and that's healthy.
 And I think that it's looking a lot better than signing up for a two-year contract and getting a heavily subsidized phone every two years.
 Chris, I have to just challenge you quickly on the point about the subsidy model being unsustainable.
 I mean, it is what AT&T and Verizon practice and those guys just keep rolling in massive profits every quarter.
 Yeah, but it's like – have you seen the movie Fast and Furious?
 No.
 If you go too fast, somebody's going to get furious and then you crash.
 Well, I'll just come up with that thought, Chris.
 That's how that works.
 I'll rebut that, Vlad, because actually if you look at the major carriers, AT&T's, Verizon's last fourth quarter results,
 both of them attributed a big loss to –
 You guys, Chris is making his Google face right now.
 Like, I'm sorry to interrupt, but he's concentrating so hard.
 Yeah, I'm Googling things out of this.
 He's actually Googling.
 But I mean, they actually are on the books saying that subsidies are causing –
 AT&T lost a lot of money last quarter for a couple of reasons, but they specifically mentioned the subsidies that they had to pay out
 because of all the smartphones that they sold.
 And as the iteration and the pace of development has greatly accelerated in smartphones over the past couple of years,
 people want the new smartphones faster and they want them more often, and that's where the subsidy model really starts to fall apart.
 So while Chris is finishing up his Google job –
 Margin Call. Margin Call. Margin Call is the movie.
 I've never heard of that movie.
 But let's quickly mention that the BlackBerry Z10 got announced by AT&T for $199.99,
 which presumably doesn't have too much of a subsidy on it.
 Everyone was like, that's a terrible price.
 It's probably got some kind of subsidy.
 It also doesn't have a chance in hell.
 Solovay is selling it subsidy-free in the US for, what is it, $629 now?
 Yeah, $689 I think they dropped the price today. It was $999.
 So anyway, the point I was trying to make about Margin Call is that this hedge fund business looks like it's going really well,
 but one of their risk assessment guys notices that there's some trend happening that nobody else sees,
 that the business is about to collapse entirely.
 I'll stop there because I don't want to spoil it for everybody.
 It was called what happened to the US economy. It was the dramatization. There's no spoiler.
 It's like, spoiler alert, Bill Clinton won in 1992. I mean, come on.
 I'm talking about a movie. I'm not talking about IRL.
 I like that movie.
 Boiler Room is one of my favorite movies. Boiler Room is a top five movie for it. It really is.
 Are there race cars in Boiler Room?
 Yes, actually. There are race cars in Boiler Room because all the guys working at the firm have Ferraris and stuff.
 But anyway, so the point I was trying to make is that you can tell, there's just some delays in the industry
 because customers and carriers have become so heavily dependent on the concept of not paying full price for the hardware that they're owning.
 It's unhealthy, especially if the rate people are dropping their phones. Then what? I don't know. It's bad.
 The fact that T-Mobile is trying to break out of that I think is extremely healthy for the industry and for their consumers.
 We've heard AT&T say, I don't know if it was Randall Stevenson or Ralph Hale Bay, I think it was Stevenson,
 said just very recently that they were looking at the subsidy model and reevaluating how that's going to play out in the coming years.
 So it's definitely on their minds. They're looking at what T-Mobile is doing.
 Right, I think they're going to look and see how well it's working for T-Mobile and formulate their plans.
 Well, listen, as an outsider, I'm still getting over the fact that T-Mobile was nearly lost into the AT&T giant globe of white and blue evil.
 So I'm happy that that carrier still exists. I'm delighted to hear that now they're stepping up and actually acquiring new spectrum and new opportunities.
 And since Chris said it, it's basically a fact that Verizon and AT&T are following in his footsteps.
 And you guys are going to get a better deal, I think, out of it. I mean, if everybody follows in T-Mobile's footsteps, US, UK, Europe, etc., that would be brilliant.
 Look, I'm basically the Nostradamus of the phone industry. I'm just going to come out with that.
 Yeah, I mean, you say it as a joke, but when eventually the freaking Amazon slash Kindle phone comes out, you know.
 Doesn't that mean you'll be right about 20% of the time or something, Chris?
 No, it means I'll be right 100% of the time, as usual. Just like I'm right about Nikon over Canon.
 Wait, which are you, Chris? I don't even know.
 Enjoy dropping your $1,100 on a Coolpix A, man.
 You're going to Canon?
 It's going to be the best point shoot I've ever owned.
 Whatever, man.
 Nikon plus Sony right here.
 Forget about plus. It's all about Sony. You guys are having last century's conversation, Nikon versus Canon. It's about Sony.
 I'm sorry, but when you say it's about Sony, you mean it's about Nikon since they're using Sony sensors.
 No, I mean it's about Sony's mirrorless cameras, and I mean it's about the RX1. Right, Dan?
 No, the RX1 is an amazing, phenomenal camera.
 That's what I'm talking about. And you know what else? I'm just going to say it openly to Sony so it hears me.
 I would actually pay a higher price than any other smartphone if they fixed all the things I mentioned that need to be fixed with the Xperia Z.
 I would pay it just because it's Sony and just because I trust them.
 But they don't trust themselves to charge the premiums that they used to, and I don't know.
 I'm going to start ranting.
 Sony needs to love itself.
 It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. Sony, it's not your fault.
 It is Sony's fault.
 That's our mobile show for the week. Thank you so much everybody for listening.
 Sony's Matt David.
 Yes, thanks especially to David Pearce for coming on. If you want to follow him, and you should, he's Pearce David on Twitter.
 He's at CompanionCore.
 At Pearce David at CompanionCore.
 Reversing his name makes it pretty suggestive. Anyway, I'm a back lawn on Twitter, Vlad is Vlad Saabov.
 Dan is DC Seifert. Chris is ZPower. We are all at Verge.
 And if you want to talk to us, you can. You can leave a comment on this post.
 You can go talk to us in the forums. You can message us on Twitter.
 And we'll see you guys maybe next week probably. Thanks.
 Bye bye.