 Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. We are here and we're looking at the all new Google Hangouts interface, which doesn't give me a countdown, which is awesome. So we're starting. We're live. I am Dieter Bohm. I am Vlad Sabov. I'm Dan Seifert. And we are broadcasting without Mr. Chris Ziegler, although rumor has it that is a situation which will be resolved in short order. So let's hope. Fingers crossed. How are you guys doing? I can't stand this new interface, man. It's so bad. It's like... I mean, we're putting the blame on Chris delaying us, but the truth is we spent the past 20 minutes screwing around with the new Hangouts. The effects that Google talked up... Yeah, the effects that Google talked up in its announcement and press releases and all this stuff are like terrible. Like they're just amateur hour all over the place. And this new interface is just bad. So I vented. Okay. Well, I think the thing to do is just start talking about this. Everybody's got a window. Show him if you got him. It's really a bummer we don't have Chris here. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have one. Okay. So they announced the thing. We reviewed the thing. We reviewed KitKat. Oh, in case you are listening to the audio only one and we're terrible, we were talking about the Nexus 5 and we held that all up. Yeah, so they announced the Nexus 5 on... God, I don't even know what day it was anymore. Was it Thursday? October 31st. It was on Halloween. It was on Halloween. It was on Thursday. My father's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad. And man, this Hangout is just railing on my processor. Unbelievable. So Thursday the 31st, it is $349 off contract for the 16 gig version and $399 for the 32 gig version. Does that sound right? Yep. That's right. The black one is way better than the white one. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Whatever. Come on. It's much better. I don't normally say this, but I've got the white one. But the white is like an off-white. It's got glossy sides, whereas the black one are matte. And it's got this stupid accent for the earpiece in the middle of the thing. And I'd just rather... The black one's better. End of story. Are you showing off that it matches your gear? Oh no, that's a Pebble. Never mind. Yeah, you accuse me of wearing a gear. How dare you? Yes, I would like to point out that the white Nexus 5 and the white Pebble pretty much made for each other. So you're saying the white Pebble is actually an off-white and not really white? Well, nothing is really white. Just like nothing is really black. I mean, why are you being pedantic? I get enough pedantry from the UK team, and I would get you on the podcast. Come on, man. Give me a break. No, but seriously, Samsung really wanted to make and underline the point about the Galaxy Gear and the Galaxy Note 3 being made for each other. And the two really had nothing to do with one another. But the Nexus 5 in white, which isn't actually white, it's got more black on it than white. And the Pebble, which also isn't really perfect in white, has a whole bunch of black-accessed parts on it. So they're like 50-50 black and white. They're just a perfect match. They're beautiful together. Okay. But the thing I would say is you guys are probably right. I haven't touched the black one, but everybody has been saying the black Nexus 5 is better. It is. It all comes down to the fact that the sides of this one are glossy, whereas the black one, they're matte. And that's really the major difference. Matte always beats glossy. So they announced it at an event in San Francisco. It was kind of a strange event. It wasn't a big public unveiling. It was just a small room with some press in it and then a little hands-on area. And I was there. I was there with David Pearce, and I did the hands-on. And I guess we should talk about that hands-on because all of Google Plus is ridiculously pissed off at me. And it's— They don't like you, Dieter. Dude. So, I mean, the first thing I'll say is I said—I did make a mistake in the hands-on, and I will cop to it. I made two mistakes. Mistake number one is I said that Android cameras are traditionally bad, but really what I should have said is Nexus cameras are traditionally bad. And then, you know, I was just—it was fast because it was a weird room, and I was trying—we were trying to get the video up, and I needed to run and go interview people, and so it was just short, and I didn't spend a lot of time with it. But people were pissed off at me because I thought I came off as unenthused. But here's the thing, and I didn't, like, get into it with everybody on Google Plus and on Twitter and in our comments because when people be mad, people just stay mad. I, like, I've been getting death threats, which is awesome. It's been a long time since I've gotten death threats for a hands-on. I wasn't really that wrong about the scrolling. It's way better than it is on most Android phones, but it's still a little bit, you know, it's not perfect on Chrome. But I mean, that said, it's totally fine. But you know, it's just, like, when the new Nexus phone comes out, we kind of have, like, high hopes and dreams that the things that have been bugging us about Android are going to get fixed. And I'm, like, laser-focused on those things. And so I was laser-focused on are they finally gonna make scrolling feel, like, as great as they promised? Are they finally gonna fix a camera? And are they finally gonna give me, you know, a phone, a Nexus phone in particular with really, really solid battery life? And the scrolling is better. It's not totally perfect. The camera is... It's better than the Nexus 4. There's no getting around that. It's better. It's better than the Nexus 4. That's, like, the worst thing you could possibly say. It's the faintest of praise, but if you are comparing year over year Nexus device to the Nexus device, I think it's actually safe to say, again, faintest of praise, that it's the best camera on any Nexus device to date. But as you've noted numerous times already, Nexus devices are not really known for having great cameras. It's, like... I think we're really approaching this from the... It's like owning the fastest RV at the campground. Wow. So, I mean, Google has told us that there is a software update coming that should help with some things. But, I mean, the camera software itself is, like, the standard camera software. It's pretty lackluster. It does take a while to focus. And, you know, the pictures, I don't know, the low light performance is not what it should be. No. Well, there's a number of issues, but I think the best way to describe it is that I feel insecure when I'm shooting with a Nexus 5. Yeah. Which is to say I spent some time shooting Saturday morning, I think it was, around London. And, you know, being a morning in London, you weren't getting a ton of light. But what I ended up doing was every shot, every thing that I frame up, I would take, like, four or five attempts at it. Because the camera doesn't, like, once it focuses, it doesn't take that long to grab an extra few pictures. But it's the fact that you feel the need to take a shot multiple times just in case something went awry. And it often does. And it's just... It's just weird. I mean, there's a lack of contrast. If you want to see the photo I just took on the original show, I just posted it to Google Plus. That seemed appropriate. Continue. So you just interrupted me because you posted to Google Plus where pretty much nobody is... Oh, boy. They're gonna burn you down, Vlad! I mean, we're gonna need to have a discussion about this whole overreaction. We just did. I said that I wasn't as enthusiastic as I could have been on the thing. So what? But I mean, that's the point. Like, I've seen comments... The regulator's coming in. Oh, hey, Chris. Hey, Chris. Chris, we all have Nexus 5s. Where's yours? Hello. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Yes. Fantastic. I do not have a Nexus 5. And I'm... But here's the thing. I'm not really jealous. You also do not own a lamp. Look, do you want more light? Do you want to see the right side of my face? Is that what's going on here? I can... Hold the smartphone. Axe, murder, and light. Hold on. Is that better? You're fine. You're totally fine. You're a handsome devil. So I need to... I realize... I'm sorry to let all of our listeners and watchers in on this sausage-making that's going on right now, but I'm not recording this. So I need to set up some recording. One second. The important things are here. I apologize to everybody for this nonsense. Okay, anyway. I'm sorry. You were talking about something very interesting when I came in. In the meantime, in the meantime, let me just add a few technical notes on our bitching about the Nexus 5 camera. So there's a lack of contrast, there's a lack of saturation, and biggest problem, there's a lack of sharpness. Wait, is this on the Nexus 5 or the Nexus 4? Because you could be describing either. Well, I mean... We already made that joke, Chris. This is what I was saying. We're approaching this from the wrong direction when we say the Nexus 5 camera is better than the Nexus 4 camera. So that's like, eh, distinction between shades of really nasty gray. That's not the thing that we should be talking about. I think the Nexus 5 is a much more mature device than the Nexus 4, particularly because it has LTE and it has the best processor inside of it that you can get on the market at the moment. So in terms of value for money, there's a thing I mentioned in one of the articles I wrote about it. This thing here in the UK is competing against devices like the BlackBerry Q5, and it's only selling like 30 pounds more than the Samsung Galaxy Ace 3. So I mean, it's like, do you go and get like Galaxy S3, an older generation Samsung Galaxy, or do you get the latest Nexus with the LTE and the KitKat and all the other trinkets that come in? What's the difference between the Galaxy Ace 3 and the Galaxy S4 Mini? Who the hell knows? I don't, like as far as I'm concerned, we don't want to know the difference. Those are just not things you should be looking at. If you're looking at that sort of budget range, you might as well just start looking at Nokia's actual devices. That's fair. Yeah. Because those are pretty. No, I do want to praise the hardware. The first impression that this hardware gives is kind of like, eh, it's fine. And like, I don't know why the camera ring is so big and it's surrounded by this little like aluminum thing. But it's a nice design touch. The buttons are, I think it's too, it's just funny looking. The buttons are ceramic, which I mean, Matthias Dorote talked to us a little bit about this, but I do find them to be a little bit sharp. But the more you live with it, the more it doesn't just feel like a generic big phone, and the more it feels like, I don't know, it just, it gets out of the way. It's very just simple and unassuming, and I mean, I think the word I'd use is handsome. I would agree with you. It's like a slightly less stunningly good looking Dawn Draper, you know? It's very nice and you can live with it. It's understated. Yeah, I mean, but it has character. The thing to notice is like, compare it to the Nexus 7, and you can see like, Google's decided what it wants Nexus devices to look like. Simple, black, unassuming, soft touch plastic back, and you know, the word Nexus in lower case letters on the back. And this is white, but yeah. Well, but who would buy a white one? I mean, seriously. Me. I bought one. I bought a black one. So here's what bothers me. It's not, the Nexus 5 looks, again, I'm speaking as someone who has not touched this device, but I think we can all agree that from the reviews that I've read and from the experiences that all of you have had, it's not the best camera on a phone, right? And so why can't we just have the Nexus experience in an uncompromisingly high-end experience? Like why is that too much to ask for? Is that the role that GPE is designed to fill? Or is there room for a high-end Nexus? Well, I mean, that's the thing. One of the things that defines what a Nexus is these days is price. And if you're going to sell a phone for $350 that has got some top-end specs, I mean, the screen is great. It's super light. It's lighter than the Nexus 4, even though it has a bigger screen. You know, everything about the hardware quality and feel of this phone is really good. It's not as primo as an HTC One, but it's in the ballpark. If you're going to get a phone to that price and hitting that price is super important to you, at some point something has to give. And it looks like with the Nexus 5, it was probably the camera. But the alternative, and it's one that both myself and Dan have lusted after, was something like a Nexus Pro. So put an extra $200 on this thing's price, then you're actually going to match the iPhone 5C price unlocked and stick a great camera on it and a great battery. And then everybody is just going to go nuts. But here's my alternative theory to that, which is that Google actively wants to avoid having the label of being the absolute best Android phone, because that would be a problem for Google insofar as Google's relationship with OEMs like Samsung, LG, et cetera. I completely disagree. I think we have this discussion with every single Nexus phone that comes out. And I don't think Google sells enough of them to matter to Samsung or HTC. Yet, it doesn't sell that many yet. I think that Google wants that to change with the Nexus 5, I really do. I think they want to sell a million of these things, 10 million of these things. I think they want to. I mean, at least here in the US, they're not going to do that if the Nexus 5 is not in carrier stores. I mean, nowadays, I guess because now it's with Sprint, you'll be able to get it for $150 with a contract. If it's not in T-Mobile stores, I'm betting you money it will be. It might be on two mobile stores, but it's not on AT&T or Verizon. And let's be real, that's where it needs to be to get those 10 million figures of sales. And it needs to be available on a contract price for US consumers that are going to walk into a store and be like, I want a new phone. There's an iPhone 5S for $199 and a GS4 for $199, et cetera, et cetera. That's where you're going to get those sales figures from. Otherwise, it will be permanently a niche device, especially if you have to order it online from Google at an unlocked price. Yeah, but then… No, they're going to sell it at Best Buys. They're going to sell it at Best Buys. They're going to have it at other retailers. And imagine if you wanted to break that dynamic, how would you do it? Well, you'd try and take it head on and beat the carriers at their own game, and that was the Nexus 1, and that strategy did not work out very well. And so their new strategy is just sell the thing for as cheaply as possible. And I mean, who knows? I don't know that they're actually going to succeed, but I think that with this phone in particular, they want to succeed. But Dan, what I was going to say is if you make that imaginary Nexus Pro, if you make that awesome phone, it doesn't matter how niche the distribution is. All of us are going to cry to the high heavens about its awesomeness. People are going to find out what a mouthful spread. People will make the effort to go and get the best, absolute Android phone. But let me make the point, man. I mean, I need like more than 20 seconds here, okay? Please. D-Day's interrupted me enough. I'm like raging at you now, but Dieter is the one that keeps jumping in. All I'm saying here is at the moment, the LG G2 and the Nexus 5 are very differentiated devices. And as far as I'm concerned, I can see good reason to spend the extra money to get the LG G2 because of its better camera, because of its better battery, and I can see good reason why we want to get the Nexus 5. So for LG, both of these phones are going to sell. It has two strong phones. If Google went and took the LG G2 spec for spec, priced it at the lowest possible price, which Google seems to be keen to do with every Nexus device, try to break even, Google would literally be screwing with LG's business model. Whereas the LG right now is thriving. It's getting all the benefits of doing a Nexus device or brands equity that you get out of that. And it has differentiation for its high end. I just don't think Google really cares about the absolute high end. They can leave that to the companies. It just wants a baseline of a really good device at the lowest possible price. I'm done. I wasn't going to talk to you. So battery life. We talked about it in the review, ran tests, everybody's got a bunch of them, we've all been trying it. I think what Josh said in the review is exactly right. It is wildly inconsistent. I will have it one day crap out after seven hours and then the next day it goes for 12 and then the next day it's back down to eight. And I'm just sort of waiting to see where it's going to level out at. And part of that is heavy use thing that you do, but I've been using this thing for a while now, just Thursday, and I still have no idea where the battery is going to be at any point in the day, like ever. So I guess I had it charging earlier today. I will say, and I've made this point before, but I think for me anyway, I certainly found this to be the case with the Nexus 4 and the Lumia 920, when you have a device that has wireless charging, you tend to top it off more than if you didn't. So I have a cheap, even though I don't have any cheap phones right now, I have a cheap pad on my desk, I have a cheap pad in my bedroom, I have a cheap pad next to my couch, and you just naturally set the phone there and then over the course of the day it ends up being close to 100%. Chris has more cheap pads than lights, I think we've established that. Chris's condo is a store, a sales store for cheap pads. I'm going to get cancer any second from all this constant power I'm being radiated with. So yeah, I have a cheap pad and it does charge the Nexus 5, but it also seems to get it really hot if I don't place it right, and so I'm a little bit nervous about it. So I'm waiting for the official charger, which will have the magnets to align it, because it's got magnets, because this thing is perfectly palm-free, I'm telling you right now. I noticed today when I was charging it over USB that it was getting considerably warm while I was charging. So, I mean, I don't know. Wasn't there a whole story about...has Google started shipping that new charging pad? No, not yet. Wasn't there a whole story about how Qualcomm, there's a new, like there's some crazy new Qualcomm technology in the Nexus 5 to reduce heat output from the radios? Yeah, sorry, I was just playing, seeing if we could turn on Q&A, but we can't. But if you have Q's about the Nexus 5, you should tweet at us. I have Q's, I haven't used a Nexus 5. What do you want to know? Should I buy one? Dude, it's $349. I'm Lucas, you're an iOS fanboy, so. Between this and an HTC One, get the Nexus 5. Because the HTC One's camera is a beautiful experiment, but it's no great shakes, and you're not losing out that much here. And the HTC One's battery is, I think, a little bit better than the Nexus 5, but not enough to be appreciable, and this feels just as nice in the hand. I will say that this, barring a major price reduction on the GPE models, it completely obviates them. Why would anyone buy a GPE GS4 or One when you have this for $300 less? It's insane. Yeah, if the price was like a $100 difference, I could justify spending a little more to get the One for the nicer build quality and the added features, but at $300, it's just completely neutered the value factor. Yeah, it's a non-starter, yeah. Yeah, but those are also aging models. You have to anticipate that come January, come CES, we're gonna have a lot more alluring devices. We live in a world where you just called five-month-old devices aging. Yeah, these are from, what, June? I think they hit in June, right, the Google editions? Yeah, well. That's software, though, I'm talking about. Yeah, even the branded models, though, aren't that much older. Maybe April. Yeah, so anyway, I just wanna put things in perspective for everybody here. What else do you wanna know? Like we didn't know that we're thicker when every single month. So we haven't really talked about KitKat, so. Not at all. I was trying to do Nexus 5 and then KitKat. So I put up a report today about KitKat after having talked to a bunch of Android guys. So I have a theory of there's KitKat and then there's KitKat on the Nexus 5, which are two slightly different things, but very different things. So what's interesting is as of right now, and nobody believes me about this for some reason, including Dan, dude, the Nexus 5 launcher is only available on the Nexus 5 right now. And Google hasn't said and hasn't, I don't think, has decided if they want to put it on anything else, including the Nexus 4 or Google Play edition devices. They want to see how people like it. That just sounds so insane to me, that the fact that it's like, would be on the Nexus 5 and not on the Nexus 4 or the Nexus 7 or any other Nexus device for that matter. It's hard for me to wrap my head around it. That's what they told you and I don't disbelieve that that's what they told you and everything. I just feel like it's one of those things that in a couple weeks when the Nexus 4's 4.4 update arrives, it's just going to be there. I see this going one of a few ways. If they do in fact keep it exclusive to the Nexus 5, and even if they put it on the Nexus 4, I mean the thing to realize is that the Nexus is no longer about being the premier just Android device. It's now like a Google device. Google now is right on the home screen and you can search Google from the phone dialer and your default, no stop, oh my god, I didn't say okay, whatever, search Google, whatever. Sorry, it's just responding to me automatically, the sound of my voice in the launcher. Hangouts is a default messaging app, etc. If it goes that way, then what we're looking at here is there's Samsung's version of Android and there's HTC's version of Android and now there's Google's version of Android, which is kind of crazy. The thing that makes me believe that they might even consider putting this thing into the Google Play Store, this launcher available for any device, is if you go into settings, there's a top level setting for home and you tap that and that is how you choose your launcher. You don't have to go into app settings anymore and mess with this garbage of clearing defaults for launcher app. It's just right there and you can switch between them very easily. This just works. Apex didn't need to update itself to make this happen. Google just figured it out. Same thing with their cloud storage picker, Dropbox was just in there, which is kind of amazing. Anyway, if they decide not only do they want to put it on Nexus devices, but they want to just put it on Google Play like they did with their keyboard, it would be a huge screw you to Samsung and HTC and LG and everybody else because there is now at the very first setting after your radios is switching your home screen to something else. It's like, sorry Samsung, nobody wants your skin. We're going to give them ours. That would be crazy. Sorry BlinkFeed. Right? This is like the ultimate screw you because HTC's BlinkFeed is the left most screen and now it's Google Now. Yeah, it's really interesting. HTC has been very aggressive in saying that they will be deploying 4.4 to its devices. I think even all the US carrier devices within 90 days. So it will be really interesting to see how all of this Google Now integration stuff works with HTC's launcher. But I just wanted to say that the reason that I think that this, Google has literally no reason to keep this exclusive to the Nexus 5, simply because you can turn off the Google Now integration in the launcher. If you turn off Google Now, it's no longer your left most home screen. You've got a standard type of home screen that you know, Android has had for however many years. So if they're concerned that people might not like it, there's always the option that you can just turn it off. But every OEM… They'll want to push it on people. Yeah, but every OEM seems to have its own idea of how Google Now should be accessed, right? Like nobody is doing it the same way. And I think that that's going to continue to be the case. I mean there's no sign that Samsung or HTC are going to let off their customizations. Or Sony, especially Sony. Especially, well I'd say especially Samsung. I mean Samsung's got competing services for everything that Google's pushing right now. They've got chat on. That's Samsung. Yes. Sorry, no, something just triggered Google Now and I don't know what I said that triggered it. It's really creepy. I just realized that Samsung has chat on and LG has knock on. Yeah. But those are actually like two totally different features. Right, like they're using… Yes, and I would like to point out that knock on is exponentially more useful than chat on. I will say that when LG launches its own messaging service, which by all accounts it probably will, it's going to be called like talk around or something. Samsung has launched its own messaging service. Yeah, LG copies it. It's going to run Samsung's name through a translator and then back again and it's going to be like talk around. Okay, so that whole like Android politics aside, like KitKat's really nice. They got rid of almost all the Tron. There's still some blue here and there if you go hunting for it. Like the switches are blue and then like not the main power down menu but the last like the we're going to turn it off now pop up is blue. But other than that, everything is white. When you scroll and you hit the end of a scroll thing, it's white. It's wicked fast on this phone. They've added a whole bunch of just like plumbing features. They added the file picker which I think is still like one of Android's key advantages. It makes it a real computer and you can actually attach stuff to stuff and not have to worry about will your phone let you do that. It's really amusing to me how many apps there are on iOS where you have to like, there's like a file attach feature and it just like it takes you to the photo roll and it's like what? That's not what I mean by attach. Like you can't make the logical jump from I want to attach something to this to oh, that must mean you want to attach a picture because there is no other kind of data. And the dialer is awesome. I mean the search Google stuff is fine, it works. But the smartly putting your most contacted contacts up there, like so far it's been great figuring out who I actually want on it. And my favorite feature though is they finally, finally added smart dialing to the dial pad in 4.9 so you can just type somebody's like for Dan it would be 3, 2, 6, there you are. So I'd hate to burst your bubble on this but they added that in 4.3. No they didn't. Yeah they did. Really? Dial pad auto complete. But for some reason in 4.3 it was not enabled by default for some inane reason. You had to go into dialer settings and enable dial pad auto complete. But now I feel like a maroon, thanks a lot. This actually raises a good point here which is that I've jumped into 4.4 with the Nexus 5 and just been impressed by so many things. But in writing up our notes for the review for KitKat, what I've noticed and what you guys pointed out to me is that quite a few of the features that impressed me now have been implemented in like 4.2 and 4.3. So they're not actually brand new to the stock Android experience. This is actually the fact of the matter. I've been using pretty much every one of the latest Android 4. whatever devices out there and all of these skins have managed to hide really nice, really beautiful designs that Google has done and just obscure them and just not let me know that they're out there. But I mean just to add to what Dieter said, it's mostly white. There's some of it which I consider like a light gray but then I'm falling into the pedantry that I accused Dan of. But I feel like this neutral color scheme is very nice. It's very easy on the eyes. The app drawer now is just beautiful. All the icons have been kind of enlarged a little bit and it's so just simplified and there are no settings which I think is a bonus. They took widgets out of the app drawer which never made sense to me ever and they brought back the long press on the home screen to add widgets which we haven't seen since what, 2.3 I think. When you do it, it pops up a menu that shows a few things and I'm not worried about anybody getting confused by that to be honest. No, no. It's just sweet little papers, add widgets, mess around with the settings. But it's like just going into the app drawer, this is really symbolic for me because there are no settings. It's just organized in alphabetical order. You don't get a choice to screw around with the order. Whereas I've been using things like Nova Launcher and they have pages and pages of settings for drawers and app docs and home screens and whatever and they're fun to screw around with but ultimately I really just want to pick up a phone and have somebody make these design decisions for me. And this is what I like. This is what Android is doing. They're actively making decisions and saying this is a good way for you to use this, get used to it. Home screens for example, I only have one but if I want to add a new app, it will automatically generate a new home screen for me. I don't get the choice to have like five blank home screens and then have to delete them all. They're just all of these subtle little things which are just automated and done for you and just make the process of using the phone that much more straightforward. This is what I like. I really feel like the whole experience has been streamlined. My favorite highlight actually is when I go to set an alarm and this is just beautiful circular UI to pick the time, the hour and the minutes and it's functionally not any more useful than all the other interfaces but it just makes me happy to do it. My favorite alarm feature is like a half hour before an alarm is going to go off, some three or four hours before I don't know what it is, it actually pops down a notification for you saying that your alarm is going to go off in 10 minutes or five minutes or a half hour or whatever and then you can dismiss it right from there like no, I'm awake, I don't need this alarm now and get rid of it. It's amazing, it's great. I use it all the time because apparently now I wake up at 4.30 in the morning every day. I'll tell you what's a hot mess though is hangouts. I would come in but I don't actually hang out with anybody other than you guys. So the big thing with KitKat and the new version of hangouts that came with KitKat and it's going to be delivered to other phones and whatever is that Google is finally integrating SMS messages into hangouts which people have wanted since the day hangouts launched but it's doing it in probably the most ham-fisted clunky way that it could possibly be done. Instead of threading your conversations with a single contact into one string of conversation whether it's on hangouts or SMS, it's forcing separate threads for SMS and separate threads for hangout conversations which is just bifurcating and confusing and messy. I mean if you're Google you can't make it work like iMessage and just have things switch over to iMessage because you don't know what the recipient, what phone they're using, you don't know where hangouts is installed, whatever. But yeah, it's not that hard to just have a single conversation per person and have multiple accounts. I'd much rather think about conversations per person and switch between my two Google accounts or SMS than switch to one of two Google accounts and then look for the SMS conversation or the hangout conversation. I know that there's some level of confusion by threading everything but it's way better than just sticking stuff all over the place. Like I need to remember that. Yeah, right, I mean you said that. LevelS 1.0 actually did that. It threaded Google Talk messages in with SMS and that's exactly what hangouts is supposed to do and later on other services as well. But you know, that was 2009, come on. Yeah but I mean Blackberry has been doing that for a long time too. Yeah. I'm just saying there's lots of examples of people that have solved this problem and not that their solutions were perfect but they are better than the solution that hangouts is going with right now. Pretty much the only benefit is now I think you mentioned this in either your review of KitKat or another report on KitKatEaters that now I only have one icon on my home screen as opposed to two or three. Right, yeah, so they had – this was Roshi's point, Roshi Lockheimer's point. They had Google Plus Messenger and Google Talk and SMS and those three are now a single icon so that's nice. Actually there's something – somebody was asking on Twitter, Armando Rodriguez was asking how do you know when you have a data connection? So now that all the icons are white, the status bar icon, the signal strength icons are always white and it used to be that like those would be gray and then they would turn blue when they knew that they had a solid connection to Google and then you also got little up down arrows inside the little status bars to tell you what your data was doing, if it was downloading a bunch of data or uploading a bunch of data. And so far as I can tell, all that's gone. So you just have to trust that you've got a solid and good internet connection. I guess I haven't been on a captive portal since I started using this so maybe it gives you some indication if it looks like you've got an internet connection but you don't. But that's sort of like instant quick, I know that my data connection is solid indicator in the status bar, you've lost that. But you do get an indication that's better about when GPS is active, that's over on the right now and there's a location shortcut that shows you the apps that have most recently pinged your location and like how much battery they're using. So they've fixed that. Which is similar to – yeah, that's similar to what iOS does as far as the data it gives you for recent location. I think that's great and you can now choose different modes of location services. You can choose the high accuracy which Google tells you will use the most battery life. You can turn a battery saving mode on which will drop GPS and only use Wi-Fi triangulation and cellular triangulation. So that's a much more user friendly way to manage it and hopefully save some battery life. So actually just about the status bar, the thing, the signal bars that used to turn blue, they're turning white and they're kind of – I don't see an issue with distinguishing when you have a good signal from a bad signal. There's a good enough contrast between the white and the dark gray there. But yeah, I'm not noticing like you're saying the up and down vertical bars when you're having data transfers which were handy from the previous interfaces. But there's something else I wanted to note on the next slide which is – It turns orange if you don't have service. Sorry Vlad, I'm interrupting McGee again but Twitter tells me I'm wrong. It turns orange if you don't have a full connection. Man I like that orange. I've seen it on my Wi-Fi and I used to think that's just like a good highlight color to replace the blue. It's just party Wi-Fi. I was like that's a nice subtle orange color. It really is. I mean it's still a nice color, just not a happy one when you're looking at it on this phone. But a couple of quick hardware points to add with the Nexus 5. The auto brightness is actually driving me nuts. Oh so much better, you're wrong. Well I mean I might be wrong about one part which is that I find it too bright by default which you know kind of a subjective issue but it also hunts around a lot for me. So I would just be reading a piece of play white text and nothing would change about my lighting. It would just go up and down, up and down and try and figure out where the hell it is. So that's one point. The other is that the speaker, the loudspeaker on this handset is an afterthought. It's just really really weak. I mean it's fine for ringtones and notifications but I mean the HTC One series just embarrasses this. That's interesting that you say that because it's not on the back anymore. It's down at the bottom where the charging port is and in theory that makes it a better projection if you have it placed on a desk. It's exactly the same place as on the LG G2 but it is nothing like the one on the LG G2. Interesting. It's exactly but nothing like. Another point actually comparing it to the G2 is the micro USB port at the bottom. Somebody asked me about this on Twitter. It's upside down on the Nexus 5 relative to the G2 so it's not the same orientation. I don't know what to tell you about that. Hey man, someone wanted to know. I haven't had a whole lot of hunting for brightness level problems but I will say maybe it is a little bit too bright on the auto brightness but I'd much rather have that than the dim cluster that was. I'd much rather just have it work correctly like it does on the G2. And you and the G2 should start out as friends. Me and the G2 and that knock on function, dude, we're in love. The reason that knock on function exists is because it's fixing something that's broken with the G2 to begin with. Well you know what, double tap to wake. Nokia did it in the N9 and all of these other devices. I'm just saying everybody, every single phone manufacturer needs to have this on their phone. Double tap to wake, double tap to put it to sleep. It just makes sense. But also, LG, that skin, it is terrible. I installed Cyanogen Mod on G2 and I can tell everybody it's easy enough to root and Cyanogen Mod is stable enough to use on a daily basis so thumbs up. But LG does actually have good things about its skin. Probably like one good thing which is that when you plug in a headphone or the micro USB port, you get a little animation showing it as if it's like going into the device. It just kind of pops in and pops out and just tells you yes I have a headphone jack in me. And it's just really cool to me. I just really like that animation. I know I'm not getting any support but I'm saying there's a good thing about that skin. I like that. Anything else that we have to say about, I mean, you know, I wrote the KitKat review. You guys helped pitch in on that. We've got the Nexus 5 review, we've got the report that went up today. We've learned a lot about this thing. What I really want to know and if we're going to just leave on Google stuff, it's like the unanswered question of Google has talked a lot about how KitKat has been slimmed down and tightened up and runs good on or runs well on devices with lower memory, devices with slower processors and stuff like that. So I want to see what Google put its money where its mouth is. I want to see one of these low end devices running KitKat. It runs great on the Nexus 5 but by all accounts the Nexus 5 is one of the fastest phones you can buy right now. Well so Vlad actually wrote a report about this. Yeah. I want to know, I want to see it. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That is the billion dollar question. The way that they did this, Dave Burke told us that the way that they initially tested it on low end is they took a Nexus 4 and they crippled it. They cut it down to 512 megs of RAM and they hobbled the processor so that it couldn't go at full speed and looked like a cheap dual core processor and they lowered the resolution down to QHD. And they say that it runs great, they say that there's going to be devices coming up pretty quick with it. They were down to like, they know the exact model and type of RAM that these people are using and that's what they decided to target. I mean they need to get gingerbread off the market, just period. Every time that pie chart comes up and it's still got a huge wedge of the insolvability. It's still greater than 26% and this is greater than 26% of devices with Play Store access. Which is terrible. That means there's way more that don't, right? Earlier this year, I don't know if it's still there, but earlier this year there was definitely at least one device on AT&T's online store that had Froyo. That's not a joke. That's not going to change. AT&T's not going to push an update to that, whatever that device was and give it… Was it like an industrial scanner or something? No, it was the phone that they launched and immediately forgot. It was the Sharp FX Plus or whatever it was called. The one that looked like a sidekick but running Android. So anyway, that's neither here nor there. You guys were saying about Q&A, somebody asked us, is the Nexus 5 a good upgrade if you're already happy with the Nexus 4? I think the answer to that is absolutely obvious, no. If you're happy with your device, there is no good upgrade. Just stay happy. You have your device. Carry on with your life. I don't necessarily buy that because you don't know what you're… There are many kinds of devices where you don't know what you're missing. I think that for me personally, the iPad is the most obvious example and more generally tablets with iPad specifically because it was the first really huge mass market tablet that everyone owned where you don't understand how it fits into your life until you actually own it. That was certainly true for me and obviously upgrading from one phone to another is a little bit different than buying an entirely new kind of classic device. But still, there are definitely features or transformational differences in performance or screen quality that could qualify as yes, you don't know it yet but you need to buy this device. But I think it's safe to say here, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Nexus 5 is not that kind of upgrade. It is if you live in a place with LTE and you're not using it. Oh yeah. If you've got 350 bucks to burn and you've got LTE in your area that's compatible with the Nexus 5, then dude, spend the 350. You're going to be pretty happy. Right. But the point was, the premise of the question was I am already happy. First of all, that person is such a rarity in the modern world. I want to congratulate them and just say carry on with whatever the hell you're doing. You guys are like, what about the opportunity cost? You have to really consider such and such. No. If you're happy, carry on. I wish I could be happy with a gadget like that, man. One day you might just encounter LTE randomly and fall in love with it and have this random runaway romance together, but let that be in your future. Let it just happen naturally. I say if you're happy, stop it. Just stop. Stop being happy. I do not want you to be happy. Whatever phone you don't currently own is better than what you currently have. I don't care what it is, what phone you currently have, or what phone you're looking at. You're not as happy as you could be when you switched. This weekend I was actually trying to tape the Lumia 1020 and the Nexus 5 together. That would have made me happy. So before we move on from Google, I want to touch on another subject that I think frankly has not gotten the attention it deserves, and that's this absurd arbitrary 18 month limitation on upgrades that disqualifies the Galaxy Nexus from 4.4. And Google is not trying to hide this. They're very, very open about the fact that it is just getting forgotten because they have this 18 month rule. They're very two-faced about it because on the one hand they're saying 4.4 is great for low end devices, and then on the other hand they're saying, oh, but this two year old phone that could very, very easily run for this new operating system isn't going to get an upgrade. And I think it wouldn't be as weird if it weren't for the fact that here you have Apple basically on a rolling three year upgrade path for all of its phones, and then Google just hasn't, even for its own line, has no interest in following suit. And when you consider that the two year contract still isn't dead in the US, they're basically saying your device will be EOL'd before your contract is even over, which is just kind of a slap in the face. If I owned a Galaxy Nexus, I would be super upset. There's millions of these Galaxy Nexuses out there. They sold a ton of these things to a bunch of developers and just everybody, they're everywhere. They should really find a way to do it. And the 18 month thing, I'm sorry, any policy that Google tells you that they have about upgrades is a lie. It's whatever makes the most sense to them to say based on what they've decided to do that day. And with the Galaxy Nexus, the story is that it's got this TI processor and TI's not around and they don't have somebody to help them do the thing they need to do to make it work on 4.4. I think that's the real thing. It's got this TI processor in it. But that's still BS because TI still exists and they're still making OMAPs, they're just not selling them to smartphone vendors. You can't tell me that they can't like, first of all, Google has a copy of the OMAP3 ISA sitting in their lab. They can figure out how to program for an OMAP3. If anybody has resources to throw at it, it's Google. Excuse me, OMAP2 or not OMAP3. We're not talking about some tiny startup manufacturer. We're talking about one of the largest internet companies in the world that has tens of thousands of engineers. Right. They've got to make sure that they're putting resources into help outs so that people can get their multi-level marketing MLM schemes running. And with that we should direct our viewers to go watch scam world again which is still a fantastic piece on our site. So there are no MLMs on help outs yet. But there aren't any now because everybody gets background checked and whatever from Google. So you can only get your makeup checked with Sephora and have someone teach you how to spackle a wall or learn to play the guitar. I don't want to talk about help outs at all. Okay, we've got to talk about Blackberry. We've got to like – so they didn't – Do we have to? Have to is a strong word. I think we do because this time Blackberry is actually interesting. They didn't get sold. They got an infusion of cash from the investor firm that wanted to buy them but couldn't pull in enough bankers to actually support buying them so they just threw some money at them which is totally insane. And Torsten Heinz is out and a new guy John Chen is in. And let's just be very clear that Torsten Heinz was paid $22 million to fail. He walks away with more money than most of us will make in our entire lifetimes. Let's just get that out on the table. So absurd. I mean I've said numerous times about how he walked into a really bad situation and a lot of what happened with Blackberry was not entirely his fault. But at the same time in the 18 months or however long he was in term as CEO, he didn't do anything to improve its situation. It just got worse and worse and worse. And so by all accounts he failed at his job and he still comes out walking away with eight figures in his pocket. That's the guarantee with any CEO position. This was the thing that I was thinking the other day while I was eating parsley. I don't know I just have this really strong association now between parsley and thinking about Blackberry. Parsley is not an entree. Parsley is not an entree. I was eating parsley with other stuff but it was the strongest flavor at the time. Parsley has no flavor. I'm talking about Blackberry. Leave the parsley alone. Parsley has flavor. Parsley is beautiful. I don't think there is anything that cannot be improved by a little sprinkling of parsley. I can think of a few things. So you can have sympathy for Thorsten Heinz because rather like Steve and Elob, he was left in a situation where there weren't that many right moves for him to make. Whatever decision he was making, ultimately it was also an issue of execution with Blackberry. His decision to switch to Blackberry 10 and be aggressive and the other, other, other might have been perfect if they actually could code a mobile OS if they were capable of doing that and doing things like an email client but they just weren't. They kind of sucked at their job wholeheartedly and universally. I wouldn't just pin it on Thorsten Heinz. I don't think he really helped things. There was that quote from him saying we're innovating too much. We have differentiated products. We should differentiate it because they're like three years behind the curve, etc., etc. He didn't help things too much but we can't have too much sympathy for him. So my biggest question is, you know, everyone's calling this interim CEO, John Chen, the fixer upper guy but wasn't Thorsten the fixer upper guy? So is this the fixer upper for the fixer upper? It must be. Well I mean John Chen actually has credentials in doing that because in his previous role he led, what was the name of that company? Well he led the revival of a company that was kind of down in the dumps and was ready to fail basically. So he's got perfect experience, perfect credentials for this job. Whereas Thorsten Heinz was an internal hire for Blackberry. So I mean John Chen has at least more of a, I don't even know if he has more of a chance to revive things now because it's you know, 18 months on, the situation has gotten worse. But he seems better qualified at least. Okay. Okay, well since that's all of our hard analysis, I would just like to point out that maybe, just maybe, part of Blackberry's problem has to do with the fact that it just appointed a new and give me a chance to read this in full, lead director and chair of the compensation, nomination and governance committee. Most of those words have been capitalized. Alicia Keys? No. Strange enough, no. This is a position that Fairfax's CEO Prem Watser is taking up at Blackberry. Fairfax being the investors that wanted to take over Blackberry and just couldn't get the money together. But it's just kind of nuts. There's like so much middle management going on and so much like senior vice president, deputy of management for something in charge of etc. It just sounds like another terrible model to me. But also notable, in the entire Blackberry announcement there was nothing said about the future. Even John Chen is an interim CEO. So the main CEO, executive chair of the board, so essentially he's the man in charge. He's got the Steve Jobs position of Blackberry, which is funny because Steve Jobs never failed this bad. But anyway, he's got as much, pretty much it sounds like he's got as much power as him, but he's in an interim position. So Blackberry isn't really committing to anything at the moment. Well they did say one thing and that's they are not killing the handset division. Six months on that. Yeah. Yeah, we're not killing the handset division today. Right. Right. We're not eating a cheese sandwich today. Every single – Actually parsley on a cheese sandwich, very good. Yeah. I'm telling you guys, parsley is just for decoration. It has no flavor. Oh my god, it's full of vitamins. No, it is full of – I'm not disputing that. I mean lots of things are full of vitamins. Kale is full of vitamins. Kale is awesome. Kale has flavor. Yeah, no, kale has a lot of flavor. Kale is like really like – you have to like either cook it or like blend it. Those are your only options. You can't eat it raw. Of course you can. Well you can. I should not have this outrage against raw vegetable eating. Vlad, I would just like to point out something you once said to me, which was that – you said to me that the only part of the apple worth eating is the skin and you got rid of the rest. So your opinion on like the flavor and value of fruits and vegetables is just teetering on the edge, teetering on the brink. Just to defend that, I never throw away the rest of the apple. I just let some poor victim eat it because it's all sugar. Whereas the skin of the apple is where all the good stuff is. Also the rind of pumpkin and squash and all of those things is the best. If we hadn't started talking about blackberries yet, that would be great because I could say speaking of fruits and then start talking about blackberry. But we were already talking about blackberries. So anyway, the Z30, I haven't touched one. I'm not sure I ever will touch one. You can't wipe it off once you do. But every first take I've seen of this device across the interwebs seems to suggest that it is the answer to a question that no one asked. Which is, if you love the Z10, what would you buy next? So you know, take that for what you will. Oh, okay, segue. Seguele, this is the best. Speaking of devices and answers to questions that no one asked, the LG G Flex. Take it away Chris, I'm giving it. The stage is yours. You need to tell us about the Flex. So the Flex is a, it is not just a curved phone. As we learned from the, and many people pointed this out to me, the vaguely sexual video that is on our site right now, there is a picture of a guy pressing repeatedly on top of the phone to flatten it. He's just having his way with that thing man. He really is. Like if you looped it and set it to some sultry music, it would be really over the top. But then the question. You guys are like, so gutted. I thought it looked like CPR. I thought he was giving the G Flex CPR. You don't think CPR is vaguely sexual? Anyway, back to the G Flex for one second. The question becomes, so this phone is actually flexible, hence the name I guess. But it's just barely flexible. It's mostly rigid, there's just a little bit of give in it. So it's like what is the point of that? And as Neelai pointed out to us earlier, he's flexing it in the direction of just being flat. Just make a flat phone. What is the function of this device? This is absolutely, this is like the most crystal clear focused case I've seen of both Samsung and LG flexing their engineering prowess without putting the cart before the horse and saying is there actually any reason for this device to exist? Because the answer is no. It's very clearly no. When I was watching this video, the only thing I could think of was there was a spat of Nokia flip phones that were really thin and they were, you flip them open and you could put it face down on a desk and you could literally punch the back of the thing and the spring would just kind of like give so that it wouldn't snap the phone in half. And that's all I could think of when I was watching him press down on this upside down G Flex. We used to do the flex test on every phone where you would take it and you would put some torsion on it and then if it bent that was a sign of poor quality. And I mean, that was a sign of poor quality. And maybe now. Now it's innovation. I have nothing to say about the G Flex other than no, no thanks. As far as I'm concerned and again this is kind of like comparing Nexus cameras, the G Flex is definitely the better choice than the Galaxy Round. That's fair, although I haven't held the Galaxy Round. I haven't seen somebody try and hold the Galaxy Round up to their head either. I imagine it would be ridiculous. Yeah because nobody's head is shaped like a cylinder. I'm more concerned about the pocketability. I'm concerned about everything. Why does this phone? I mean why didn't LG and Samsung just wait another year until they could actually put this component, which is an absolutely magical, wonderful sci-fi component, the concept of a curved, bendable display. Why don't they just wait a year until they can make the rest of the phone bendable and then show us something really impressive. You know, that is a good point you raised Chris and it's something I was thinking of with regards to smart watches and I think Apple, Microsoft, Google, the big companies that are holding off on their smart watches, the ones that we keep hearing rumors that they're building one but they're not releasing one. I think they're doing the right thing because there is a risk right now that people will see smart watches and they'll get burned by the fact that they all pretty much suck apart from the Pebble and then the whole category kind of just picks up a terrible reputation and now there's kind of that risk with these flexible devices. If they all seem like gimmicks, if they all seem like terrible ideas and just engineering demos, the next time one comes out it might not get the proper reception that it deserves because somebody might actually make something useful out of the technology. So are you blaming Samsung for tanking the smart watch market before it began? And Sony. So I would say smart watch too from Sony, it's atrocious. Yeah I had the first one, the live whatever it was called. Live view. Yeah live view, it was a heartbreaker. Really bad. It's a world of hurt. You know who's not a heartbreaker? This is a terrible transition. Chris, talk to us about Amignan Clyburn, sounds like you wrote a really good story about her and I just want to have us all thank her together. Yes we all owe our livelihoods to this amazing woman. No I don't. Look, no even you Vlad, even though you are not an American citizen. We should say who she is for people who don't know. So Amignan Clyburn was the interim chairwoman of the FCC for a span of about five and a half, six months between the end of Julius Genachowski's tenure and the beginning of Tom Wheeler's who was just confirmed yesterday. No that's not true, he was confirmed last week but he was sworn in yesterday. And she was previously a commissioner. There are three people on the commission. There is, oh what is her name? Hold on I'm getting it. It doesn't matter. Jessica Rosenworcel. No, no, no it does and I'll tell you why it matters Dieter. Because Jessica Rosenworcel who is a member of the three person commission that the FCC is composed of is the sister of the lead singer for Guster. So I just want everybody to know that. This is a true story, you can look it up. So there's Rosenworcel, there's Clyburn and there's Ajit Pai. All of whom were appointed by Obama. Anyway long story short, she was temporarily put into the position of being the chairperson to fill in and she just accomplished a ridiculous amount in her very brief tenure. Generally speaking the FCC is one of the more bureaucratically challenged organizations in the federal government. They tend to take years to get anything done. And if you look back over Genachowski's tenure, really what he did, I mean look, I can't take a lot away from the guy because you know wireless broadband use exploded and he had a number of really important initiatives. But at the end of the day the one thing that sticks out in my mind that he accomplished was putting the ax in the ATTT mobile deal, right? In the six month span that Clyburn was in office, she basically fired up two new bands of Spectrum and we all know how rare that is. Like Spectrum never frees up. She freed up two bands, well she didn't personally free them up but she like launched the rule making that happens before the auction. She signed the enormous Sprint clear wire soft bank deal which had been sitting on her plate for approval. So she pushed that through which ultimately led to Sprint being able to launch this Spark thing which Dieter will be talking about in a minute. And yes you will, you will. And she pushed through some legislation on prison long distance rates which had been a surprisingly like big issue that had been like going on for a decade where like basically what was happening was there are these monopoly providers in prisons that just completely extort people to make phone calls. So it can cost like several dollars just to make a connection and then several dollars a minute. And you can understand how like you know not everyone that is in prison is rich so it makes it very difficult for people to communicate with families and so on. That is the most politically correct thing you've ever said, not everyone in prison is rich. It's true. So she was able to push that through which had been on FCC's plate for a long, long time. So she was just a very, very productive chairperson and I think that FCC would have been well positioned to permanently give her the job if that was an option. But it's not like Obama can just say like oh wait never mind on Wheeler you can just keep the job. It doesn't work that way. She would have to be confirmed and it's a whole thing. So now we get Tom Wheeler who is a former lobbyist for the CTIA and NACDA I think if I remember correctly. Oh man. So in other words he represented the wireless industry and the cable industry and now he runs the FCC. So I think that we are probably in for a much more pragmatic and borderline consumer hostile reign as opposed to Clyburn's who did not come from that world and previously served on South Carolina's public service commission. So anyway I've talked about the FCC for far too long. The important thing to remember here is that you convinced me that her name wasn't pronounced Mignion. Shoot, I just had it. Mignion. Yes. I was watching, she was on C-Span and someone just pronounced her name and I was right and now I believe it is. Wait for it. Mignion, I was right. I was right the whole time. I've heard it pronounced both ways. Really? Yes. I just refuse to refer to somebody as a stake. That's my core problem and when I hear Mignion I think of beef and it just gets really weird. Nobody really talks about Barack Obama, just use her surname and pretend she doesn't have a first name. Exactly. Or we could give her a cool Top Gun style nickname like Fireball. I have to share. I did have a vision in my mind when Chris said that she opened up two new bands of wireless of like Storm from the X-Men just rising up into the sky and just working on some air waves and saying yes, here's some more wireless for you people. That is exactly how it went down by the way. So anyway, she was just unusually productive for someone who was never expected to really get a lot done. She was effectively a caretaker, right? She was a lame duck who was just there to fill the seat until Tom Wheeler got confirmed and instead she ended up getting a lot done. So kudos. Yes. Okay, Sprint Spark. So Sprint, they've got a whole bunch of random spectrum that they've acquired over the years including stuff from Clearwire and whatever else. So they've got 800, they've got 19 and they've got 25 and stuff from the next hell. And so they finally got everything cleared out that they can run LTE on it. So they've introduced this thing called Spark where they're claiming they can get speeds up to 60 megabits and it can go faster than that someday in the future and they say that they can achieve this by using all of that spectrum on a single phone and so the radio will pick which one it needs. So if you're in a building you'll end up with 800 but if you're outside where you can get the faster stuff you'll get that. And that's the story with Sprint Spark. They've launched it in a few cities and my guess is that it'll be just like Sprint has been for a while where there'll be like 10 people that have got amazing service and become Sprint fanboys for life and everybody else sort of wonders why Sprint is kind of crap. That's really a really hard take but I don't know, it seems like a big promise from them and we've been hearing a lot of big network promises from Sprint for a long time and if the WiMax thing didn't already hurt their credibility there, like everything that's happened since then certainly has and they just need to start delivering and they need to start delivering really fast. And hopefully they can, hopefully SoftBank is going to dump some money in there and I can go back to thinking Dan Hesse is the most trustworthy guy in mobile but he's not because crazy Guy McGee over at T-Mobile is. That's a good way of putting it, yes. Also Dan Hesse doesn't understand neutrality. That's right, yes. I will say that Sprint is in the best position now, a better position now than it's really ever been in the past five years in order to do these network enhancements now that it has SoftBank's bankrolling and everything like that and the support behind it and it got the approval from the FCC that was so desperately needed. Just as Nexus 5's camera is the best Nexus camera ever, Sprint is the best camera ever. Silver linings, Peter. We're peddling hope. It is a long game. It's like most people won't see the benefits of this product until late 2014 at the earliest assuming they see it ever. So Sprint really has to come through on its promises and really just needs to deliver. If they can pull this off it would be amazing because we're talking about speeds that make my cable broadband look kind of pokey, right? Right. What kind of bogus cable modem do you have? I can get 100 megabit in Chicago. Well, I'm getting files soon so don't you worry about me. I get 100 megabit in the burbs, man. Anyway, it would be a huge deal if they can pull it off and they've got a bunch of devices. They teased the Nexus 5 at this event because it was the day before and they had it in their little thing. I don't know. The other thing that happened was if you're talking about speeds that fast, at some point you're like, well, you're starting to look like a standard broadband provider. Are you going to do the things that standard broadband providers do which is charge for different tiers of service or whatever? Danny says no, they're not going to change their unlimited plan. All that's going to stay the same. But there was sort of a, ho, ho, ho, I don't understand why anybody would believe in that neutrality. It doesn't make any sense to me at all. You're allowed to charge more for first class seats. Why can't you charge more for first class internet service? Look, you're never going to get anyone in the wireless industry to tell you that they want to be regulated more heavily. It's just not going to happen. On one level, I understand what Dan is saying. Hesse, not Sefer, just to clarify. Chris never understands what I'm saying. No, I never understand what Dan is saying. I understand what he's saying from the perspective that I do think that wireless carriers should be allowed to investigate the possibility of charging different monthly fees for different speed tiers. I would be okay with that. Just like I'm okay with it on my cable modem. It makes sense to me. I pay more for faster service. Fine, that's totally okay. But when you start putting up arbitrary barriers around services or protocols, that's where you start getting into a really nasty gray area that the FCC so far has refused to regulate more heavily on. If you read all of their net neutrality language throughout the years, they're very, very careful to carve out an exception for wireless. That was one thing that Clyburn didn't change. I'm sure there are many good reasons for it, not the least of which is the fact that there are just too many lobbyist hands in the pot. Unfortunately there are no strong regulations preventing that kind of nonsense from happening. But also these analogies are just bogus. This is kind of like all the people making the argument comparing things like US government debt to household debt and whatever. The way that you treat and you manage your debt in your household, which is like a few thousand dollars or whatever, versus the way that you treat and manage trillions of dollars in US debt and being the world's reserve currency and all of that, those are just completely not analogous things. They just kind of look the same superficially. This is where Dan has his comparison like, well if we offer such and such service, it's fine for us to charge a different price, etc. We're just private individuals not supplying a fundamentally important lifeline to people. Admittedly it's print so it's not that much of a lifeline because there aren't that many customers but still, it's a vital service. You can't just treat it like it's some luxury that people pick and choose. I agree with Chris, different prices for different levels of service, yeah fine, but you shouldn't be prioritizing traffic. That's it. That also is it I believe for the Virgin Mobile Show. Thank you everybody very much for watching us and listening to us and having feels with us. If you want to, I don't know, if you want to contact us you can. We're on Twitter, I am back on Dan's DCC for Chris is zpower, Vlad is Vlad Savov, not to be confused with Vlad Wick who's also available on Twitter. Who's been suspiciously quiet for… We are all at Verge and you can email us and you can comment on this post right now or later as you wish. You can comment on Google Plus, many of you. Nobody's going to read it if you comment Google Plus. That dude there, they're commenting right now, my phone is exploding. It's on Googlebot and Google Plus. Goodnight everybody, thanks for watching. Bye.AYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYA incarceration.
 Greetings, mobile accomplishers.
 Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show.
 We are here and we're looking at the all new Google Hangouts interface, which doesn't give
 me a countdown, which is awesome.
 So we're starting.
 We're live.
 I am Dieter Bohm.
 I am Vlad Sabov.
 I'm Dan Seifert.
 And we are broadcasting without Mr. Chris Ziegler, although rumor has it that is a situation
 which will be resolved in short order.
 So let's hope.
 Fingers crossed.
 How are you guys doing?
 I can't stand this new interface, man.
 It's so bad.
 It's like...
 I mean, we're putting the blame on Chris delaying us, but the truth is we spent the past 20
 minutes screwing around with the new Hangouts.
 The effects that Google talked up...
 Yeah, the effects that Google talked up in its announcement and press releases and all
 this stuff are like terrible.
 Like they're just amateur hour all over the place.
 And this new interface is just bad.
 So I vented.
 Okay.
 Well, I think the thing to do is just start talking about this.
 Everybody's got a window.
 Show him if you got him.
 It's really a bummer we don't have Chris here.
 I'm pretty sure he doesn't have one.
 Okay.
 So they announced the thing.
 We reviewed the thing.
 We reviewed KitKat.
 Oh, in case you are listening to the audio only one and we're terrible, we were talking
 about the Nexus 5 and we held that all up.
 Yeah, so they announced the Nexus 5 on...
 God, I don't even know what day it was anymore.
 Was it Thursday?
 October 31st.
 It was on Halloween.
 It was on Halloween.
 It was on Thursday.
 My father's birthday.
 Happy birthday, Dad.
 And man, this Hangout is just railing on my processor.
 Unbelievable.
 So Thursday the 31st, it is $349 off contract for the 16 gig version and $399 for the 32
 gig version.
 Does that sound right?
 Yep.
 That's right.
 The black one is way better than the white one.
 Yeah, I agree.
 Yeah.
 Whatever.
 Come on.
 It's much better.
 I don't normally say this, but I've got the white one.
 But the white is like an off-white.
 It's got glossy sides, whereas the black one are matte.
 And it's got this stupid accent for the earpiece in the middle of the thing.
 And I'd just rather...
 The black one's better.
 End of story.
 Are you showing off that it matches your gear?
 Oh no, that's a Pebble.
 Never mind.
 Yeah, you accuse me of wearing a gear.
 How dare you?
 Yes, I would like to point out that the white Nexus 5 and the white Pebble pretty much made
 for each other.
 So you're saying the white Pebble is actually an off-white and not really white?
 Well, nothing is really white.
 Just like nothing is really black.
 I mean, why are you being pedantic?
 I get enough pedantry from the UK team, and I would get you on the podcast.
 Come on, man.
 Give me a break.
 No, but seriously, Samsung really wanted to make and underline the point about the Galaxy
 Gear and the Galaxy Note 3 being made for each other.
 And the two really had nothing to do with one another.
 But the Nexus 5 in white, which isn't actually white, it's got more black on it than white.
 And the Pebble, which also isn't really perfect in white, has a whole bunch of black-accessed
 parts on it.
 So they're like 50-50 black and white.
 They're just a perfect match.
 They're beautiful together.
 Okay.
 But the thing I would say is you guys are probably right.
 I haven't touched the black one, but everybody has been saying the black Nexus 5 is better.
 It is.
 It all comes down to the fact that the sides of this one are glossy, whereas the black
 one, they're matte.
 And that's really the major difference.
 Matte always beats glossy.
 So they announced it at an event in San Francisco.
 It was kind of a strange event.
 It wasn't a big public unveiling.
 It was just a small room with some press in it and then a little hands-on area.
 And I was there.
 I was there with David Pearce, and I did the hands-on.
 And I guess we should talk about that hands-on because all of Google Plus is ridiculously
 pissed off at me.
 And it's—
 They don't like you, Dieter.
 Dude.
 So, I mean, the first thing I'll say is I said—I did make a mistake in the hands-on,
 and I will cop to it.
 I made two mistakes.
 Mistake number one is I said that Android cameras are traditionally bad, but really
 what I should have said is Nexus cameras are traditionally bad.
 And then, you know, I was just—it was fast because it was a weird room, and I was trying—we
 were trying to get the video up, and I needed to run and go interview people, and so it
 was just short, and I didn't spend a lot of time with it.
 But people were pissed off at me because I thought I came off as unenthused.
 But here's the thing, and I didn't, like, get into it with everybody on Google Plus
 and on Twitter and in our comments because when people be mad, people just stay mad.
 I, like, I've been getting death threats, which is awesome.
 It's been a long time since I've gotten death threats for a hands-on.
 I wasn't really that wrong about the scrolling.
 It's way better than it is on most Android phones, but it's still a little bit, you
 know, it's not perfect on Chrome.
 But I mean, that said, it's totally fine.
 But you know, it's just, like, when the new Nexus phone comes out, we kind of have,
 like, high hopes and dreams that the things that have been bugging us about Android are
 going to get fixed.
 And I'm, like, laser-focused on those things.
 And so I was laser-focused on are they finally gonna make scrolling feel, like, as great
 as they promised?
 Are they finally gonna fix a camera?
 And are they finally gonna give me, you know, a phone, a Nexus phone in particular with
 really, really solid battery life?
 And the scrolling is better.
 It's not totally perfect.
 The camera is...
 It's better than the Nexus 4.
 There's no getting around that.
 It's better.
 It's better than the Nexus 4.
 That's, like, the worst thing you could possibly say.
 It's the faintest of praise, but if you are comparing year over year Nexus device to the
 Nexus device, I think it's actually safe to say, again, faintest of praise, that it's
 the best camera on any Nexus device to date.
 But as you've noted numerous times already, Nexus devices are not really known for having
 great cameras.
 It's, like...
 I think we're really approaching this from the...
 It's like owning the fastest RV at the campground.
 Wow.
 So, I mean, Google has told us that there is a software update coming that should help
 with some things.
 But, I mean, the camera software itself is, like, the standard camera software.
 It's pretty lackluster.
 It does take a while to focus.
 And, you know, the pictures, I don't know, the low light performance is not what it should
 be.
 No.
 Well, there's a number of issues, but I think the best way to describe it is that I feel
 insecure when I'm shooting with a Nexus 5.
 Yeah.
 Which is to say I spent some time shooting Saturday morning, I think it was, around London.
 And, you know, being a morning in London, you weren't getting a ton of light.
 But what I ended up doing was every shot, every thing that I frame up, I would take,
 like, four or five attempts at it.
 Because the camera doesn't, like, once it focuses, it doesn't take that long to grab
 an extra few pictures.
 But it's the fact that you feel the need to take a shot multiple times just in case something
 went awry.
 And it often does.
 And it's just...
 It's just weird.
 I mean, there's a lack of contrast.
 If you want to see the photo I just took on the original show, I just posted it to Google
 Plus.
 That seemed appropriate.
 Continue.
 So you just interrupted me because you posted to Google Plus where pretty much nobody is...
 Oh, boy.
 They're gonna burn you down, Vlad!
 I mean, we're gonna need to have a discussion about this whole overreaction.
 We just did.
 I said that I wasn't as enthusiastic as I could have been on the thing.
 So what?
 But I mean, that's the point.
 Like, I've seen comments...
 The regulator's coming in.
 Oh, hey, Chris.
 Hey, Chris.
 Chris, we all have Nexus 5s.
 Where's yours?
 Hello.
 Can you hear me now?
 Yeah.
 Yes.
 Fantastic.
 I do not have a Nexus 5.
 And I'm...
 But here's the thing.
 I'm not really jealous.
 You also do not own a lamp.
 Look, do you want more light?
 Do you want to see the right side of my face?
 Is that what's going on here?
 I can...
 Hold the smartphone.
 Axe, murder, and light.
 Hold on.
 Is that better?
 You're fine.
 You're totally fine.
 You're a handsome devil.
 So I need to...
 I realize...
 I'm sorry to let all of our listeners and watchers in on this sausage-making that's
 going on right now, but I'm not recording this.
 So I need to set up some recording.
 One second.
 The important things are here.
 I apologize to everybody for this nonsense.
 Okay, anyway.
 I'm sorry.
 You were talking about something very interesting when I came in.
 In the meantime, in the meantime, let me just add a few technical notes on our bitching
 about the Nexus 5 camera.
 So there's a lack of contrast, there's a lack of saturation, and biggest problem, there's
 a lack of sharpness.
 Wait, is this on the Nexus 5 or the Nexus 4?
 Because you could be describing either.
 Well, I mean...
 We already made that joke, Chris.
 This is what I was saying.
 We're approaching this from the wrong direction when we say the Nexus 5 camera is better than
 the Nexus 4 camera.
 So that's like, eh, distinction between shades of really nasty gray.
 That's not the thing that we should be talking about.
 I think the Nexus 5 is a much more mature device than the Nexus 4, particularly because
 it has LTE and it has the best processor inside of it that you can get on the market at the
 moment.
 So in terms of value for money, there's a thing I mentioned in one of the articles I
 wrote about it.
 This thing here in the UK is competing against devices like the BlackBerry Q5, and it's only
 selling like 30 pounds more than the Samsung Galaxy Ace 3.
 So I mean, it's like, do you go and get like Galaxy S3, an older generation Samsung Galaxy,
 or do you get the latest Nexus with the LTE and the KitKat and all the other trinkets
 that come in?
 What's the difference between the Galaxy Ace 3 and the Galaxy S4 Mini?
 Who the hell knows?
 I don't, like as far as I'm concerned, we don't want to know the difference.
 Those are just not things you should be looking at.
 If you're looking at that sort of budget range, you might as well just start looking at Nokia's
 actual devices.
 That's fair.
 Yeah.
 Because those are pretty.
 No, I do want to praise the hardware.
 The first impression that this hardware gives is kind of like, eh, it's fine.
 And like, I don't know why the camera ring is so big and it's surrounded by this little
 like aluminum thing.
 But it's a nice design touch.
 The buttons are, I think it's too, it's just funny looking.
 The buttons are ceramic, which I mean, Matthias Dorote talked to us a little bit about this,
 but I do find them to be a little bit sharp.
 But the more you live with it, the more it doesn't just feel like a generic big phone,
 and the more it feels like, I don't know, it just, it gets out of the way.
 It's very just simple and unassuming, and I mean, I think the word I'd use is handsome.
 I would agree with you.
 It's like a slightly less stunningly good looking Dawn Draper, you know?
 It's very nice and you can live with it.
 It's understated.
 Yeah, I mean, but it has character.
 The thing to notice is like, compare it to the Nexus 7, and you can see like, Google's
 decided what it wants Nexus devices to look like.
 Simple, black, unassuming, soft touch plastic back, and you know, the word Nexus in lower
 case letters on the back.
 And this is white, but yeah.
 Well, but who would buy a white one?
 I mean, seriously.
 Me.
 I bought one.
 I bought a black one.
 So here's what bothers me.
 It's not, the Nexus 5 looks, again, I'm speaking as someone who has not touched this device,
 but I think we can all agree that from the reviews that I've read and from the experiences
 that all of you have had, it's not the best camera on a phone, right?
 And so why can't we just have the Nexus experience in an uncompromisingly high-end experience?
 Like why is that too much to ask for?
 Is that the role that GPE is designed to fill?
 Or is there room for a high-end Nexus?
 Well, I mean, that's the thing.
 One of the things that defines what a Nexus is these days is price.
 And if you're going to sell a phone for $350 that has got some top-end specs, I mean,
 the screen is great.
 It's super light.
 It's lighter than the Nexus 4, even though it has a bigger screen.
 You know, everything about the hardware quality and feel of this phone is really good.
 It's not as primo as an HTC One, but it's in the ballpark.
 If you're going to get a phone to that price and hitting that price is super important
 to you, at some point something has to give.
 And it looks like with the Nexus 5, it was probably the camera.
 But the alternative, and it's one that both myself and Dan have lusted after, was something
 like a Nexus Pro.
 So put an extra $200 on this thing's price, then you're actually going to match the
 iPhone 5C price unlocked and stick a great camera on it and a great battery.
 And then everybody is just going to go nuts.
 But here's my alternative theory to that, which is that Google actively wants to avoid
 having the label of being the absolute best Android phone, because that would be a problem
 for Google insofar as Google's relationship with OEMs like Samsung, LG, et cetera.
 I completely disagree.
 I think we have this discussion with every single Nexus phone that comes out.
 And I don't think Google sells enough of them to matter to Samsung or HTC.
 Yet, it doesn't sell that many yet.
 I think that Google wants that to change with the Nexus 5, I really do.
 I think they want to sell a million of these things, 10 million of these things.
 I think they want to.
 I mean, at least here in the US, they're not going to do that if the Nexus 5 is not
 in carrier stores.
 I mean, nowadays, I guess because now it's with Sprint, you'll be able to get it for
 $150 with a contract.
 If it's not in T-Mobile stores, I'm betting you money it will be.
 It might be on two mobile stores, but it's not on AT&T or Verizon.
 And let's be real, that's where it needs to be to get those 10 million figures of sales.
 And it needs to be available on a contract price for US consumers that are going to walk
 into a store and be like, I want a new phone.
 There's an iPhone 5S for $199 and a GS4 for $199, et cetera, et cetera.
 That's where you're going to get those sales figures from.
 Otherwise, it will be permanently a niche device, especially if you have to order it
 online from Google at an unlocked price.
 Yeah, but then…
 No, they're going to sell it at Best Buys.
 They're going to sell it at Best Buys.
 They're going to have it at other retailers.
 And imagine if you wanted to break that dynamic, how would you do it?
 Well, you'd try and take it head on and beat the carriers at their own game, and that
 was the Nexus 1, and that strategy did not work out very well.
 And so their new strategy is just sell the thing for as cheaply as possible.
 And I mean, who knows?
 I don't know that they're actually going to succeed, but I think that with this phone
 in particular, they want to succeed.
 But Dan, what I was going to say is if you make that imaginary Nexus Pro, if you make
 that awesome phone, it doesn't matter how niche the distribution is.
 All of us are going to cry to the high heavens about its awesomeness.
 People are going to find out what a mouthful spread.
 People will make the effort to go and get the best, absolute Android phone.
 But let me make the point, man.
 I mean, I need like more than 20 seconds here, okay?
 Please.
 D-Day's interrupted me enough.
 I'm like raging at you now, but Dieter is the one that keeps jumping in.
 All I'm saying here is at the moment, the LG G2 and the Nexus 5 are very differentiated
 devices.
 And as far as I'm concerned, I can see good reason to spend the extra money to get the
 LG G2 because of its better camera, because of its better battery, and I can see good
 reason why we want to get the Nexus 5.
 So for LG, both of these phones are going to sell.
 It has two strong phones.
 If Google went and took the LG G2 spec for spec, priced it at the lowest possible price,
 which Google seems to be keen to do with every Nexus device, try to break even, Google would
 literally be screwing with LG's business model.
 Whereas the LG right now is thriving.
 It's getting all the benefits of doing a Nexus device or brands equity that you get out of
 that.
 And it has differentiation for its high end.
 I just don't think Google really cares about the absolute high end.
 They can leave that to the companies.
 It just wants a baseline of a really good device at the lowest possible price.
 I'm done.
 I wasn't going to talk to you.
 So battery life.
 We talked about it in the review, ran tests, everybody's got a bunch of them, we've all
 been trying it.
 I think what Josh said in the review is exactly right.
 It is wildly inconsistent.
 I will have it one day crap out after seven hours and then the next day it goes for 12
 and then the next day it's back down to eight.
 And I'm just sort of waiting to see where it's going to level out at.
 And part of that is heavy use thing that you do, but I've been using this thing for a
 while now, just Thursday, and I still have no idea where the battery is going to be at
 any point in the day, like ever.
 So I guess I had it charging earlier today.
 I will say, and I've made this point before, but I think for me anyway, I certainly found
 this to be the case with the Nexus 4 and the Lumia 920, when you have a device that has
 wireless charging, you tend to top it off more than if you didn't.
 So I have a cheap, even though I don't have any cheap phones right now, I have a cheap
 pad on my desk, I have a cheap pad in my bedroom, I have a cheap pad next to my couch, and you
 just naturally set the phone there and then over the course of the day it ends up being
 close to 100%.
 Chris has more cheap pads than lights, I think we've established that.
 Chris's condo is a store, a sales store for cheap pads.
 I'm going to get cancer any second from all this constant power I'm being radiated
 with.
 So yeah, I have a cheap pad and it does charge the Nexus 5, but it also seems to get it really
 hot if I don't place it right, and so I'm a little bit nervous about it.
 So I'm waiting for the official charger, which will have the magnets to align it, because
 it's got magnets, because this thing is perfectly palm-free, I'm telling you right now.
 I noticed today when I was charging it over USB that it was getting considerably warm
 while I was charging.
 So, I mean, I don't know.
 Wasn't there a whole story about...has Google started shipping that new charging pad?
 No, not yet.
 Wasn't there a whole story about how Qualcomm, there's a new, like there's some crazy new
 Qualcomm technology in the Nexus 5 to reduce heat output from the radios?
 Yeah, sorry, I was just playing, seeing if we could turn on Q&A, but we can't.
 But if you have Q's about the Nexus 5, you should tweet at us.
 I have Q's, I haven't used a Nexus 5.
 What do you want to know?
 Should I buy one?
 Dude, it's $349.
 I'm Lucas, you're an iOS fanboy, so.
 Between this and an HTC One, get the Nexus 5.
 Because the HTC One's camera is a beautiful experiment, but it's no great shakes, and
 you're not losing out that much here.
 And the HTC One's battery is, I think, a little bit better than the Nexus 5, but not
 enough to be appreciable, and this feels just as nice in the hand.
 I will say that this, barring a major price reduction on the GPE models, it completely
 obviates them.
 Why would anyone buy a GPE GS4 or One when you have this for $300 less?
 It's insane.
 Yeah, if the price was like a $100 difference, I could justify spending a little more to
 get the One for the nicer build quality and the added features, but at $300, it's just
 completely neutered the value factor.
 Yeah, it's a non-starter, yeah.
 Yeah, but those are also aging models.
 You have to anticipate that come January, come CES, we're gonna have a lot more alluring
 devices.
 We live in a world where you just called five-month-old devices aging.
 Yeah, these are from, what, June?
 I think they hit in June, right, the Google editions?
 Yeah, well.
 That's software, though, I'm talking about.
 Yeah, even the branded models, though, aren't that much older.
 Maybe April.
 Yeah, so anyway, I just wanna put things in perspective for everybody here.
 What else do you wanna know?
 Like we didn't know that we're thicker when every single month.
 So we haven't really talked about KitKat, so.
 Not at all.
 I was trying to do Nexus 5 and then KitKat.
 So I put up a report today about KitKat after having talked to a bunch of Android guys.
 So I have a theory of there's KitKat and then there's KitKat on the Nexus 5, which
 are two slightly different things, but very different things.
 So what's interesting is as of right now, and nobody believes me about this for some
 reason, including Dan, dude, the Nexus 5 launcher is only available on the Nexus 5 right now.
 And Google hasn't said and hasn't, I don't think, has decided if they want to put it
 on anything else, including the Nexus 4 or Google Play edition devices.
 They want to see how people like it.
 That just sounds so insane to me, that the fact that it's like, would be on the Nexus
 5 and not on the Nexus 4 or the Nexus 7 or any other Nexus device for that matter.
 It's hard for me to wrap my head around it.
 That's what they told you and I don't disbelieve that that's what they told you
 and everything.
 I just feel like it's one of those things that in a couple weeks when the Nexus 4's
 4.4 update arrives, it's just going to be there.
 I see this going one of a few ways.
 If they do in fact keep it exclusive to the Nexus 5, and even if they put it on the Nexus
 4, I mean the thing to realize is that the Nexus is no longer about being the premier
 just Android device.
 It's now like a Google device.
 Google now is right on the home screen and you can search Google from the phone dialer
 and your default, no stop, oh my god, I didn't say okay, whatever, search Google, whatever.
 Sorry, it's just responding to me automatically, the sound of my voice in the launcher.
 Hangouts is a default messaging app, etc.
 If it goes that way, then what we're looking at here is there's Samsung's version of
 Android and there's HTC's version of Android and now there's Google's version of Android,
 which is kind of crazy.
 The thing that makes me believe that they might even consider putting this thing into
 the Google Play Store, this launcher available for any device, is if you go into settings,
 there's a top level setting for home and you tap that and that is how you choose your
 launcher.
 You don't have to go into app settings anymore and mess with this garbage of clearing defaults
 for launcher app.
 It's just right there and you can switch between them very easily.
 This just works.
 Apex didn't need to update itself to make this happen.
 Google just figured it out.
 Same thing with their cloud storage picker, Dropbox was just in there, which is kind of
 amazing.
 Anyway, if they decide not only do they want to put it on Nexus devices, but they want
 to just put it on Google Play like they did with their keyboard, it would be a huge screw
 you to Samsung and HTC and LG and everybody else because there is now at the very first
 setting after your radios is switching your home screen to something else.
 It's like, sorry Samsung, nobody wants your skin.
 We're going to give them ours.
 That would be crazy.
 Sorry BlinkFeed.
 Right?
 This is like the ultimate screw you because HTC's BlinkFeed is the left most screen and
 now it's Google Now.
 Yeah, it's really interesting.
 HTC has been very aggressive in saying that they will be deploying 4.4 to its devices.
 I think even all the US carrier devices within 90 days.
 So it will be really interesting to see how all of this Google Now integration stuff works
 with HTC's launcher.
 But I just wanted to say that the reason that I think that this, Google has literally no
 reason to keep this exclusive to the Nexus 5, simply because you can turn off the Google
 Now integration in the launcher.
 If you turn off Google Now, it's no longer your left most home screen.
 You've got a standard type of home screen that you know, Android has had for however
 many years.
 So if they're concerned that people might not like it, there's always the option that
 you can just turn it off.
 But every OEM…
 They'll want to push it on people.
 Yeah, but every OEM seems to have its own idea of how Google Now should be accessed,
 right?
 Like nobody is doing it the same way.
 And I think that that's going to continue to be the case.
 I mean there's no sign that Samsung or HTC are going to let off their customizations.
 Or Sony, especially Sony.
 Especially, well I'd say especially Samsung.
 I mean Samsung's got competing services for everything that Google's pushing right
 now.
 They've got chat on.
 That's Samsung.
 Yes.
 Sorry, no, something just triggered Google Now and I don't know what I said that triggered
 it.
 It's really creepy.
 I just realized that Samsung has chat on and LG has knock on.
 Yeah.
 But those are actually like two totally different features.
 Right, like they're using…
 Yes, and I would like to point out that knock on is exponentially more useful than chat
 on.
 I will say that when LG launches its own messaging service, which by all accounts it probably
 will, it's going to be called like talk around or something.
 Samsung has launched its own messaging service.
 Yeah, LG copies it.
 It's going to run Samsung's name through a translator and then back again and it's
 going to be like talk around.
 Okay, so that whole like Android politics aside, like KitKat's really nice.
 They got rid of almost all the Tron.
 There's still some blue here and there if you go hunting for it.
 Like the switches are blue and then like not the main power down menu but the last like
 the we're going to turn it off now pop up is blue.
 But other than that, everything is white.
 When you scroll and you hit the end of a scroll thing, it's white.
 It's wicked fast on this phone.
 They've added a whole bunch of just like plumbing features.
 They added the file picker which I think is still like one of Android's key advantages.
 It makes it a real computer and you can actually attach stuff to stuff and not have to worry
 about will your phone let you do that.
 It's really amusing to me how many apps there are on iOS where you have to like, there's
 like a file attach feature and it just like it takes you to the photo roll and it's like
 what?
 That's not what I mean by attach.
 Like you can't make the logical jump from I want to attach something to this to oh,
 that must mean you want to attach a picture because there is no other kind of data.
 And the dialer is awesome.
 I mean the search Google stuff is fine, it works.
 But the smartly putting your most contacted contacts up there, like so far it's been
 great figuring out who I actually want on it.
 And my favorite feature though is they finally, finally added smart dialing to the dial pad
 in 4.9 so you can just type somebody's like for Dan it would be 3, 2, 6, there you are.
 So I'd hate to burst your bubble on this but they added that in 4.3.
 No they didn't.
 Yeah they did.
 Really?
 Dial pad auto complete.
 But for some reason in 4.3 it was not enabled by default for some inane reason.
 You had to go into dialer settings and enable dial pad auto complete.
 But now I feel like a maroon, thanks a lot.
 This actually raises a good point here which is that I've jumped into 4.4 with the Nexus
 5 and just been impressed by so many things.
 But in writing up our notes for the review for KitKat, what I've noticed and what you
 guys pointed out to me is that quite a few of the features that impressed me now have
 been implemented in like 4.2 and 4.3.
 So they're not actually brand new to the stock Android experience.
 This is actually the fact of the matter.
 I've been using pretty much every one of the latest Android 4. whatever devices out there
 and all of these skins have managed to hide really nice, really beautiful designs that
 Google has done and just obscure them and just not let me know that they're out there.
 But I mean just to add to what Dieter said, it's mostly white.
 There's some of it which I consider like a light gray but then I'm falling into the
 pedantry that I accused Dan of.
 But I feel like this neutral color scheme is very nice.
 It's very easy on the eyes.
 The app drawer now is just beautiful.
 All the icons have been kind of enlarged a little bit and it's so just simplified and
 there are no settings which I think is a bonus.
 They took widgets out of the app drawer which never made sense to me ever and they brought
 back the long press on the home screen to add widgets which we haven't seen since what,
 2.3 I think.
 When you do it, it pops up a menu that shows a few things and I'm not worried about anybody
 getting confused by that to be honest.
 No, no.
 It's just sweet little papers, add widgets, mess around with the settings.
 But it's like just going into the app drawer, this is really symbolic for me because there
 are no settings.
 It's just organized in alphabetical order.
 You don't get a choice to screw around with the order.
 Whereas I've been using things like Nova Launcher and they have pages and pages of settings
 for drawers and app docs and home screens and whatever and they're fun to screw around
 with but ultimately I really just want to pick up a phone and have somebody make these
 design decisions for me.
 And this is what I like.
 This is what Android is doing.
 They're actively making decisions and saying this is a good way for you to use this, get
 used to it.
 Home screens for example, I only have one but if I want to add a new app, it will automatically
 generate a new home screen for me.
 I don't get the choice to have like five blank home screens and then have to delete them
 all.
 They're just all of these subtle little things which are just automated and done for you
 and just make the process of using the phone that much more straightforward.
 This is what I like.
 I really feel like the whole experience has been streamlined.
 My favorite highlight actually is when I go to set an alarm and this is just beautiful
 circular UI to pick the time, the hour and the minutes and it's functionally not any
 more useful than all the other interfaces but it just makes me happy to do it.
 My favorite alarm feature is like a half hour before an alarm is going to go off, some three
 or four hours before I don't know what it is, it actually pops down a notification for
 you saying that your alarm is going to go off in 10 minutes or five minutes or a half
 hour or whatever and then you can dismiss it right from there like no, I'm awake, I
 don't need this alarm now and get rid of it.
 It's amazing, it's great.
 I use it all the time because apparently now I wake up at 4.30 in the morning every day.
 I'll tell you what's a hot mess though is hangouts.
 I would come in but I don't actually hang out with anybody other than you guys.
 So the big thing with KitKat and the new version of hangouts that came with KitKat and it's
 going to be delivered to other phones and whatever is that Google is finally integrating
 SMS messages into hangouts which people have wanted since the day hangouts launched but
 it's doing it in probably the most ham-fisted clunky way that it could possibly be done.
 Instead of threading your conversations with a single contact into one string of conversation
 whether it's on hangouts or SMS, it's forcing separate threads for SMS and separate
 threads for hangout conversations which is just bifurcating and confusing and messy.
 I mean if you're Google you can't make it work like iMessage and just have things
 switch over to iMessage because you don't know what the recipient, what phone they're
 using, you don't know where hangouts is installed, whatever.
 But yeah, it's not that hard to just have a single conversation per person and have
 multiple accounts.
 I'd much rather think about conversations per person and switch between my two Google
 accounts or SMS than switch to one of two Google accounts and then look for the SMS
 conversation or the hangout conversation.
 I know that there's some level of confusion by threading everything but it's way better
 than just sticking stuff all over the place.
 Like I need to remember that.
 Yeah, right, I mean you said that.
 LevelS 1.0 actually did that.
 It threaded Google Talk messages in with SMS and that's exactly what hangouts is supposed
 to do and later on other services as well.
 But you know, that was 2009, come on.
 Yeah but I mean Blackberry has been doing that for a long time too.
 Yeah.
 I'm just saying there's lots of examples of people that have solved this problem and
 not that their solutions were perfect but they are better than the solution that hangouts
 is going with right now.
 Pretty much the only benefit is now I think you mentioned this in either your review of
 KitKat or another report on KitKatEaters that now I only have one icon on my home screen
 as opposed to two or three.
 Right, yeah, so they had – this was Roshi's point, Roshi Lockheimer's point.
 They had Google Plus Messenger and Google Talk and SMS and those three are now a single
 icon so that's nice.
 Actually there's something – somebody was asking on Twitter, Armando Rodriguez was
 asking how do you know when you have a data connection?
 So now that all the icons are white, the status bar icon, the signal strength icons are always
 white and it used to be that like those would be gray and then they would turn blue when
 they knew that they had a solid connection to Google and then you also got little up
 down arrows inside the little status bars to tell you what your data was doing, if it
 was downloading a bunch of data or uploading a bunch of data.
 And so far as I can tell, all that's gone.
 So you just have to trust that you've got a solid and good internet connection.
 I guess I haven't been on a captive portal since I started using this so maybe it gives
 you some indication if it looks like you've got an internet connection but you don't.
 But that's sort of like instant quick, I know that my data connection is solid indicator
 in the status bar, you've lost that.
 But you do get an indication that's better about when GPS is active, that's over on
 the right now and there's a location shortcut that shows you the apps that have most recently
 pinged your location and like how much battery they're using.
 So they've fixed that.
 Which is similar to – yeah, that's similar to what iOS does as far as the data it gives
 you for recent location.
 I think that's great and you can now choose different modes of location services.
 You can choose the high accuracy which Google tells you will use the most battery life.
 You can turn a battery saving mode on which will drop GPS and only use Wi-Fi triangulation
 and cellular triangulation.
 So that's a much more user friendly way to manage it and hopefully save some battery
 life.
 So actually just about the status bar, the thing, the signal bars that used to turn blue,
 they're turning white and they're kind of – I don't see an issue with distinguishing
 when you have a good signal from a bad signal.
 There's a good enough contrast between the white and the dark gray there.
 But yeah, I'm not noticing like you're saying the up and down vertical bars when
 you're having data transfers which were handy from the previous interfaces.
 But there's something else I wanted to note on the next slide which is –
 It turns orange if you don't have service.
 Sorry Vlad, I'm interrupting McGee again but Twitter tells me I'm wrong.
 It turns orange if you don't have a full connection.
 Man I like that orange.
 I've seen it on my Wi-Fi and I used to think that's just like a good highlight color
 to replace the blue.
 It's just party Wi-Fi.
 I was like that's a nice subtle orange color.
 It really is.
 I mean it's still a nice color, just not a happy one when you're looking at it on
 this phone.
 But a couple of quick hardware points to add with the Nexus 5.
 The auto brightness is actually driving me nuts.
 Oh so much better, you're wrong.
 Well I mean I might be wrong about one part which is that I find it too bright by default
 which you know kind of a subjective issue but it also hunts around a lot for me.
 So I would just be reading a piece of play white text and nothing would change about
 my lighting.
 It would just go up and down, up and down and try and figure out where the hell it is.
 So that's one point.
 The other is that the speaker, the loudspeaker on this handset is an afterthought.
 It's just really really weak.
 I mean it's fine for ringtones and notifications but I mean the HTC One series just embarrasses
 this.
 That's interesting that you say that because it's not on the back anymore.
 It's down at the bottom where the charging port is and in theory that makes it a better
 projection if you have it placed on a desk.
 It's exactly the same place as on the LG G2 but it is nothing like the one on the LG G2.
 Interesting.
 It's exactly but nothing like.
 Another point actually comparing it to the G2 is the micro USB port at the bottom.
 Somebody asked me about this on Twitter.
 It's upside down on the Nexus 5 relative to the G2 so it's not the same orientation.
 I don't know what to tell you about that.
 Hey man, someone wanted to know.
 I haven't had a whole lot of hunting for brightness level problems but I will say maybe
 it is a little bit too bright on the auto brightness but I'd much rather have that
 than the dim cluster that was.
 I'd much rather just have it work correctly like it does on the G2.
 And you and the G2 should start out as friends.
 Me and the G2 and that knock on function, dude, we're in love.
 The reason that knock on function exists is because it's fixing something that's broken
 with the G2 to begin with.
 Well you know what, double tap to wake.
 Nokia did it in the N9 and all of these other devices.
 I'm just saying everybody, every single phone manufacturer needs to have this on their phone.
 Double tap to wake, double tap to put it to sleep.
 It just makes sense.
 But also, LG, that skin, it is terrible.
 I installed Cyanogen Mod on G2 and I can tell everybody it's easy enough to root and Cyanogen
 Mod is stable enough to use on a daily basis so thumbs up.
 But LG does actually have good things about its skin.
 Probably like one good thing which is that when you plug in a headphone or the micro
 USB port, you get a little animation showing it as if it's like going into the device.
 It just kind of pops in and pops out and just tells you yes I have a headphone jack in me.
 And it's just really cool to me.
 I just really like that animation.
 I know I'm not getting any support but I'm saying there's a good thing about that skin.
 I like that.
 Anything else that we have to say about, I mean, you know, I wrote the KitKat review.
 You guys helped pitch in on that.
 We've got the Nexus 5 review, we've got the report that went up today.
 We've learned a lot about this thing.
 What I really want to know and if we're going to just leave on Google stuff, it's like the
 unanswered question of Google has talked a lot about how KitKat has been slimmed down
 and tightened up and runs good on or runs well on devices with lower memory, devices
 with slower processors and stuff like that.
 So I want to see what Google put its money where its mouth is.
 I want to see one of these low end devices running KitKat.
 It runs great on the Nexus 5 but by all accounts the Nexus 5 is one of the fastest phones you
 can buy right now.
 Well so Vlad actually wrote a report about this.
 Yeah.
 I want to know, I want to see it.
 That's what I'm saying.
 Yeah.
 That is the billion dollar question.
 The way that they did this, Dave Burke told us that the way that they initially tested
 it on low end is they took a Nexus 4 and they crippled it.
 They cut it down to 512 megs of RAM and they hobbled the processor so that it couldn't
 go at full speed and looked like a cheap dual core processor and they lowered the resolution
 down to QHD.
 And they say that it runs great, they say that there's going to be devices coming up
 pretty quick with it.
 They were down to like, they know the exact model and type of RAM that these people are
 using and that's what they decided to target.
 I mean they need to get gingerbread off the market, just period.
 Every time that pie chart comes up and it's still got a huge wedge of the insolvability.
 It's still greater than 26% and this is greater than 26% of devices with Play Store
 access.
 Which is terrible.
 That means there's way more that don't, right?
 Earlier this year, I don't know if it's still there, but earlier this year there was definitely
 at least one device on AT&T's online store that had Froyo.
 That's not a joke.
 That's not going to change.
 AT&T's not going to push an update to that, whatever that device was and give it…
 Was it like an industrial scanner or something?
 No, it was the phone that they launched and immediately forgot.
 It was the Sharp FX Plus or whatever it was called.
 The one that looked like a sidekick but running Android.
 So anyway, that's neither here nor there.
 You guys were saying about Q&A, somebody asked us, is the Nexus 5 a good upgrade if you're
 already happy with the Nexus 4?
 I think the answer to that is absolutely obvious, no.
 If you're happy with your device, there is no good upgrade.
 Just stay happy.
 You have your device.
 Carry on with your life.
 I don't necessarily buy that because you don't know what you're…
 There are many kinds of devices where you don't know what you're missing.
 I think that for me personally, the iPad is the most obvious example and more generally
 tablets with iPad specifically because it was the first really huge mass market tablet
 that everyone owned where you don't understand how it fits into your life until you actually
 own it.
 That was certainly true for me and obviously upgrading from one phone to another is a little
 bit different than buying an entirely new kind of classic device.
 But still, there are definitely features or transformational differences in performance
 or screen quality that could qualify as yes, you don't know it yet but you need to buy
 this device.
 But I think it's safe to say here, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Nexus 5 is not
 that kind of upgrade.
 It is if you live in a place with LTE and you're not using it.
 Oh yeah.
 If you've got 350 bucks to burn and you've got LTE in your area that's compatible with
 the Nexus 5, then dude, spend the 350.
 You're going to be pretty happy.
 Right.
 But the point was, the premise of the question was I am already happy.
 First of all, that person is such a rarity in the modern world.
 I want to congratulate them and just say carry on with whatever the hell you're doing.
 You guys are like, what about the opportunity cost?
 You have to really consider such and such.
 No.
 If you're happy, carry on.
 I wish I could be happy with a gadget like that, man.
 One day you might just encounter LTE randomly and fall in love with it and have this random
 runaway romance together, but let that be in your future.
 Let it just happen naturally.
 I say if you're happy, stop it.
 Just stop.
 Stop being happy.
 I do not want you to be happy.
 Whatever phone you don't currently own is better than what you currently have.
 I don't care what it is, what phone you currently have, or what phone you're looking at.
 You're not as happy as you could be when you switched.
 This weekend I was actually trying to tape the Lumia 1020 and the Nexus 5 together.
 That would have made me happy.
 So before we move on from Google, I want to touch on another subject that I think frankly
 has not gotten the attention it deserves, and that's this absurd arbitrary 18 month
 limitation on upgrades that disqualifies the Galaxy Nexus from 4.4.
 And Google is not trying to hide this.
 They're very, very open about the fact that it is just getting forgotten because they
 have this 18 month rule.
 They're very two-faced about it because on the one hand they're saying 4.4 is great for
 low end devices, and then on the other hand they're saying, oh, but this two year old
 phone that could very, very easily run for this new operating system isn't going to get
 an upgrade.
 And I think it wouldn't be as weird if it weren't for the fact that here you have Apple
 basically on a rolling three year upgrade path for all of its phones, and then Google
 just hasn't, even for its own line, has no interest in following suit.
 And when you consider that the two year contract still isn't dead in the US, they're basically
 saying your device will be EOL'd before your contract is even over, which is just kind
 of a slap in the face.
 If I owned a Galaxy Nexus, I would be super upset.
 There's millions of these Galaxy Nexuses out there.
 They sold a ton of these things to a bunch of developers and just everybody, they're
 everywhere.
 They should really find a way to do it.
 And the 18 month thing, I'm sorry, any policy that Google tells you that they have about
 upgrades is a lie.
 It's whatever makes the most sense to them to say based on what they've decided to
 do that day.
 And with the Galaxy Nexus, the story is that it's got this TI processor and TI's not
 around and they don't have somebody to help them do the thing they need to do to make
 it work on 4.4.
 I think that's the real thing.
 It's got this TI processor in it.
 But that's still BS because TI still exists and they're still making OMAPs, they're
 just not selling them to smartphone vendors.
 You can't tell me that they can't like, first of all, Google has a copy of the OMAP3
 ISA sitting in their lab.
 They can figure out how to program for an OMAP3.
 If anybody has resources to throw at it, it's Google.
 Excuse me, OMAP2 or not OMAP3.
 We're not talking about some tiny startup manufacturer.
 We're talking about one of the largest internet companies in the world that has tens of thousands
 of engineers.
 Right.
 They've got to make sure that they're putting resources into help outs so that people
 can get their multi-level marketing MLM schemes running.
 And with that we should direct our viewers to go watch scam world again which is still
 a fantastic piece on our site.
 So there are no MLMs on help outs yet.
 But there aren't any now because everybody gets background checked and whatever from
 Google.
 So you can only get your makeup checked with Sephora and have someone teach you how to
 spackle a wall or learn to play the guitar.
 I don't want to talk about help outs at all.
 Okay, we've got to talk about Blackberry.
 We've got to like – so they didn't –
 Do we have to?
 Have to is a strong word.
 I think we do because this time Blackberry is actually interesting.
 They didn't get sold.
 They got an infusion of cash from the investor firm that wanted to buy them but couldn't
 pull in enough bankers to actually support buying them so they just threw some money
 at them which is totally insane.
 And Torsten Heinz is out and a new guy John Chen is in.
 And let's just be very clear that Torsten Heinz was paid $22 million to fail.
 He walks away with more money than most of us will make in our entire lifetimes.
 Let's just get that out on the table.
 So absurd.
 I mean I've said numerous times about how he walked into a really bad situation and
 a lot of what happened with Blackberry was not entirely his fault.
 But at the same time in the 18 months or however long he was in term as CEO, he didn't do
 anything to improve its situation.
 It just got worse and worse and worse.
 And so by all accounts he failed at his job and he still comes out walking away with eight
 figures in his pocket.
 That's the guarantee with any CEO position.
 This was the thing that I was thinking the other day while I was eating parsley.
 I don't know I just have this really strong association now between parsley and thinking
 about Blackberry.
 Parsley is not an entree.
 Parsley is not an entree.
 I was eating parsley with other stuff but it was the strongest flavor at the time.
 Parsley has no flavor.
 I'm talking about Blackberry.
 Leave the parsley alone.
 Parsley has flavor.
 Parsley is beautiful.
 I don't think there is anything that cannot be improved by a little sprinkling of parsley.
 I can think of a few things.
 So you can have sympathy for Thorsten Heinz because rather like Steve and Elob, he was
 left in a situation where there weren't that many right moves for him to make.
 Whatever decision he was making, ultimately it was also an issue of execution with Blackberry.
 His decision to switch to Blackberry 10 and be aggressive and the other, other, other
 might have been perfect if they actually could code a mobile OS if they were capable of doing
 that and doing things like an email client but they just weren't.
 They kind of sucked at their job wholeheartedly and universally.
 I wouldn't just pin it on Thorsten Heinz.
 I don't think he really helped things.
 There was that quote from him saying we're innovating too much.
 We have differentiated products.
 We should differentiate it because they're like three years behind the curve, etc., etc.
 He didn't help things too much but we can't have too much sympathy for him.
 So my biggest question is, you know, everyone's calling this interim CEO, John Chen, the fixer
 upper guy but wasn't Thorsten the fixer upper guy?
 So is this the fixer upper for the fixer upper?
 It must be.
 Well I mean John Chen actually has credentials in doing that because in his previous role
 he led, what was the name of that company?
 Well he led the revival of a company that was kind of down in the dumps and was ready
 to fail basically.
 So he's got perfect experience, perfect credentials for this job.
 Whereas Thorsten Heinz was an internal hire for Blackberry.
 So I mean John Chen has at least more of a, I don't even know if he has more of a chance
 to revive things now because it's you know, 18 months on, the situation has gotten worse.
 But he seems better qualified at least.
 Okay.
 Okay, well since that's all of our hard analysis, I would just like to point out that maybe,
 just maybe, part of Blackberry's problem has to do with the fact that it just appointed
 a new and give me a chance to read this in full, lead director and chair of the compensation,
 nomination and governance committee.
 Most of those words have been capitalized.
 Alicia Keys?
 No.
 Strange enough, no.
 This is a position that Fairfax's CEO Prem Watser is taking up at Blackberry.
 Fairfax being the investors that wanted to take over Blackberry and just couldn't get
 the money together.
 But it's just kind of nuts.
 There's like so much middle management going on and so much like senior vice president,
 deputy of management for something in charge of etc.
 It just sounds like another terrible model to me.
 But also notable, in the entire Blackberry announcement there was nothing said about
 the future.
 Even John Chen is an interim CEO.
 So the main CEO, executive chair of the board, so essentially he's the man in charge.
 He's got the Steve Jobs position of Blackberry, which is funny because Steve Jobs never failed
 this bad.
 But anyway, he's got as much, pretty much it sounds like he's got as much power as
 him, but he's in an interim position.
 So Blackberry isn't really committing to anything at the moment.
 Well they did say one thing and that's they are not killing the handset division.
 Six months on that.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, we're not killing the handset division today.
 Right.
 Right.
 We're not eating a cheese sandwich today.
 Every single – Actually parsley on a cheese sandwich, very
 good.
 Yeah.
 I'm telling you guys, parsley is just for decoration.
 It has no flavor.
 Oh my god, it's full of vitamins.
 No, it is full of – I'm not disputing that.
 I mean lots of things are full of vitamins.
 Kale is full of vitamins.
 Kale is awesome.
 Kale has flavor.
 Yeah, no, kale has a lot of flavor.
 Kale is like really like – you have to like either cook it or like blend it.
 Those are your only options.
 You can't eat it raw.
 Of course you can.
 Well you can.
 I should not have this outrage against raw vegetable eating.
 Vlad, I would just like to point out something you once said to me, which was that – you
 said to me that the only part of the apple worth eating is the skin and you got rid of
 the rest.
 So your opinion on like the flavor and value of fruits and vegetables is just teetering
 on the edge, teetering on the brink.
 Just to defend that, I never throw away the rest of the apple.
 I just let some poor victim eat it because it's all sugar.
 Whereas the skin of the apple is where all the good stuff is.
 Also the rind of pumpkin and squash and all of those things is the best.
 If we hadn't started talking about blackberries yet, that would be great because I could say
 speaking of fruits and then start talking about blackberry.
 But we were already talking about blackberries.
 So anyway, the Z30, I haven't touched one.
 I'm not sure I ever will touch one.
 You can't wipe it off once you do.
 But every first take I've seen of this device across the interwebs seems to suggest that
 it is the answer to a question that no one asked.
 Which is, if you love the Z10, what would you buy next?
 So you know, take that for what you will.
 Oh, okay, segue.
 Seguele, this is the best.
 Speaking of devices and answers to questions that no one asked, the LG G Flex.
 Take it away Chris, I'm giving it.
 The stage is yours.
 You need to tell us about the Flex.
 So the Flex is a, it is not just a curved phone.
 As we learned from the, and many people pointed this out to me, the vaguely sexual video that
 is on our site right now, there is a picture of a guy pressing repeatedly on top of the
 phone to flatten it.
 He's just having his way with that thing man.
 He really is.
 Like if you looped it and set it to some sultry music, it would be really over the top.
 But then the question.
 You guys are like, so gutted.
 I thought it looked like CPR.
 I thought he was giving the G Flex CPR.
 You don't think CPR is vaguely sexual?
 Anyway, back to the G Flex for one second.
 The question becomes, so this phone is actually flexible, hence the name I guess.
 But it's just barely flexible.
 It's mostly rigid, there's just a little bit of give in it.
 So it's like what is the point of that?
 And as Neelai pointed out to us earlier, he's flexing it in the direction of just being
 flat.
 Just make a flat phone.
 What is the function of this device?
 This is absolutely, this is like the most crystal clear focused case I've seen of both
 Samsung and LG flexing their engineering prowess without putting the cart before the horse
 and saying is there actually any reason for this device to exist?
 Because the answer is no.
 It's very clearly no.
 When I was watching this video, the only thing I could think of was there was a spat of Nokia
 flip phones that were really thin and they were, you flip them open and you could put
 it face down on a desk and you could literally punch the back of the thing and the spring
 would just kind of like give so that it wouldn't snap the phone in half.
 And that's all I could think of when I was watching him press down on this upside down
 G Flex.
 We used to do the flex test on every phone where you would take it and you would put
 some torsion on it and then if it bent that was a sign of poor quality.
 And I mean, that was a sign of poor quality.
 And maybe now.
 Now it's innovation.
 I have nothing to say about the G Flex other than no, no thanks.
 As far as I'm concerned and again this is kind of like comparing Nexus cameras, the
 G Flex is definitely the better choice than the Galaxy Round.
 That's fair, although I haven't held the Galaxy Round.
 I haven't seen somebody try and hold the Galaxy Round up to their head either.
 I imagine it would be ridiculous.
 Yeah because nobody's head is shaped like a cylinder.
 I'm more concerned about the pocketability.
 I'm concerned about everything.
 Why does this phone?
 I mean why didn't LG and Samsung just wait another year until they could actually put
 this component, which is an absolutely magical, wonderful sci-fi component, the concept of
 a curved, bendable display.
 Why don't they just wait a year until they can make the rest of the phone bendable and
 then show us something really impressive.
 You know, that is a good point you raised Chris and it's something I was thinking of
 with regards to smart watches and I think Apple, Microsoft, Google, the big companies
 that are holding off on their smart watches, the ones that we keep hearing rumors that
 they're building one but they're not releasing one.
 I think they're doing the right thing because there is a risk right now that people will
 see smart watches and they'll get burned by the fact that they all pretty much suck apart
 from the Pebble and then the whole category kind of just picks up a terrible reputation
 and now there's kind of that risk with these flexible devices.
 If they all seem like gimmicks, if they all seem like terrible ideas and just engineering
 demos, the next time one comes out it might not get the proper reception that it deserves
 because somebody might actually make something useful out of the technology.
 So are you blaming Samsung for tanking the smart watch market before it began?
 And Sony.
 So I would say smart watch too from Sony, it's atrocious.
 Yeah I had the first one, the live whatever it was called.
 Live view.
 Yeah live view, it was a heartbreaker.
 Really bad.
 It's a world of hurt.
 You know who's not a heartbreaker?
 This is a terrible transition.
 Chris, talk to us about Amignan Clyburn, sounds like you wrote a really good story about her
 and I just want to have us all thank her together.
 Yes we all owe our livelihoods to this amazing woman.
 No I don't.
 Look, no even you Vlad, even though you are not an American citizen.
 We should say who she is for people who don't know.
 So Amignan Clyburn was the interim chairwoman of the FCC for a span of about five and a
 half, six months between the end of Julius Genachowski's tenure and the beginning of
 Tom Wheeler's who was just confirmed yesterday.
 No that's not true, he was confirmed last week but he was sworn in yesterday.
 And she was previously a commissioner.
 There are three people on the commission.
 There is, oh what is her name?
 Hold on I'm getting it.
 It doesn't matter.
 Jessica Rosenworcel.
 No, no, no it does and I'll tell you why it matters Dieter.
 Because Jessica Rosenworcel who is a member of the three person commission that the FCC
 is composed of is the sister of the lead singer for Guster.
 So I just want everybody to know that.
 This is a true story, you can look it up.
 So there's Rosenworcel, there's Clyburn and there's Ajit Pai.
 All of whom were appointed by Obama.
 Anyway long story short, she was temporarily put into the position of being the chairperson
 to fill in and she just accomplished a ridiculous amount in her very brief tenure.
 Generally speaking the FCC is one of the more bureaucratically challenged organizations
 in the federal government.
 They tend to take years to get anything done.
 And if you look back over Genachowski's tenure, really what he did, I mean look, I can't take
 a lot away from the guy because you know wireless broadband use exploded and he had a number
 of really important initiatives.
 But at the end of the day the one thing that sticks out in my mind that he accomplished
 was putting the ax in the ATTT mobile deal, right?
 In the six month span that Clyburn was in office, she basically fired up two new bands
 of Spectrum and we all know how rare that is.
 Like Spectrum never frees up.
 She freed up two bands, well she didn't personally free them up but she like launched the rule
 making that happens before the auction.
 She signed the enormous Sprint clear wire soft bank deal which had been sitting on her
 plate for approval.
 So she pushed that through which ultimately led to Sprint being able to launch this Spark
 thing which Dieter will be talking about in a minute.
 And yes you will, you will.
 And she pushed through some legislation on prison long distance rates which had been
 a surprisingly like big issue that had been like going on for a decade where like basically
 what was happening was there are these monopoly providers in prisons that just completely
 extort people to make phone calls.
 So it can cost like several dollars just to make a connection and then several dollars
 a minute.
 And you can understand how like you know not everyone that is in prison is rich so it makes
 it very difficult for people to communicate with families and so on.
 That is the most politically correct thing you've ever said, not everyone in prison is
 rich.
 It's true.
 So she was able to push that through which had been on FCC's plate for a long, long time.
 So she was just a very, very productive chairperson and I think that FCC would have been well
 positioned to permanently give her the job if that was an option.
 But it's not like Obama can just say like oh wait never mind on Wheeler you can just
 keep the job.
 It doesn't work that way.
 She would have to be confirmed and it's a whole thing.
 So now we get Tom Wheeler who is a former lobbyist for the CTIA and NACDA I think if
 I remember correctly.
 Oh man.
 So in other words he represented the wireless industry and the cable industry and now he
 runs the FCC.
 So I think that we are probably in for a much more pragmatic and borderline consumer hostile
 reign as opposed to Clyburn's who did not come from that world and previously served
 on South Carolina's public service commission.
 So anyway I've talked about the FCC for far too long.
 The important thing to remember here is that you convinced me that her name wasn't pronounced
 Mignion.
 Shoot, I just had it.
 Mignion.
 Yes.
 I was watching, she was on C-Span and someone just pronounced her name and I was right and
 now I believe it is.
 Wait for it.
 Mignion, I was right.
 I was right the whole time.
 I've heard it pronounced both ways.
 Really?
 Yes.
 I just refuse to refer to somebody as a stake.
 That's my core problem and when I hear Mignion I think of beef and it just gets really weird.
 Nobody really talks about Barack Obama, just use her surname and pretend she doesn't have
 a first name.
 Exactly.
 Or we could give her a cool Top Gun style nickname like Fireball.
 I have to share.
 I did have a vision in my mind when Chris said that she opened up two new bands of wireless
 of like Storm from the X-Men just rising up into the sky and just working on some air
 waves and saying yes, here's some more wireless for you people.
 That is exactly how it went down by the way.
 So anyway, she was just unusually productive for someone who was never expected to really
 get a lot done.
 She was effectively a caretaker, right?
 She was a lame duck who was just there to fill the seat until Tom Wheeler got confirmed
 and instead she ended up getting a lot done.
 So kudos.
 Yes.
 Okay, Sprint Spark.
 So Sprint, they've got a whole bunch of random spectrum that they've acquired over the years
 including stuff from Clearwire and whatever else.
 So they've got 800, they've got 19 and they've got 25 and stuff from the next hell.
 And so they finally got everything cleared out that they can run LTE on it.
 So they've introduced this thing called Spark where they're claiming they can get
 speeds up to 60 megabits and it can go faster than that someday in the future and they say
 that they can achieve this by using all of that spectrum on a single phone and so the
 radio will pick which one it needs.
 So if you're in a building you'll end up with 800 but if you're outside where you
 can get the faster stuff you'll get that.
 And that's the story with Sprint Spark.
 They've launched it in a few cities and my guess is that it'll be just like Sprint
 has been for a while where there'll be like 10 people that have got amazing service and
 become Sprint fanboys for life and everybody else sort of wonders why Sprint is kind of
 crap.
 That's really a really hard take but I don't know, it seems like a big promise from them
 and we've been hearing a lot of big network promises from Sprint for a long time and if
 the WiMax thing didn't already hurt their credibility there, like everything that's
 happened since then certainly has and they just need to start delivering and they need
 to start delivering really fast.
 And hopefully they can, hopefully SoftBank is going to dump some money in there and I
 can go back to thinking Dan Hesse is the most trustworthy guy in mobile but he's not because
 crazy Guy McGee over at T-Mobile is.
 That's a good way of putting it, yes.
 Also Dan Hesse doesn't understand neutrality.
 That's right, yes.
 I will say that Sprint is in the best position now, a better position now than it's really
 ever been in the past five years in order to do these network enhancements now that
 it has SoftBank's bankrolling and everything like that and the support behind it and it
 got the approval from the FCC that was so desperately needed.
 Just as Nexus 5's camera is the best Nexus camera ever, Sprint is the best camera ever.
 Silver linings, Peter.
 We're peddling hope.
 It is a long game.
 It's like most people won't see the benefits of this product until late 2014 at the earliest
 assuming they see it ever.
 So Sprint really has to come through on its promises and really just needs to deliver.
 If they can pull this off it would be amazing because we're talking about speeds that make
 my cable broadband look kind of pokey, right?
 Right.
 What kind of bogus cable modem do you have?
 I can get 100 megabit in Chicago.
 Well, I'm getting files soon so don't you worry about me.
 I get 100 megabit in the burbs, man.
 Anyway, it would be a huge deal if they can pull it off and they've got a bunch of devices.
 They teased the Nexus 5 at this event because it was the day before and they had it in their
 little thing.
 I don't know.
 The other thing that happened was if you're talking about speeds that fast, at some point
 you're like, well, you're starting to look like a standard broadband provider.
 Are you going to do the things that standard broadband providers do which is charge for
 different tiers of service or whatever?
 Danny says no, they're not going to change their unlimited plan.
 All that's going to stay the same.
 But there was sort of a, ho, ho, ho, I don't understand why anybody would believe in that
 neutrality.
 It doesn't make any sense to me at all.
 You're allowed to charge more for first class seats.
 Why can't you charge more for first class internet service?
 Look, you're never going to get anyone in the wireless industry to tell you that they
 want to be regulated more heavily.
 It's just not going to happen.
 On one level, I understand what Dan is saying.
 Hesse, not Sefer, just to clarify.
 Chris never understands what I'm saying.
 No, I never understand what Dan is saying.
 I understand what he's saying from the perspective that I do think that wireless carriers should
 be allowed to investigate the possibility of charging different monthly fees for different
 speed tiers.
 I would be okay with that.
 Just like I'm okay with it on my cable modem.
 It makes sense to me.
 I pay more for faster service.
 Fine, that's totally okay.
 But when you start putting up arbitrary barriers around services or protocols, that's where
 you start getting into a really nasty gray area that the FCC so far has refused to regulate
 more heavily on.
 If you read all of their net neutrality language throughout the years, they're very, very careful
 to carve out an exception for wireless.
 That was one thing that Clyburn didn't change.
 I'm sure there are many good reasons for it, not the least of which is the fact that there
 are just too many lobbyist hands in the pot.
 Unfortunately there are no strong regulations preventing that kind of nonsense from happening.
 But also these analogies are just bogus.
 This is kind of like all the people making the argument comparing things like US government
 debt to household debt and whatever.
 The way that you treat and you manage your debt in your household, which is like a few
 thousand dollars or whatever, versus the way that you treat and manage trillions of dollars
 in US debt and being the world's reserve currency and all of that, those are just completely
 not analogous things.
 They just kind of look the same superficially.
 This is where Dan has his comparison like, well if we offer such and such service, it's
 fine for us to charge a different price, etc.
 We're just private individuals not supplying a fundamentally important lifeline to people.
 Admittedly it's print so it's not that much of a lifeline because there aren't that many
 customers but still, it's a vital service.
 You can't just treat it like it's some luxury that people pick and choose.
 I agree with Chris, different prices for different levels of service, yeah fine, but you shouldn't
 be prioritizing traffic.
 That's it.
 That also is it I believe for the Virgin Mobile Show.
 Thank you everybody very much for watching us and listening to us and having feels with
 us.
 If you want to, I don't know, if you want to contact us you can.
 We're on Twitter, I am back on Dan's DCC for Chris is zpower, Vlad is Vlad Savov, not
 to be confused with Vlad Wick who's also available on Twitter.
 Who's been suspiciously quiet for…
 We are all at Verge and you can email us and you can comment on this post right now or
 later as you wish.
 You can comment on Google Plus, many of you.
 Nobody's going to read it if you comment Google Plus.
 That dude there, they're commenting right now, my phone is exploding.
 It's on Googlebot and Google Plus.
 Goodnight everybody, thanks for watching.
 Bye.
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