 In the smartphone ecosystem, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. The conglomerates who claim to provide innovative new products, and the Verge Mobile Show hosts who call them out on their shenanigans. These are their stories. Hi I'm Dieter Baume. I'm Vlad Isavov. I'm Chris Sigler. And this is the Verge Mobile Show. This is a Verge and Mobile, Law and Verge. Show number 12, week of August 13th. Thank you very much to the inescapable Sean Hollister for our introduction this week. I thought that was pretty special. He's the man with the voice of gold. And by the way, Dieter, I think I speak for Vlad when I say that I very much missed you last week. Not to say Ross wasn't an amazing guest host, but I personally missed you. I missed you guys as well. It was a sad time. Instead of you guys, I had Dan Hesse, who is very cool and very tall, but not as fun. Also we are- Not as strong names or anything. We're an all beard podcast today. We are. We are. Actually, I haven't seen- This is a little embarrassing, but I haven't actually looked at the live feed yet, so I have no idea what Vlad looks like. Is his beard lush? Is it glorious? It's glorious. I don't know if I'd call it lush though. It's in the process of growing. It's in the process. It's getting there. I'm not looking at the live stream either. Vlad, I don't think that I mentioned this to you before, but I think you tweeted a picture of yourself with a handlebar thing going on. And it looked absolutely amazing, and I have no idea why you didn't keep that. I don't know. I kind of ended up feeling wrong. This wasn't your sound. It's just the wrong appearance having a mustache. I grew that out, especially for you, Chris, as you know. I appreciate that. You told me- It's bad having a mustache is wrong. I don't want anybody to be right. I know. I feel the same way. I feel exactly the same way. Actually, since we're going down that topic, I came across this website. I think it's askmen.com, which the website isn't that random or weird, but the article was it was like the top 10 countries with the most mustaches in them. And Bulgaria actually ranked in the top 10 in terms of prevalence of mustaches. I think it probably isn't absolute numbers. It's mustaches relative to men or relative to males, but that's still impressive and surprising. And would you say that they're really nice looking mustaches? Are they like Ron Swanson caliber mustaches or are they kind of thin? Could they use some work? I think most of them are pretty strong, fine mustaches. It's that Mediterranean stock. We were never short of facial hair or any other sort of hair. But anyway, mobile devices. We have batteries. I've got it. I've got it. We are broadcasting on the internet, showing you our facial hair live. For many of you using Flash and Flash is going away on Android. It is. How do you like that? So basically, they're going to stop providing it in Google Play, nay Android market, tomorrow as we record this. I want to say I'm not sad to see it go, but I'm a tiny, tiny wee bit sad that it is going before we have good, reliable, consistent mobile experiences on Android for video. I just wanted to watch this morning actually a Vimeo video. Didn't work on the Nexus 7 and I was like, oh, well that sucks. And I tried it on the iPad. No problem. So I am sad that I'm not sad to see Flash go on Android because it was never any good at all ever. But I am sad that it does mean that that last fallback solution for watching certain content is just not going to be there. Well this, I think it's an important thing though because it really puts the pressure on the entire industry to step up and replace it. As long as Flash is around and available on all these new devices, that kind of lessens the impetus to make things work correctly. And I think that if you'd asked me in 2008, I would have told you, or even 2010, I probably would have told you that I deeply, deeply despised Apple for steadfastly refusing to support Flash on mobile. But in retrospect, I think it was the right move and it helped move the industry along. And now this is going to be the next step to push it to the next level where we are completely non-reliant on Flash. I agree, we're not there yet, but hopefully this will take us there. Wait, Chris, you didn't like, did you not like it when Apple didn't want to support Flash? Because I then can lay claim to being right at the time, whereas you were so terribly wrong. Because I was in support of Apple's decision. As Dieter just said, Flash on Android or any sort of mobile device has never really worked properly. And where it's worked, it's consumed power, both in terms of processing power and battery life in ways that just don't fit mobile devices at all. So it hasn't really been a useful or functional addition at all. So Apple's decision not to support it, not to get into that entire mess was absolutely the right one. But I also felt that was the case at the time. When Steve Jobs was writing his thoughts on Flash and he had like, what was it, like six reasons why it was a nightmare? It was Flash that he wrote that about, wasn't it? Six reasons Flash is a nightmare? I don't remember. He wrote his open letter about Flash. Yeah. Oh yeah, I remember that. I think there were six reasons. Were there six reasons? Oh yes. It's not open, the full web, reliability, battery life, touch, and growing dependent on third party tools. Those are his six reasons. So I don't necessarily agree with every single point on his list. But at the time, a lot of people, they write it as just a bit of arrogance or whatever on Apple's part and just trying to be different from everybody else. And it is absolutely true that if Flash could be made to work on mobile devices, it was the ideal standard because it was just so ubiquitous on a desktop. Every video hosting service, every video sharing service we've had has been Flash based from the start. People are doing HTML5 video streaming as an add on, as a secondary option. And again, as Dieter said, it's still in the experimental stage. Not everybody has, or I don't know if anybody has a really good player like that for HTML5. So it would have been great if it worked, but it never did. So why should we be sad? It never worked on mobile. It worked fine on the desktop with the exception of the horrendous processor matter. There's a whole lot of reasons it didn't work in the past few years. But initially, it was great. My problem is that HTML5 just isn't there. I mean, there was the experience I have every day trying to watch video on Android devices that don't support HTML5, or rather the way that the app developer or the website developer coded their HTML5 version of the video, it doesn't appear on Android. And that's really the issue is I feel like there's not a de facto, this is how everybody should embed video now solution on HTML5. I know that there's this fight with Google, then Mozilla was in it, and Apple was in the debate about what exactly the HTML5 video standard should be in terms of encoding the video and serving it. The way that you embed it in a page is relatively simple. And I don't know exactly what the status is on that battle, but I do know that when I'm on a mobile device, and there's video that I want to watch from Comedy Central or Vimeo or whomever, that I just cannot assume that it's going to work. It works on usually iOS because it's so ubiquitous and everybody knows how to code for it. But on Android and other platforms, it's just I can never really know. And I find myself saving stuff to pocket and then going back to my desktop later so I can watch it. And that's annoying. I also think that the HTML5 experience, not just with video, but in general, there are some things where you have an HTML5 experience and a Flash experience, and the Flash experience is still a little bit better or richer. And we need to get to the point where we can completely supplant Flash. And we're not there yet. A good example is Lytro, which I have right here in my hands. You guys probably aren't seeing it. But the Lytro embed to do the interactive depth of field for just the web-based version is not nearly as good as the Flash embed. And so that's one of many examples where we need to improve that. Well, OK. OK, that's fair enough. But seriously, the point about Flash, and Dita said it works fine on the desktop. It doesn't work fine on desktop. Just today, I published this article slash editorial where I embedded a number of Flash videos. And I can tell you that while I was composing it and looking at it in our layout editor, the number of times that the Flash video just completely blanked out and I was seeing a white space on the page. And then sometimes it would come back. Sometimes I would hover over the white space and the video would pop up. And sometimes I would need to refresh entirely in order to see the video again. So that's one thing. This was happening with me on Chrome. But you can see those issues in every browser. And all of us have had this issue of having a Flash video playing somewhere in a tab, somewhere in your browser, and then your mouse point just disappears. Right? So this is, again, Chrome specific. But we've all had this issue. We've all cried and moaned about this issue. Adobe's never fixed it. And I mean, we already know that Adobe is abandoning Flash everywhere, which, again, to me is good riddance. But I don't want us to speak of Flash in overly positive terms just because it's dying and that's our habit, not to speak badly of the dead, right? To try and be nice. I just don't want us to sugarcoat it. Flash has sucked for such and such a long time. And it's really time for us to just accept that we've got the Internet. We've got things like video that we want to stream. And it's up to people, coders, to figure out how to do that in the best way. Flash wasn't it. So we move on. But I have no problem speaking terribly of Symbian. I don't know what you're talking about. Chris's email address is chris at the verge dot com if you want to talk to him about your thoughts on Symbian. Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, I guess we will see if it would be nice if there were a clear open standard to replace Flash with HTML5 video that everybody sort of knew or knows. I feel like it's just going to be a mess for a while. And that's fine. It's better to have that, I guess, than Flash. But you know, I mean, Adobe should be that company. They said they were going to be. They made comments like they were going to help solve this problem. But who knows if they're actually going to pull it off because Adobe hasn't. They're not exactly firing on all cylinders right now, if you know what I mean. I know what you mean. Yeah. What should we talk about? So Motorola, Google is going to lay off 20 percent of Motorola's workforce, which is a bummer. Google has decided that it doesn't want all of Motorola's cylinders. You know what? You guys can just go. We don't need you. Yeah. And they're going to kick out fewer phones, too, right? Right. So these are I was trying to figure this out earlier in the week. Are these Google's first publicly announced layoffs in the company's history? If if they aren't, then then it's one of the very few. I know that they've they've quietly pushed some people out of the door in the past, but I don't know if this is ever really happened on this scale before. It's it's on this scale. Definitely. And this is some 4000 employees that are being fired. Right. Yeah, it's a big deal for these guys. And I think, you know, I have mixed feelings about it, as I think we all have mixed feelings about Motorola. I don't think that if Motorola had stayed in an independent company, they would have gone this route as drastically and as quickly as they have. And I think that Google is really anxious to push the non Android hardware out of its portfolio. Really, that's what what it's all about. Right. Motorola has a lot of low end devices still that it sells in emerging markets. Brazil and China and India, where, you know, they aren't Android based. And that just isn't that doesn't play into Google's business model for Motorola at all. So it's getting rid of those right off the top. One thing that that I heard yesterday that's kind of interesting, at least to the the local economy, since I'm Chicago based here, is that they had specific incentives to, I believe, to move their headquarters to downtown Chicago. Because right now they're they're actually based way out in a suburb. But in order to qualify for those incentives, they had to maintain local employment of at least twenty five hundred. This this round of layoffs pushes them below twenty five hundred. So they actually are now disqualified for incentives that they had had before. So I don't know what that means in terms of, you know, where their headquarters is going to ultimately be. I think they're still moving downtown here. But I you know, I've said for many months now and I still think this is true, that in the long term it makes a ton of sense for them to be either co-located with Google or at least in the same neighborhood. And they do have an office on the West Coast. But you know, they've got most of what I heard is that most of their local employees in Chicago are engineers. Those are the kinds of people that you want on the West Coast. So I wouldn't be surprised to see them move out west sooner or later. I would guess it would take a while before they move out west. I think that at some point, Illinois or even Chicago would be like, well, you know, we really do want you to stay. We'll see if we can change our tone on those incentives. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I personally like the idea of there being innovative technology company not located in California. I think that's, you know, that's good for the diversity of thought and what goes into smartphones. And I'm now giving motor oil praise for its diversity of thought, which is a weird thing. But nevertheless, I'm doing it. I don't know. I mean, I look at the photon cue. I wonder just what's going on over there. I agree with Dieter. There's absolutely a need to diversify the sources for our designs and our ideas for phones, whether it be outside of the West Coast of the United States or entirely outside of the United States. It's good to have fresh ideas. I mean, one of the most innovative phones, which never actually materialized, if you guys remember, it was the first else. And that was thought up over in Israel. And the innovation with it was that the whole UI was supposed to be thumb based. So you only use one hand, one thumb, and it'll kind of like the UI grows around your fingers and your interaction with it, which probably was like too ambitious a project. And that's why it never materialized. But it didn't come from San Francisco area. It didn't come from the Bay Area. So I agree. Also on the topic of Motorola, I need to mention this. I got a Droid Razr Max here because I wanted to see it. I got it from Motorola. I wanted to see it for the first time. And the first thing is this thing has a massive battery inside it. But I can't tell that. It doesn't feel fat. Like I expected it to be much thicker than it actually is. And I just unplugged it from the charger the moment we started the show. So I'll update you guys somewhere somehow. The battery is not going to decrease during the course. If you actually see the battery go down while we're podcasting, that means we've been podcasting way too long. No, no, no. I'm talking about the podcast and the show. I'm talking in general during the week. Because I've also given myself a tweet a while ago for a week. So I'm not tweeting for a week just to see that I can do it. So I can't tweet when the battery runs out. But maybe I can Google+. Yeah, but you're on Google+. So I mean, really. I don't mean any disrespect, Vlad, but that really isn't as ambitious of a project as Paul is undertaking. What is, Chris? I should well start going off the pyramids and be less ambitious. This is true. This is true. Yeah, the droid that my concern with the droid razor max. I just tweeted this yesterday is that I don't know if they can repeat the feat of that device with a better display. Right. Because the reason they were able to do that is because they took the razor chassis, which is only seven point one millimeters, and the way they got down to seven point one millimeters is by using a really crappy self illuminating display, an AMOLED and just bumping it back up to the regular thickness of a of a regular like modern smartphone and then using all that that remaining capacity for battery. I think it's what, 3000 milliamp hours or something. So the question is, can they? Yeah. Yeah. So the question is, can they take that concept and put in a display that doesn't suck? I don't know. I mean, that thing is going to last a month. I mean, the razor max has got incredibly good battery life with LTE. I mean, if you're just running this thing, just straight HSPA. I mean, I can't imagine what you could do to it to kill a battery. You'd literally have to like put it in an oven and run a flash video before it goes away tomorrow constantly. And maybe you could drain the battery. We'll find out. Yeah. I mean, like what I'm saying is it's such a fat battery that you could easily have fat phone and feel justified in the phone being chunky. Like a perfect example is the PeerView 808, which I've had plenty of recent experience with. It feels about, you know, twice the size of this. Like the Razor Max just kind of feels, it just feels like a regular size phone. It isn't extra super slim and skinny like the original Razor or the new HT and Samsung phones, but I actually don't need it to be. Like it feels like it's a great size and there's no compromise. But as Chris says, the no compromise in terms of size is down to the AMOLED display. Which is not just... Let's actually bring it back to Motorola itself because this is interesting to me. I mean, just looking at this particular phone, which I don't know why I'm carrying on about it so much, like nobody else has really tried to match that, you know, we'll just go crazy with the battery thing. Samsung has done, stuck a really big battery inside the Galaxy S3, but that's just part of the whole package. And Samsung and HTC, like I've been complaining for a long time, keep going for bigger and bigger displays and trying to crank out specs, but Motorola is doing something different. So if the company is now going to focus on a few good phones, maybe, hopefully, that diversity that Dieter and I spoke about will help and then we'll see some few good phones that are actually different from the good phones that everybody else is trying to build. What do you guys think? Right. Yeah, I would like to see something, you know, inspiring. I mean, the Razr, it's a cool design and I like the aesthetic of the hardware, of course, you know, the software, I don't know, whatever. But I mean, it just, it didn't catch my attention because I was more focused on the Galaxy Nexus and the innovation that was happening there. And it took them forever to get ice cream sandwich on the Razr. And we've obviously seen Samsung just dominate and we've seen HTC at least try to sort of reinvent itself, but I'm interested to see if Motorola can, I don't know, elucidate a similar vision for, you know, fewer phones and this is what Motorola is. This is what it means to buy a Motorola phone now. Because right now, if you ask somebody, what does it mean to buy a Motorola phone? They'll tell you, what do they tell you? They'll tell you it's a StarTac or Razr, the original Razr, or they'll tell you that, oh, yeah, that Razr Max has got ridiculously long battery life. And those are cool, you know, features and that's, you know, there's people still know Motorola, but nobody thinks about Motorola as like having a corporate identity as an Android manufacturer. And it'll be interesting to see if they can actually pull that off. I want a Pebble 2. That's all I want. Pebble 2, the original Pebble was an amazing device. The spring-loaded hinge, the way that you opened it by like sliding it off the magnet. I think I've waxed poetic about this phone three or four times in the past, but it's worth doing again since we're talking about Motorola. My question is, you know, we've heard Google say on many occasions that they're going to run Motorola at an arm's length, which I think is good for many reasons. One is that there's less appearance of, you know, favoritism among other Android OEMs, but then also it makes it easier for Google to offload Motorola in the future if they want to, which I wouldn't be surprised if you're two or three down the road that happened. But by the same token, you can kind of tell, you definitely get the impression that Google is not a fan of OEM skins and they are probably not a fan of the fact that there, there really isn't anyone other than Google doing anything with the stock Android experience with the Nexus series. And we've heard these rumors about the Wall Street Journal rumor about a series of Nexus devices coming out later this year, Nexus phones specifically. So I'm wondering whether Motorola is going to continue to develop a blur or whatever it is that they're calling it these days. Or if they are, I mean, is that going to rub Google the wrong way enough that they kind of steer Motorola in the direction of going stock? The Razer Nexus, I'm just thinking of the name. Yeah. Sounds good. Sounds good. I'm on record. What did I commit to buying a hundred Razers if they ship it with a stock Android? Is that what I said? This is like from two months ago, three months ago. I hope it happens. But then, you know, I guess Motorola becomes the company that ships stock Android. That could be cool. I could get on board with that actually, instead of just waiting for the next Nexus device. I am sick and to death about not having a stock Android LTE device on AT&T. I'm running Cyanogen Mod 9, I'm HTC One X developed by a guy over at XDA, and it's running pretty well, but it's still not quite, you know, fully stable. So I'm going to be switching back to the Galaxy Nexus. Oh, you're switching back to the Galaxy Nexus? I'm going to get back to that. Let me just say that quote from you was just the perfect distillation of a first world problem. I'm sick to death of not having an AT&T LTE phone with such and such specs and such and such capabilities and stock Android. Not having that is literally making me sick. I am getting closer to death because this thing is not in my life right now. Look, look, okay, Europe, Europe and Asia led, led the, the entire wireless industry for a solid 20 or even 30 years. And now it's America's turn. Freedom prevails. Bald eagles flying over. In fact, Creighton and Brendan, if you guys can add some bald eagles behind me right now, I'd appreciate that as sort of a CGI thing, maybe a flag, maybe some fireworks. It is our turn to lead the world with LTE and I am reveling in it and I know Dieter is as well. And you're just going to have to deal with it. You know what? I'm just going to go out and buy a PS Vita on behalf of the Euro Japanese team. Just to support our- I really wish I had my sunglasses sitting here because I really want to deal with it, but I don't have my sunglasses nearby. But seriously, to make the point though, Dieter is switching back to the Galaxy Nexus. Chris admitted over the weekend that he's switching back to the Galaxy Nexus. I'm switching back to the Galaxy Nexus temporarily until I actually go out and do- Yeah, it's temporary with both of you. I know. It's temporary until the next Nexus. Fine. Okay. But seriously, I'm the guy who wrote the piece against Chris's piece saying the Galaxy Nexus isn't the best Android phone. And then you guys are using the Galaxy Nexus again. The facts kind of speak for themselves. No, listen, Vlad. I'm just going to put an end to this rampant and baseless speculation right now. Okay. Yes, my SIM is in a Galaxy Nexus. Yes. But the only reason I did it is because like there is no good reason. I was just like, eh, I'll switch phones for like, cause I, I, to be very honest, I haven't played with 4.1 that much on the phone side. I played with an X of seven a lot, but not a 4.1 on a phone. I only used it on the Galaxy Nexus for like 15 minutes before I put it back in the GX 3 before. So I wanted to give it like an honest and fair shake, although AT&T HSPA in Chicago is just as bad as ever. It's completely nonfunctional during weekdays. So this isn't going to stand for very long. I'm sure that by the end of this week, I will be back into another device. So the fact that we started a conversation on Motorola and ended talking about the Galaxy Nexus is a perfect example of where the company is right now. We gotta move on. I want to talk about this new mobile payments committee, which I want to say sounds really ominous, but maybe it's not. So I've been complaining at length about the fact that mobile payments is fragmented and there was no unified ecosystem and you never know if you're going to be able to use it. And apparently all the big players listened to me, to me specifically, and in reaction to my specific complaints, because I'm so influential and powerful in the industry, they have formed the mobile payments committee, which consists of Google, ISIS, PayPal, Verifone, Intuit, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Basically- Can I just drop a quote in here? Just very briefly? I believe I'm quoting correctly from Civilization here. And the quote is, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the growing needs of the bureaucracy. That's how this feels to me. Let's have a committee to organize the organizational body. But it is, hey, laugh about it all you want, but it is a very important step. It is a step that was needed because it was starting to look like this was just going to devolve into a really consumer hostile fiefdom that served nobody's benefits, or best interest, excuse me. And I have to say, after using the latest version of Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus the past couple of days, it's starting to congeal. It's starting to really come together. And I want to see all of these carriers, and Google, and Apple, I want to see all these guys get on the same page, because this is something that has to happen. Yeah, I mean, what was the takeaway at CTI? I forget what that big article about fragmentation, what we called it. One of the original headlines was, mobile payments, nobody's winning, but we're all losing. And it's all, everybody was trying to win. And that just meant that you had no way of knowing if your particular wallet would work. And in theory, anyway, all these guys being on a committee together, sure, it's more bureaucracy, and it's all star chamber, and there's going to be backroom deals, and blah, blah, blah. But you know what? If the thing that gets kicked out of this is, here's the standard, you can have all these fragmented solutions, but here's a baseline standard that they're all going to use so that you can trust that your wallet will work when you go to CVS, or 7-Eleven, or Tiffany's, or I don't know, or People Shop. That's good. And I hope that that actually happens. Now, the interesting thing about this crazy committee is that there's one company that's not on it that you would expect to be on it, and that's Square, aka the company that's actually doing the best job at mobile payments right now. Yeah. I wouldn't actually expect Square to be on that committee. And just very briefly, to come back to them, the reason I was flippant with the point about bureaucracy was that, yes, it's a beautiful dream that they will organize themselves and have a cogent plan that applies to everybody. But I kind of feel like we've seen this with a whole bunch of such loose, voluntary organizations, things like the Open Handset Alliance. What does that stand for with Android? Who does what there? How does that contribute to the overall landscape? I don't think it does anything. And I kind of feel like this is going to go the same way. But also, this committee that is now being gathered seems to be exclusively focused on enabling mobile payments via the mobile phone itself, whereas Square is focused on its own service and also on its own appendage for a phone. So you need the Square card reader in order to have your cards read. I don't think Square has a- No, that's not true. Square has geofencing where you walk in and the cashier has got an iPad and they're like, oh, Vlad just walked in. And you're like, hey, I'm Vlad. And they're like, hey, Vlad, I would like this coffee. And here's your coffee. And then you say thanks and you walk away. And that's the whole transaction. You don't pull out your phone. You don't swipe a card. You don't tap an NFC thing. They know who you are. Your picture pops up because you walked into their geofence. And then you ask for what you want to buy, and they sell it to you, and you're done. So I have completely missed this business model pivot from Square. I still remember the Square card reader. Oh, no, they still have it. It still exists. It's still their most popular option. And in fact, they recently, I want to say like six months ago, they finally switched it to being encrypted. It used to be that it would just send the credit card data unencrypted, but now it's encrypted so it'll only work with Square's app, which was the thing that PayPal and Intuit were yelling at them about or saying they were better at. Anyway, but the thing about Square is you want to root for them. Jeff Dorsey, is that his name? And little startup, and is it an exciting story? And that's great, but that's not what gets you at the checkout register at Macy's. But then again, it got him in the checkout register at Starbucks. So maybe I'm wrong. Which is a big deal. Which is a really big deal. But my perception of Square from the very beginning was like, if you looked at their business model, number one on the list of goals was Starbucks. It was just obviously, I think even the initial pitch was like, here's how you pay for a cup of coffee. It's like, where do you go to bring that sort of functionality other than Starbucks, which has outlets so far and wide and so many of them. It's a huge coup for them. But just to salvage quickly my initial point about not expecting Square to be part of this committee, communion organization. Again, even with geofencing, their business model is different. They're not trying to do mobile apps for phones in the same way that everybody else is trying to do Google Wallet. Well, yeah, but do they need to? The argument that we've been making is that mobile payments in order to not suck need to be ubiquitous. And is Square on a path to being ubiquitous? In order to play that ubiquitous game, you've got to get in the dirty, dirty mess of talking to these gigantic players. They control the market, Visa and MasterCard and NEC and whoever else makes the checkout registers, that whole thing. Square could disrupt it and they've done it a little bit with their little dongle and direct payments on devices and yada, yada, yada. But these other companies aren't going to just go away and they're going to fight back. And so I would like to see Square go ahead and get its hands dirty and corrupt its ideals just a little bit to get us all on the path to a single ubiquitous solution that's maybe it's a meta solution, but it's at least something that we know will work. And that's been my thing since I started talking about mobile payments. What's a little surprising to me is that Starbucks, I feel like Starbucks is in the process of seeding its own very advanced mobile payment system. I mean, they have one of the most successful mobile payment systems in the world already. I think there was some stat that came out earlier this week or last week that what, 40 or 50 or 60, some ridiculous percentage of all transactions at Starbucks currently in the United States are mobile based, which is insane. And I don't think there's any other major retailer that can claim that. Because they have their Starbucks app that is on iOS now. And you just you link up whatever card to it and it displays that 2D barcode. And they have those 2D scanners in every Starbucks already. So I mean, it's really cool that Starbucks is being so proactive about this and advancing the cause. But at the same time, they were already there. So I don't quite understand why they were the ones to step forward and support this on a really broad scale when they already had that capability. And they've been pushing that capability for years. That's a really good point. And I can't even come up with a good answer in that situation. I'm as surprised as Dieter. That's a high number. But then we also have to consider that Starbucks outlets aren't going to be parked next to a motel on the highway in Montana or someplace like that. Most Starbucks are in really urbanized central city areas where people already have smartphones and techies tend to hang out. Oh, there's Starbucks in Montana. You'd be surprised. Okay, you should probably actually. All right. What's next? So iMore has got a rumor that Apple's going to take pre-orders to the new iPhone right away on the 12th and that they'll start internationally on October 5th. And they should be shipping, I think, relatively quickly, pretty much right away. September 21st is when people will be able to start buying the device. If we buy that, they're going to be announcing the product on the 12th. Then Apple has always had pre-orders right away and shipped right away right after. So it's pretty much par for the course. So I don't really have any reason to doubt this. I'm excited for an LTE iPhone, which is weird for me to say because I'm totally not inspired by iOS 6. But I'm excited to see what an iPhone feels like with crazy fast LTE data. I've got bad news for you, Dieter. Your LTE is not going to be crazy fast because you and somewhere between 10 and 50 million other Americans are all going to be experiencing LTE on iOS for the first time, or on an iPhone for the first time, I should say. And these networks are going to slow to a crawl. I think that I talked about this a week or two ago. Maybe I didn't, but I think I did, that AT&T LTE in Chicago has already noticeably started to slow down. And I think that's the GS3 effect because I've seen GS3s everywhere since they launched. And I think that that's really started to have a negative pressure on LTE speeds. So if the GS3 is doing that, I can only imagine what the iPhone is going to do. Okay, so is it time for me to give up on AT&T? It's time for you to give up on wireless. Everybody is moving back to corded phones. And just stay on your cable modem. Don't leave your house. That's all I can recommend. You know, if I was in your shoes, Dieter, I would just switch to T-Mobile. Just curse everybody else off, switch to T-Mobile and support the little guy because that company is struggling. And yes, I am in the process of doing a really kickass segue right now because T-Mobile reported its quarterly results, yada, yada, yada. And they tried to patch over things, but they've lost half a million of their contract subscribers in the last quarter, or relative to the previous year, I think, which is a hugely worrying number. Like everybody else, Sprint was kind of able to hold on to subscribers. AT&T and Verizon keep growing subscribers, but the guys who are losing subscribers are T-Mobile and they're losing heavily. The interesting thing about that, I mean, I'm not too surprised to see them lose post pay subscribers, but both T-Mobile and Sprint are seeing huge growth in prepaid subscribers. And this has sort of been floating around on the internet, this idea that why are we all on these super expensive postpaid plans when prepaid plans are so much cheaper month to month for basically the exact same service? And I'm getting to the point where I don't have a good answer for that at all. I buy phones so often that the subsidies don't matter to me. I'm basically subsidizing nothing except for AT&T's profit margin at this point. The only reason for me to not move to a prepaid model is basically phone choice and phone selection. And that's it. But with prepaid, you just get at least on T-Mobile, you just get a SIM anyway, or you can just get a SIM if you want, and then you do whatever you want with it. Well, what I want is for there to be an LTE option. Yeah. Yeah, by the way, this isn't on the topic list, but we should briefly mention it. We are hearing rumors, this actually came in through Timo News, but we've kind of been able to semi-corroborate it. There's discussion of a Samsung SGHT899 for T-Mobile that appears to be a Wifi phone device with a 720p display and LTE. This is the Odyssey, right? Yes. This is the phone that we rumored as the Odyssey, well, not rumored, it was in Samsung's core documents from the Apple core case last month, which appears to be basically a GS3 chassis for Apollo, which when you think about it is exactly what Apollo needs. And so if T-Mobile gets this device and it's one of their launch LTE devices, that'll be a pretty compelling Windows Phone 8 argument. But my guess, since T-Mobile has previously said that they won't have commercial LTE until 2013, my guess is that they'll launch it with the LTE dormant. And if it launches in 2012 at all, we don't even know that much. But if it launches this year, you probably won't realistically be able to get any real LTE service until next year. That's too long to wait, man. I can't handle it. I know. I know. I hear you. No, but I mean, so I mean, I mean, you know, I have this article about Sprint trying to be like the nice guy, but what's interesting with both of these guys is they're struggling, but they are managing to pick up some customers in the prepaid market. But the prepaid market just isn't as profitable as a postpaid market. And so like I would be really interested to know, like if you go into the boardroom of T-Mobile and Sprint, how they really feel about all these customers on these other plans that are cheaper for the customer, but not making them as much money. Like, they're, they're right. They're at least offsetting their losses in postpaid customers, but they're doing it with people that bring in less ARPU. We all know that T-Mobile got ARPU rules all. I don't know about Sprint, but T-Mobile has actively been trying to reduce subsidies for a long time. I think that that there is a perception at T-Mobile that that really weighs on their bottom line having to really heavily subsidize hardware. So they, I mean, I can think of several examples of hardware that they've launched in the past couple of years that they've launched at a higher price point, even on postpaid than AT&T and Verizon have. And that's because they, you know, they're not as willing to put these giant subsidies on those devices. So from that perspective, you would think that moving to this subsidy free model, even at the cost of monthly ARPU would be exactly what they've been trying to do on some level. At least if you're trying to be- Yeah, but then with T-Mobile, we end up in this, they're doing this like this equipment installment plan, which again, like in principle, I think it's a good idea where you still get a subsidy, you still sign a contract, but once you're done paying off the subsidy, the 20 bucks a month extra, then you just go back down to your regular cheaper plan. Like it's a great idea in principle, but in practice it just sort of is like another confusing mess. I just wish that somebody, Verizon, high Verizon would, you know, start listing the full unsubsidized price of phones. Even if you're paying the subsidized price, like they should list next to every phone, this is the full unsubsidized price first, and then this is the subsidized price if you're willing to sign into your contract. That should be how it is. Oh, but they do sometimes. They do. And the thing is when they do that, I'm never convinced that that's legitimate because they list things like 6599.99, what am I? Okay. 659.99. Yeah. And they kind of seem like inflated prices and they seem like way too perfect prices when you consider that they're buying those phones in box from the, you know, phone makers. So I never really trust those prices when they say this is how much it used to be and this is how much it could be otherwise, et cetera. That doesn't feel like the right price. Well, they're not selling the phone at cost, right? Even when they're selling it off contract, they're selling it with a profit margin. I mean, that's their right as a retailer. But I think what Dieter is suggesting is that it would be nice to see the American carriers, and we've said this countless times, but it would be nice to see the American carriers move to a slightly more European model where it really is about the cost of the phone. And then if you want a tariff that knocks some some of that, you know, that that reduces sting of that hardware cost, then go ahead and sign up for it. Yeah. Now, I totally agree. Totally agree. I mean, to me, this this preceding conversation is kind of absurd because I see exactly what you're talking about. The European model, Chris, where in the UK you have Amazon, you have a bunch of importers, guys like Expanses, Hantech, Clove, et cetera, et cetera. There's actually a really well developed mini industry of people importing, bringing in phones and then competing on price, which I know is kind of absurd to the US phone market. But it do compete on price just on the phone itself. And Amazon, because it doesn't pay any tax in the UK because tax dodging, such and such, really go stupendously low prices. And that creates great competition. And then I mean, then you could you have a choice, then you could go prepaid, you could have a contract, but just get the SIM card as opposed to buying the phone, do the whole subsidy dance, which is data says it gives people better output because the subsidy automatically includes some extra cash for them. Like however much you subsidize the cost of the phone is not perfect. It was tack on a couple of extra dollars and that's how you increase the output. So I mean, my advice to anybody is always buy the phone by itself, buy the data and the contract by itself. They're perfectly separable things. They don't need to go together. Now, let's see, that's a lie because you can't go into AT&T or Verizon today on a postpaid plan and say, give me the data and don't charge the extra that you would have charged me if I had bought a phone with a subsidy. You can do that on T-Mobile and you can do it on some of the prepaid stuff that are both on VNOS on Sprint and blah, blah, blah. But if you go and go into AT&T and pay for an Android phone straight up, you do not, you still are paying the same amount per month that you would be paying if you had AT&T subsidizing the phone by 400 bucks over the course of two years. So if you think you're gonna be switching phones a lot, sure, pay, don't pay the subsidy. But in the US, on AT&T and Verizon, I think that you should go for the subsidy. Even though you're stuck on a contract and it sucks and blah, blah, blah, at least you know that you're getting that 400 bucks off the price of the phone and that gets spread out over the cost of your two-year contract. You're actually paying more by buying a phone straight out if you're not getting a discount on your data and voice on your contract. By the way, Creighton just whispered into my ear, he said, I know what ARPU is, but for the benefit of our listeners- We've talked about ARPU every week. Well, you know, and he knows what ARPU is. We all know what ARPU is, but we should say ARPU is average revenue per user, ARPU. It's how much money the carriers squeeze out of you every month. And they all have basically, Verizon, I think had record ARPU, the highest of any carrier. AT&T was very high. Sprint was very proud of theirs. I don't know what T-Mobile was, it probably wasn't great. But they're all making a ton of money. And I hate them. I hate everybody. Well, actually, I mean, Sprint is losing a ton of money. It's losing billions, but that's because of the financial engineering that goes on behind the scenes with all of these corporations and the complexity. In terms of, as you say, Dieter, just selling stuff to people, yeah, they're making way too much money. We should, I want to, okay, so I want to talk real quick about this federal report they're going to maybe reassess, quote unquote, how cell phone radiation gets measured and approved in the US for compliance with the FCC. And we've got this report from Adrian describing how the process looks now. And that's fine. And we can have an argument that is completely uninformed about which study is more likely to be correct or not correct about whether or not it causes cancer. But what's crazy to me is these things are designed as though they assume you're carrying your phone in a holster. And I guess it's not recommended that you carry your phone in a pocket. So like the radiation stuff is set assuming the phone is on a holster on your belt, not in your pocket. And that seems like a really small difference in terms of its proximity to your body. But it's enough to make me go, I'm not going to start carrying my phone in my holster because that's crazy. But I mean, let's be real. This is only a problem if you have any desire to have children whatsoever, which, you know, that's fair enough. Yeah, which I don't. Right. I mean, who wants to reproduce? Yeah. Yeah. No, I haven't seen a normal human being put their phone in a holster in a very, very long time. I mean, there's Dwight on The Office uses a holster. But other than that, it's not really a common sight. It's more I think it's more a common sight these days for someone who's using a Blackberry or an IDEN device. That's actually if you want to see a phone in a holster, go to a Microsoft store and you will see those Lumia 900s and like iPhone holsters, iPhone mother cases. Are you serious? Yeah. So what? I think that I've seen it. And I think Matthew Parrazzano on Twitter, he was he was tweeting about it the other day, too. Like we've both seen it. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. Just by the way, I'm going to wait. I'm sorry, but I have to interrupt before I forget. There's a very important Tumblr that everyone should check out that I just found out about myself today called Celebrity Windows Phone Sightings that Tumblr dot com where you will see the amazing pictures of real life celebrities. Where you see under construction, still awaiting building materials. You didn't know about Celebrity Windows Phone Sightings that Tumblr dot com? No, I had no idea. But you're a feature. I know. I had no idea. So the most amazing thing about this site is that there are like tons of B and C and D listers and E listers like myself. And all of the B and C listers are using glossy white Nokia Lumia 900s, sometimes with the matching monster headphones. And my suspicion is that Nokia like blanketed the entire B and C list community with these devices at some point earlier this year. And then they all felt compelled to take Instagrams of themselves using these phones. It's great. It's really wonderful. I hope Nokia does it again for their Apollo launches. I don't know who photoshopped this cyan Lumia 900 in your hand there, Chris, but it's not a very good Photoshop. It wasn't me. That's all I can tell you is that it definitely was not me. Yeah, you've got much more Photoshop skills than us. He's quite proud of his Windows phone usage. So I don't think Chris wants to hide from that fact. But quick correction. There is absolutely never justification to say there's a really important Tumblr that everybody needs to know about. Like that sentence, you can just slide it away, file it away. It's not going to use that again. My only question was, do we think that there is somebody who used to work for HTC when they designed the Nexus One who has moved to the US government's testing facility? Because it's the same kind of thing. Remember when... Okay, wait. It's a dubious connection, but it's there. Sticking a phone in a host and not putting it in your pocket. Remember when the Nexus One has some screen issues with people popping it in their pocket, and HTC's first reaction was tantamount... Or was it Google's? I don't know. But the first reaction was tantamount to saying, well, you're not supposed to put the phone in your pocket. And everyone was like, what? I don't remember this at all. Are you guys serious? The Nexus One? Yeah, like crazy. It was within the past few years, people. Okay, well, the Nexus One, it had some screen issues with scratching on the screen. And... Oh, it was... Okay. That was... Okay. Well, I'm sure that some of our listeners slash viewers will back me up on this. Oh, it's scratching. Okay, I do vaguely remember this, yes. Yeah. According to HTC's technical support, they don't go in pockets unless the screen gets cracked. It's like you're not supposed to put it in your back pockets. Like you're not supposed to sit on the damn things. Right. Which remains true even today. I don't think these crashes will happen if people sit in on them. Then you kind of get the shattering effect. Well, so I think that there are a lot of people... There are probably a lot of people who just throw their phone in a pocket with keys and coins and stuff. Which I mean, it doesn't matter what kind of space age materials the phone is made out of, you still shouldn't be doing that. So that's one conceivable explanation. Speaking of phones and holsters, RIM says that it is totally ready to license Blackberry 10. So somebody should license it. Yeah. They have the A, now they need the B, you know? Yeah. I mean, we'll see. No, we won't. I mean, who... Man, who... No, we don't need to go into RIM anymore. That's dead. We also had the rumor that IBM was poking around at their enterprise services unit and maybe wanted to buy it. Came out of Bloomberg. My sense, and it's been this from the beginning since these rumors started, is the board has drank the Kool-Aid. They fully want to see what happens. They fully think that they're going to launch Blackberry 10 and then something's going to happen. I don't think they're even going to get that far. But I think they're going to get that far. It's going to be like it'll be out on the market for a month and then the board will be like, no, it didn't work. Let's sell the company. I think that you could very well be right. They could end up in a touchpad kind of situation where these phones hit the market for a very short period of time and then there's a bait and switch kind of thing and the company goes away or they break it up and sell it piecemeal or who knows. There are many, many different scenarios. None of them that I can see end well for RIM. I'm not a professional analyst and I don't have an MBA and I don't have a PhD in economics. So I don't want to make any diehard predictions on what's going to happen with this company. You look at every possible scenario. I don't know how or where they can succeed. And I'm sure to sort of back up this IBM thing that went around, I'm sure that there is a lot of value in what RIM has done and continues to do in that space. They have a lot of expertise in enterprise security and infrastructure and they can tie into all these different services and they're good supporting devices from an IT perspective. And that business undoubtedly has a lot of value. But as far as BlackGray10 specifically goes, they're starting from scratch. There's also the the the CUNIX business, which has a lot of value to there and a lot of cars. They're in a lot of other kinds of embedded systems so that there is value in the company that's waiting to be unlocked. But I don't see how, you know, I think that the end game for RIM is probably going to be that they, they break up pieces of the company that are worth a lot of money and sell them off and whatever's left just withers on the vine. That's that's dire, I know. But I mean, we've we've been through too much. You know, the downfall of the Symbian Foundation broke my heart. I'll never be able to get over that. And since then, I've just been a jaded son of a gun. I don't know. Well, you know, BlackGray10, like the Playbook, probably, well, no, in fact, I'm sure it will, will run Qt apps based on the Qt application framework, Qt, that Nokia has just sold off to, what is it, Digia? Digia? Must be Digia. And so like the core application, it's this framework that's actually like was pretty good for cross platform stuff. And I suppose it still is. It was, you know, for developing on Symbian and then on Meeco. I know that Qt apps were running on WebOS. They've got it running on the Playbook. So it seems like it's a relatively flexible application framework. But you know, if they'll get it running for Android, iOS, Windows 8, they say. But I mean, I think it's like I'm not a cute fanboy because I don't know that much about it. But it's always been like an interesting thing. It's always seemed like it was the closest to actually being cross platform app development before HTML5 and still probably better performance than some HTML5 stuff. And I'm a little bit sad to see Nokia drop it, but I'm not at all surprised. But Nokia wasn't really going to do anything with it. Qt was part of its former strategy, the one that revolved around the various Symbian, Meeco combinations that Nokia was going to hopefully try and develop and create. So it makes sense to set it up. I mean, Nokia initially sort of, I believe, some licensing rights to Digia, which is another Finnish company. So at least Qt is sticking around in Finland, even if Nokia's manufacturing facilities aren't. Zing. And the other thing really to be said about this is that Digia is paying 4 million euros to complete this deal, which tells you everything you need to know. Nokia is cutting ties with its former strategy, former operations. I mean, Stephen Neelop has already cut quite a few jobs, which presumably touch on this Qt development team. So the price of 4 million euros in corporate terms, I mean, to you and I, it's a lot of money. But in corporate terms, it's like, well, here's a bit of a moose change. It's like, you may as well have just open sourced it and given it away. You know, that is what I've gotten, you know, a little bit of goodwill. But I mean, I think it's a little bit like I think it's a little bit like dig. I think that there's a lot more to the story than the five hundred thousand dollars that was paid for dig. I think there's more to the story than the 4 million euro that did you play paid for Qt? Because, I mean, if nothing else, there's the ongoing expense of paying the the the engineers that are moving to Digia. I mean, you know, there's there's a whole thing. It's not just the upfront 4 million euro. Oh, yeah. No, no, that's a good point. I mean, Nokia could be saving a lot of money in redundancy payments if it decided, OK, well, this was in this we shut down the development. It might have had to pay off a whole bunch of these engineers, whereas Digia might be picking that up. A great example of a similar thing is over here in the UK with soccer clubs. A few of them have had debt problems and a club will be taken over for the price of a pound, like a single pound coin, but then the guy who takes over the club takes on the cost of like one hundred million, two hundred million pounds worth debts. So Digia might well be taking on some of that extra toxic baggage on Nokia's behalf and, you know, improving Nokia's bottom line at the end, because seriously, this 4 million euros, if we're talking Apple profits, it's like a rounding error. Yeah. It's relevant. Vlad, do you want to talk just really I mean, it's not strictly like smartphone related, but this this piece that you wrote about the surface and how it sort of might affect Nokia, it's just a really good piece. And I just wanted to at least tell people to go read it. But maybe you want to say something. Well, yes, briefly to try and get people not to jump my head off for it. Like, I'm not trying to attack anybody with this. It was more of rumination on the situation rather than anything else. And also, I readily admit this kind of late analysis to Microsoft's surface announcement, like Microsoft announced back in June. I'm writing this this week, but it just kind of dawned on me. It was surprising. And part of the reason why I came back to Nokia is because somebody emailed me asking, do you have any news about like a tablet? And then I was like, wait, hang on a second. We haven't heard anything about this. And the thing for me with surface is, first of all, Microsoft, in terms of publicity, it was a massive success, just getting people hyped up, interested in the product, etc. It was it was a brilliant success. And now it is when you say Windows eight and you say, what is the characteristic device for this platform? It's surface. And Microsoft is not shying away from that because it recently held a party to celebrate Windows eight going gold, being released to manufacturing. And at that party, it made a massive, massive cake. And it has surface tablets with the keyboards attached at the top of the cake. I mean, actually, the table was a cake. We had a pretty big discussion about this crazy Microsoft cake. The table was a cake. And then the surface on top, there was like three or four parts, which are all cake. It's madness. It's nuts. It's not a cake is what it is. Right. But the thing is, how does that impact Nokia? And some of the comments of my piece were like, well, you're overrating the importance of this Nokia tablet to Nokia's future because Nokia has never been in tablets. Nokia is about phones. I don't think I am. Like with all my love and respect to our readers, I think the tablet part of Nokia's strategy is going to be as huge as smartphone part of the strategy going forward. What do you guys think? Am I crazy? I think no. I mean, I. Go ahead. Speak. No, it's all you. You, you go. I was just going to say, yes, I think that Nokia in another world where Microsoft didn't create the surface definitely should have jumped into a Windows RT tablet and could have had a pretty decent level of success with it. Since we don't live in that world, then I if I were Nokia, I would scuttle plans for tablets as quickly as possible. I would I'd put them in the same building as all those cute developers were, you know, just like, oh, yeah, sure. You know, you guys work on some other future stuff. We'll get to it later because I just I don't see how even if they make something amazing, like you said, like it's what's the point? They're not going to be able to compete with Microsoft on that space. I kind of agree with you. But but I also feel like their expense in developing a Windows RT tablet has the potential to be pretty minimal because it's it really is essentially a scaled up phone. The software is written for them. They have their their design language, which is still very attractive, largely because, you know, their phones that use this design language, pretty low volume at this point. So it's still a kind of a novel thing that won't be true forever once they have a lot of success. That's no longer going to be a very interesting idea. But at this point, it is. So if they made a scaled up Lumia 900 that was a Windows RT tablet, I think that that they would be able to do something with that. They could for one thing. This is a very important point. Microsoft, correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe I'm completely crazy on this, but I don't think Microsoft has said anything about availability of LTE Windows or excuse me, surfaces. Is that right? That's true. That's totally right. They've only been Wi-Fi so far. Right. So so what? So maybe Nokia's angle can be, OK, we are going to work directly with the carriers. We're going to do bundles by this Lumia 910 or whatever they call their Apollo device and and get this this great LTE Windows RT tablet that looks exactly like your your Lumia or some discount. I don't know. No, seriously, I mean, I find the suggestion crazy that Nokia would just cut off plans for a tablet. I do feel like the company is already really heavily invested in developing this tablet. Like I don't think Nokia would do a tablet without like blowing it out and just doing something really impressive. In that respect, I do feel like Nokia is very much kind of like Apple and Sony, where those guys don't enter a new product category without having something that will blow people away, you know, and just recapture the hype. And this is the thing. Nokia's first tablet is a momentous product, completely separate of its specs and its looks and its operating system and whatever. It's like iconic brand, iconic company entering a new market segment. Let's see what happens. Let's see what they do. You know, they have such a great history of design. But then like Microsoft completely just took the wind out of that sale because Microsoft did the really nicely designed Windows RT tablet. It did the really nice little innovation, which the touch cover and the type cover and all these other tweaks and the integrated kickstand, which is like perfectly designed. So it's like, wait, wait, hang on a second. What is left for Nokia to do to blow people away? How do you do a Windows RT tablet that is so superior to Surface that it makes people not think about it? I don't know if you can do that right now. Well, I think their only option, their only smart option if they're going to continue with the tablet strategy is to search for demographics, search for kinds of customers that aren't completely or appropriately served with the Surface running RT or Pro. And I don't know, I'm not, you know, I'm not enough of an expert to know if those demographics exist. But if they do, that, you know, I find it hard to believe that that those two products are the be all end all solution to the, quote unquote, Windows tablet. There have to be other ways that that market can be addressed. Well, I will say this, the Surface, we don't know what the distribution is going to be on it. So Nokia is going to can get in every carrier store and Nokia can get in every Best Buy and everywhere else. We don't know if Microsoft is going to be doing more than just Microsoft store and online. You know, these might not be everywhere. They're certainly not going to be inside the carrier stores. And so I could see an argument for a Nokia tablet from that perspective. But from the perspective of like the ecosystem needs Nokia to swoop in and save Windows RT tablets by making something that is incredibly compelling hardware. I just don't see a huge need for it. Although Nokia will have the AT&T LTE that you crave, Dieter. That cannot live without. So there's your killer feature. Yeah. Chris, do you, speaking of. How do I put this, speaking of controversial arguments, do you want to talk about the reserve tank? Because I think you pretty much lost your mind. I think that this is this is a solution. Like this is this is just insane. I've gotten that exact reaction countless times over the past few days. I was actually really surprised that I don't think a single person said, oh, that's a pretty cool idea. Everyone's just like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You've lost your mind. Give us give us the 10 second pitch of what you're suggesting. So here's the basic idea. In the motorcycle world, it is very common for there to be this this thing on the somewhere on the engine that is essentially a valve that switches between two gas tank intakes. There's a normal and a reserve. And they're both again, they're both going into the same tank. But the reserve can access a little bit of extra fuel at the bottom of the tank. And the idea is that you have that emergency stash of gas that can't be accessed normally. So when the when the when the tank goes, quote unquote, dry and the engine putters to a stop, you have just enough gas to get to a gas station or get to your destination by switching over to the reserve. And then you go on. And this has been a thing in motorcycles for all of time. It's been there for four decades. And so I thought, well, why couldn't you adapt that to phones? Because I keep there are countless occasions where I don't properly manage the battery life that I have available to me on my device. It's not that I couldn't. It's that I don't either. I over browse. I'm checking my email too often. I'm sending too many picture messages. Something stupid is happening. And by four or five p.m., the phone is dead. Hang on. You're sending too many picture messages. You're like you're just messing it up. You're all like, I have sweet man. I totally love picture mail. I am going to just live stream with my life with little three twenty by three twenty images that I'm going to send to my friends. Look, look, man, MMS is the future. OK, mark my words. But anyway, OK, go ahead. Sorry. The basic idea is this. I want a forced shut off of the device before the battery is actually dead so that when that shut off occurs, I can do something to the phone that gives me access to that last remaining, you know, twenty five, thirty, thirty five, forty minutes of battery life just enough to make one last call or navigate to my destination or, you know, get to a charger. And my initial thinking and this is what I posited in the piece was that the way to do that would be a physical switch underneath the battery cover that you actually pry the battery cover off to get to. So it was really like, you know, it was a, you know, a come to Jesus moment when your battery ran out. Like you had to do something to the phone to actually switch the battery over to reserve. But but with the comments that I got on the piece, it got me to thinking about how you could actually do this in software. And I think the solution would be this and that there might even be a way to do this with like locale or one of those other situationally aware apps right now. I don't know. I haven't looked into it. But one option would be for, you know, when you get down to say 10 or 5 percent battery life, the phone just shuts off and then, you know, you pull the phone out of your pocket. So that way it's kind of a self preservation thing, right? The phone shuts itself off early so that you have enough battery life when you when you switch the phone back on. So you turn the phone back on at this point, you get a dire warning message on the phone that says, hey, doofus, your battery is just about dead. You need to do something about it. But you still have a few minutes to do those last few things that need to do. So maybe you could handle it that way. I still like the physical switch, but I think I'm literally the only human on the planet that thinks that's a good idea. Well, I'm smart actions does this on recent Motorola devices. There's like a low battery mode. I'm pretty sure that the Galaxy S3 has a low battery thing where it like it alerts you. Hey, you're down to 10 percent. We are turning off unnecessary services like. Oh, yeah. There's a battery saver. Yeah. Yeah. Like how is that not a better solution? Because you really say. I'll tell you exactly why, because the battery saver mode, I've used the battery saver mode on the GS3. First of all, I'm not convinced that it does anything. I think it might just be psychosomatic. It seems to drain at the exact same rate. But more importantly, regardless, even if it is saving saving power drain, it's still draining power. I want to I want it to stop draining power, period, when I get down to a certain threshold so that by the time I recognize by the time I pull the phone out of my pocket and see what's happening, I have that guaranteed last remaining five or seven or 10 percent of the battery. Look, this is very, very simple. The problem here is that Chris is applying his petrol head mind to more problems. And the solutions that are coming out are just way too mechanical. That's just the basic simplicity of it. I mean, Chris, let's face it. You're also a watch enthusiast and your favorite watches are really intricate ones. Fellow watch enthusiasts get really giddy and excited about things that are actually called complications. Like a good thing in a watch is a complication. So coming from that sort of world, Chris, yeah, a reserve tank makes sense. Look, look, guys, once you try a phone with the reserve switch, you're not going to be able to go back. No, Chris, I'm not even joking. Your reserve tank in a phone is exactly like these really luxurious, really highly designed watches that have, I mean, a spectacularly sophisticated and, you know, brilliantly designed movements that represent time in the most obscure way. Like you need to look at it like it's Japanese and interpret that thing. And like one thing is twisting around and then another thing is rolling around and then the other one is snaking through and you've got the minutes and the seconds and it's all kind of weird and freaky and whatever. And it always takes you like seven seconds to figure out the time. That is your reserve tank, which, you know what? I think there's room for that. So what you're telling me is that this is going to end up on a Vertu. You're telling me that this is going to end up on a Vertu because that's designed to be like a watch. I mean, you'll love it. And it will be amazing. If you're selling Vertu phones, wouldn't that be kind of a nutty thing to be selling to people like, OK, we've got a battery. You can replace it. You can swap it. But if everything is desperation stage and you really just need to use the phone for emergencies, we've got a special battery. This is an extra one. So you can have the battery out and the phone still work because it's a Vertu and it's, you know, etc, etc. That's got marketing potential right there. It does. It does. Yeah. If we could do it, we're going to sue because we just came up with the entire pitch for it. We're suing everybody all the time. And I see where you're going with this. This is definitely a segue, isn't it? Oh, it is? The segue is to discussing the- Yes, it's a segue. Apple versus Samsung. We do not have time. We're not going to get into it. But the Apple versus Samsung trial, we do have insanely complete coverage. Brian Bishop is there on the ground every day. Matt and Nilay are doing analysis with him. There's a huge stream of everything that's happening at the trial. And if you're not subscribed to the official Vergecast feed, they're doing a weekly breakout podcast specifically for this trial, Nilay and Matt and Brian, to talk about all the insanity that is happening there. And so if you're at all interested in any of this, hit the stream and listen to that podcast. And I mean, there's just so much stuff that's happened. I don't even know if there's one thing I could pull out for us to talk about that. Dude, just say readtheverge.com. There it is. Go there. Just be there. We'll be there. You be there. And then good things will happen. Yeah. And that, I think, is going to wrap up our mobile show for the week. If you want to follow us, we're at Verge on Twitter. I'm at Backlant. Chris is at ZPower. Vlad is at Vlad Savov. We've got an email address. It's themobileshow at theverge.com. And next week, we'll be here. So you should be too. Thanks for listening. Bye, guys. Thanks, guys. Join us again next week. Bye.
 In the smartphone ecosystem, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important
 groups.
 The conglomerates who claim to provide innovative new products, and the Verge Mobile Show hosts
 who call them out on their shenanigans.
 These are their stories.
 Hi I'm Dieter Baume.
 I'm Vlad Isavov.
 I'm Chris Sigler.
 And this is the Verge Mobile Show.
 This is a Verge and Mobile, Law and Verge.
 Show number 12, week of August 13th.
 Thank you very much to the inescapable Sean Hollister for our introduction this week.
 I thought that was pretty special.
 He's the man with the voice of gold.
 And by the way, Dieter, I think I speak for Vlad when I say that I very much missed you
 last week.
 Not to say Ross wasn't an amazing guest host, but I personally missed you.
 I missed you guys as well.
 It was a sad time.
 Instead of you guys, I had Dan Hesse, who is very cool and very tall, but not as fun.
 Also we are- Not as strong names or anything.
 We're an all beard podcast today.
 We are.
 We are.
 Actually, I haven't seen- This is a little embarrassing, but I haven't actually looked
 at the live feed yet, so I have no idea what Vlad looks like.
 Is his beard lush?
 Is it glorious?
 It's glorious.
 I don't know if I'd call it lush though.
 It's in the process of growing.
 It's in the process.
 It's getting there.
 I'm not looking at the live stream either.
 Vlad, I don't think that I mentioned this to you before, but I think you tweeted a picture
 of yourself with a handlebar thing going on.
 And it looked absolutely amazing, and I have no idea why you didn't keep that.
 I don't know.
 I kind of ended up feeling wrong.
 This wasn't your sound.
 It's just the wrong appearance having a mustache.
 I grew that out, especially for you, Chris, as you know.
 I appreciate that.
 You told me- It's bad having a mustache is wrong.
 I don't want anybody to be right.
 I know.
 I feel the same way.
 I feel exactly the same way.
 Actually, since we're going down that topic, I came across this website.
 I think it's askmen.com, which the website isn't that random or weird, but the article
 was it was like the top 10 countries with the most mustaches in them.
 And Bulgaria actually ranked in the top 10 in terms of prevalence of mustaches.
 I think it probably isn't absolute numbers.
 It's mustaches relative to men or relative to males, but that's still impressive and
 surprising.
 And would you say that they're really nice looking mustaches?
 Are they like Ron Swanson caliber mustaches or are they kind of thin?
 Could they use some work?
 I think most of them are pretty strong, fine mustaches.
 It's that Mediterranean stock.
 We were never short of facial hair or any other sort of hair.
 But anyway, mobile devices.
 We have batteries.
 I've got it.
 I've got it.
 We are broadcasting on the internet, showing you our facial hair live.
 For many of you using Flash and Flash is going away on Android.
 It is.
 How do you like that?
 So basically, they're going to stop providing it in Google Play, nay Android market, tomorrow
 as we record this.
 I want to say I'm not sad to see it go, but I'm a tiny, tiny wee bit sad that it is going
 before we have good, reliable, consistent mobile experiences on Android for video.
 I just wanted to watch this morning actually a Vimeo video.
 Didn't work on the Nexus 7 and I was like, oh, well that sucks.
 And I tried it on the iPad.
 No problem.
 So I am sad that I'm not sad to see Flash go on Android because it was never any good
 at all ever.
 But I am sad that it does mean that that last fallback solution for watching certain content
 is just not going to be there.
 Well this, I think it's an important thing though because it really puts the pressure
 on the entire industry to step up and replace it.
 As long as Flash is around and available on all these new devices, that kind of lessens
 the impetus to make things work correctly.
 And I think that if you'd asked me in 2008, I would have told you, or even 2010, I probably
 would have told you that I deeply, deeply despised Apple for steadfastly refusing to
 support Flash on mobile.
 But in retrospect, I think it was the right move and it helped move the industry along.
 And now this is going to be the next step to push it to the next level where we are
 completely non-reliant on Flash.
 I agree, we're not there yet, but hopefully this will take us there.
 Wait, Chris, you didn't like, did you not like it when Apple didn't want to support
 Flash?
 Because I then can lay claim to being right at the time, whereas you were so terribly
 wrong.
 Because I was in support of Apple's decision.
 As Dieter just said, Flash on Android or any sort of mobile device has never really worked
 properly.
 And where it's worked, it's consumed power, both in terms of processing power and battery
 life in ways that just don't fit mobile devices at all.
 So it hasn't really been a useful or functional addition at all.
 So Apple's decision not to support it, not to get into that entire mess was absolutely
 the right one.
 But I also felt that was the case at the time.
 When Steve Jobs was writing his thoughts on Flash and he had like, what was it, like six
 reasons why it was a nightmare?
 It was Flash that he wrote that about, wasn't it?
 Six reasons Flash is a nightmare?
 I don't remember.
 He wrote his open letter about Flash.
 Yeah.
 Oh yeah, I remember that.
 I think there were six reasons.
 Were there six reasons?
 Oh yes.
 It's not open, the full web, reliability, battery life, touch, and growing dependent
 on third party tools.
 Those are his six reasons.
 So I don't necessarily agree with every single point on his list.
 But at the time, a lot of people, they write it as just a bit of arrogance or whatever
 on Apple's part and just trying to be different from everybody else.
 And it is absolutely true that if Flash could be made to work on mobile devices, it was
 the ideal standard because it was just so ubiquitous on a desktop.
 Every video hosting service, every video sharing service we've had has been Flash based from
 the start.
 People are doing HTML5 video streaming as an add on, as a secondary option.
 And again, as Dieter said, it's still in the experimental stage.
 Not everybody has, or I don't know if anybody has a really good player like that for HTML5.
 So it would have been great if it worked, but it never did.
 So why should we be sad?
 It never worked on mobile.
 It worked fine on the desktop with the exception of the horrendous processor matter.
 There's a whole lot of reasons it didn't work in the past few years.
 But initially, it was great.
 My problem is that HTML5 just isn't there.
 I mean, there was the experience I have every day trying to watch video on Android devices
 that don't support HTML5, or rather the way that the app developer or the website developer
 coded their HTML5 version of the video, it doesn't appear on Android.
 And that's really the issue is I feel like there's not a de facto, this is how everybody
 should embed video now solution on HTML5.
 I know that there's this fight with Google, then Mozilla was in it, and Apple was in the
 debate about what exactly the HTML5 video standard should be in terms of encoding the
 video and serving it.
 The way that you embed it in a page is relatively simple.
 And I don't know exactly what the status is on that battle, but I do know that when I'm
 on a mobile device, and there's video that I want to watch from Comedy Central or Vimeo
 or whomever, that I just cannot assume that it's going to work.
 It works on usually iOS because it's so ubiquitous and everybody knows how to code for it.
 But on Android and other platforms, it's just I can never really know.
 And I find myself saving stuff to pocket and then going back to my desktop later so I can
 watch it.
 And that's annoying.
 I also think that the HTML5 experience, not just with video, but in general, there are
 some things where you have an HTML5 experience and a Flash experience, and the Flash experience
 is still a little bit better or richer.
 And we need to get to the point where we can completely supplant Flash.
 And we're not there yet.
 A good example is Lytro, which I have right here in my hands.
 You guys probably aren't seeing it.
 But the Lytro embed to do the interactive depth of field for just the web-based version
 is not nearly as good as the Flash embed.
 And so that's one of many examples where we need to improve that.
 Well, OK.
 OK, that's fair enough.
 But seriously, the point about Flash, and Dita said it works fine on the desktop.
 It doesn't work fine on desktop.
 Just today, I published this article slash editorial where I embedded a number of Flash
 videos.
 And I can tell you that while I was composing it and looking at it in our layout editor,
 the number of times that the Flash video just completely blanked out and I was seeing a
 white space on the page.
 And then sometimes it would come back.
 Sometimes I would hover over the white space and the video would pop up.
 And sometimes I would need to refresh entirely in order to see the video again.
 So that's one thing.
 This was happening with me on Chrome.
 But you can see those issues in every browser.
 And all of us have had this issue of having a Flash video playing somewhere in a tab,
 somewhere in your browser, and then your mouse point just disappears.
 Right?
 So this is, again, Chrome specific.
 But we've all had this issue.
 We've all cried and moaned about this issue.
 Adobe's never fixed it.
 And I mean, we already know that Adobe is abandoning Flash everywhere, which, again,
 to me is good riddance.
 But I don't want us to speak of Flash in overly positive terms just because it's dying and
 that's our habit, not to speak badly of the dead, right?
 To try and be nice.
 I just don't want us to sugarcoat it.
 Flash has sucked for such and such a long time.
 And it's really time for us to just accept that we've got the Internet.
 We've got things like video that we want to stream.
 And it's up to people, coders, to figure out how to do that in the best way.
 Flash wasn't it.
 So we move on.
 But I have no problem speaking terribly of Symbian.
 I don't know what you're talking about.
 Chris's email address is chris at the verge dot com if you want to talk to him about your
 thoughts on Symbian.
 Oh, man.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I guess we will see if it would be nice if there were a clear open standard to
 replace Flash with HTML5 video that everybody sort of knew or knows.
 I feel like it's just going to be a mess for a while.
 And that's fine.
 It's better to have that, I guess, than Flash.
 But you know, I mean, Adobe should be that company.
 They said they were going to be.
 They made comments like they were going to help solve this problem.
 But who knows if they're actually going to pull it off because Adobe hasn't.
 They're not exactly firing on all cylinders right now, if you know what I mean.
 I know what you mean.
 Yeah.
 What should we talk about?
 So Motorola, Google is going to lay off 20 percent of Motorola's workforce, which is
 a bummer.
 Google has decided that it doesn't want all of Motorola's cylinders.
 You know what?
 You guys can just go.
 We don't need you.
 Yeah.
 And they're going to kick out fewer phones, too, right?
 Right.
 So these are I was trying to figure this out earlier in the week.
 Are these Google's first publicly announced layoffs in the company's history?
 If if they aren't, then then it's one of the very few.
 I know that they've they've quietly pushed some people out of the door in the past, but
 I don't know if this is ever really happened on this scale before.
 It's it's on this scale.
 Definitely.
 And this is some 4000 employees that are being fired.
 Right.
 Yeah, it's a big deal for these guys.
 And I think, you know, I have mixed feelings about it, as I think we all have mixed feelings
 about Motorola.
 I don't think that if Motorola had stayed in an independent company, they would have
 gone this route as drastically and as quickly as they have.
 And I think that Google is really anxious to push the non Android hardware out of its
 portfolio.
 Really, that's what what it's all about.
 Right.
 Motorola has a lot of low end devices still that it sells in emerging markets.
 Brazil and China and India, where, you know, they aren't Android based.
 And that just isn't that doesn't play into Google's business model for Motorola at all.
 So it's getting rid of those right off the top.
 One thing that that I heard yesterday that's kind of interesting, at least to the the local
 economy, since I'm Chicago based here, is that they had specific incentives to, I believe,
 to move their headquarters to downtown Chicago.
 Because right now they're they're actually based way out in a suburb.
 But in order to qualify for those incentives, they had to maintain local employment of at
 least twenty five hundred.
 This this round of layoffs pushes them below twenty five hundred.
 So they actually are now disqualified for incentives that they had had before.
 So I don't know what that means in terms of, you know, where their headquarters is going
 to ultimately be.
 I think they're still moving downtown here.
 But I you know, I've said for many months now and I still think this is true, that in
 the long term it makes a ton of sense for them to be either co-located with Google or
 at least in the same neighborhood.
 And they do have an office on the West Coast.
 But you know, they've got most of what I heard is that most of their local employees in Chicago
 are engineers.
 Those are the kinds of people that you want on the West Coast.
 So I wouldn't be surprised to see them move out west sooner or later.
 I would guess it would take a while before they move out west.
 I think that at some point, Illinois or even Chicago would be like, well, you know, we
 really do want you to stay.
 We'll see if we can change our tone on those incentives.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I personally like the idea of there being innovative technology company not located
 in California.
 I think that's, you know, that's good for the diversity of thought and what goes into
 smartphones.
 And I'm now giving motor oil praise for its diversity of thought, which is a weird thing.
 But nevertheless, I'm doing it.
 I don't know.
 I mean, I look at the photon cue.
 I wonder just what's going on over there.
 I agree with Dieter.
 There's absolutely a need to diversify the sources for our designs and our ideas for
 phones, whether it be outside of the West Coast of the United States or entirely outside
 of the United States.
 It's good to have fresh ideas.
 I mean, one of the most innovative phones, which never actually materialized, if you
 guys remember, it was the first else.
 And that was thought up over in Israel.
 And the innovation with it was that the whole UI was supposed to be thumb based.
 So you only use one hand, one thumb, and it'll kind of like the UI grows around your fingers
 and your interaction with it, which probably was like too ambitious a project.
 And that's why it never materialized.
 But it didn't come from San Francisco area.
 It didn't come from the Bay Area.
 So I agree.
 Also on the topic of Motorola, I need to mention this.
 I got a Droid Razr Max here because I wanted to see it.
 I got it from Motorola.
 I wanted to see it for the first time.
 And the first thing is this thing has a massive battery inside it.
 But I can't tell that.
 It doesn't feel fat.
 Like I expected it to be much thicker than it actually is.
 And I just unplugged it from the charger the moment we started the show.
 So I'll update you guys somewhere somehow.
 The battery is not going to decrease during the course.
 If you actually see the battery go down while we're podcasting, that means we've been podcasting
 way too long.
 No, no, no.
 I'm talking about the podcast and the show.
 I'm talking in general during the week.
 Because I've also given myself a tweet a while ago for a week.
 So I'm not tweeting for a week just to see that I can do it.
 So I can't tweet when the battery runs out.
 But maybe I can Google+.
 Yeah, but you're on Google+.
 So I mean, really.
 I don't mean any disrespect, Vlad, but that really isn't as ambitious of a project as
 Paul is undertaking.
 What is, Chris?
 I should well start going off the pyramids and be less ambitious.
 This is true.
 This is true.
 Yeah, the droid that my concern with the droid razor max.
 I just tweeted this yesterday is that I don't know if they can repeat the feat of that device
 with a better display.
 Right.
 Because the reason they were able to do that is because they took the razor chassis, which
 is only seven point one millimeters, and the way they got down to seven point one millimeters
 is by using a really crappy self illuminating display, an AMOLED and just bumping it back
 up to the regular thickness of a of a regular like modern smartphone and then using all
 that that remaining capacity for battery.
 I think it's what, 3000 milliamp hours or something.
 So the question is, can they?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 So the question is, can they take that concept and put in a display that doesn't suck?
 I don't know.
 I mean, that thing is going to last a month.
 I mean, the razor max has got incredibly good battery life with LTE.
 I mean, if you're just running this thing, just straight HSPA.
 I mean, I can't imagine what you could do to it to kill a battery.
 You'd literally have to like put it in an oven and run a flash video before it goes
 away tomorrow constantly.
 And maybe you could drain the battery.
 We'll find out.
 Yeah.
 I mean, like what I'm saying is it's such a fat battery that you could easily have fat
 phone and feel justified in the phone being chunky.
 Like a perfect example is the PeerView 808, which I've had plenty of recent experience
 with.
 It feels about, you know, twice the size of this.
 Like the Razor Max just kind of feels, it just feels like a regular size phone.
 It isn't extra super slim and skinny like the original Razor or the new HT and Samsung
 phones, but I actually don't need it to be.
 Like it feels like it's a great size and there's no compromise.
 But as Chris says, the no compromise in terms of size is down to the AMOLED display.
 Which is not just...
 Let's actually bring it back to Motorola itself because this is interesting to me.
 I mean, just looking at this particular phone, which I don't know why I'm carrying on about
 it so much, like nobody else has really tried to match that, you know, we'll just go crazy
 with the battery thing.
 Samsung has done, stuck a really big battery inside the Galaxy S3, but that's just part
 of the whole package.
 And Samsung and HTC, like I've been complaining for a long time, keep going for bigger and
 bigger displays and trying to crank out specs, but Motorola is doing something different.
 So if the company is now going to focus on a few good phones, maybe, hopefully, that
 diversity that Dieter and I spoke about will help and then we'll see some few good phones
 that are actually different from the good phones that everybody else is trying to build.
 What do you guys think?
 Right.
 Yeah, I would like to see something, you know, inspiring.
 I mean, the Razr, it's a cool design and I like the aesthetic of the hardware, of course,
 you know, the software, I don't know, whatever.
 But I mean, it just, it didn't catch my attention because I was more focused on the Galaxy Nexus
 and the innovation that was happening there.
 And it took them forever to get ice cream sandwich on the Razr.
 And we've obviously seen Samsung just dominate and we've seen HTC at least try to sort of
 reinvent itself, but I'm interested to see if Motorola can, I don't know, elucidate a
 similar vision for, you know, fewer phones and this is what Motorola is.
 This is what it means to buy a Motorola phone now.
 Because right now, if you ask somebody, what does it mean to buy a Motorola phone?
 They'll tell you, what do they tell you?
 They'll tell you it's a StarTac or Razr, the original Razr, or they'll tell you that, oh,
 yeah, that Razr Max has got ridiculously long battery life.
 And those are cool, you know, features and that's, you know, there's people still know
 Motorola, but nobody thinks about Motorola as like having a corporate identity as an
 Android manufacturer.
 And it'll be interesting to see if they can actually pull that off.
 I want a Pebble 2.
 That's all I want.
 Pebble 2, the original Pebble was an amazing device.
 The spring-loaded hinge, the way that you opened it by like sliding it off the magnet.
 I think I've waxed poetic about this phone three or four times in the past, but it's
 worth doing again since we're talking about Motorola.
 My question is, you know, we've heard Google say on many occasions that they're going to
 run Motorola at an arm's length, which I think is good for many reasons.
 One is that there's less appearance of, you know, favoritism among other Android OEMs,
 but then also it makes it easier for Google to offload Motorola in the future if they
 want to, which I wouldn't be surprised if you're two or three down the road that happened.
 But by the same token, you can kind of tell, you definitely get the impression that Google
 is not a fan of OEM skins and they are probably not a fan of the fact that there, there really
 isn't anyone other than Google doing anything with the stock Android experience with the
 Nexus series.
 And we've heard these rumors about the Wall Street Journal rumor about a series of Nexus
 devices coming out later this year, Nexus phones specifically.
 So I'm wondering whether Motorola is going to continue to develop a blur or whatever
 it is that they're calling it these days.
 Or if they are, I mean, is that going to rub Google the wrong way enough that they kind
 of steer Motorola in the direction of going stock?
 The Razer Nexus, I'm just thinking of the name.
 Yeah.
 Sounds good.
 Sounds good.
 I'm on record.
 What did I commit to buying a hundred Razers if they ship it with a stock Android?
 Is that what I said?
 This is like from two months ago, three months ago.
 I hope it happens.
 But then, you know, I guess Motorola becomes the company that ships stock Android.
 That could be cool.
 I could get on board with that actually, instead of just waiting for the next Nexus device.
 I am sick and to death about not having a stock Android LTE device on AT&T.
 I'm running Cyanogen Mod 9, I'm HTC One X developed by a guy over at XDA, and it's running
 pretty well, but it's still not quite, you know, fully stable.
 So I'm going to be switching back to the Galaxy Nexus.
 Oh, you're switching back to the Galaxy Nexus?
 I'm going to get back to that.
 Let me just say that quote from you was just the perfect distillation of a first world
 problem.
 I'm sick to death of not having an AT&T LTE phone with such and such specs and such and
 such capabilities and stock Android.
 Not having that is literally making me sick.
 I am getting closer to death because this thing is not in my life right now.
 Look, look, okay, Europe, Europe and Asia led, led the, the entire wireless industry
 for a solid 20 or even 30 years.
 And now it's America's turn.
 Freedom prevails.
 Bald eagles flying over.
 In fact, Creighton and Brendan, if you guys can add some bald eagles behind me right now,
 I'd appreciate that as sort of a CGI thing, maybe a flag, maybe some fireworks.
 It is our turn to lead the world with LTE and I am reveling in it and I know Dieter
 is as well.
 And you're just going to have to deal with it.
 You know what?
 I'm just going to go out and buy a PS Vita on behalf of the Euro Japanese team.
 Just to support our- I really wish I had my sunglasses sitting
 here because I really want to deal with it, but I don't have my sunglasses nearby.
 But seriously, to make the point though, Dieter is switching back to the Galaxy Nexus.
 Chris admitted over the weekend that he's switching back to the Galaxy Nexus.
 I'm switching back to the Galaxy Nexus temporarily until I actually go out and do-
 Yeah, it's temporary with both of you.
 I know.
 It's temporary until the next Nexus.
 Fine.
 Okay.
 But seriously, I'm the guy who wrote the piece against Chris's piece saying the Galaxy Nexus
 isn't the best Android phone.
 And then you guys are using the Galaxy Nexus again.
 The facts kind of speak for themselves.
 No, listen, Vlad.
 I'm just going to put an end to this rampant and baseless speculation right now.
 Okay.
 Yes, my SIM is in a Galaxy Nexus.
 Yes.
 But the only reason I did it is because like there is no good reason.
 I was just like, eh, I'll switch phones for like, cause I, I, to be very honest, I haven't
 played with 4.1 that much on the phone side.
 I played with an X of seven a lot, but not a 4.1 on a phone.
 I only used it on the Galaxy Nexus for like 15 minutes before I put it back in the GX
 3 before.
 So I wanted to give it like an honest and fair shake, although AT&T HSPA in Chicago
 is just as bad as ever.
 It's completely nonfunctional during weekdays.
 So this isn't going to stand for very long.
 I'm sure that by the end of this week, I will be back into another device.
 So the fact that we started a conversation on Motorola and ended talking about the Galaxy
 Nexus is a perfect example of where the company is right now.
 We gotta move on.
 I want to talk about this new mobile payments committee, which I want to say sounds really
 ominous, but maybe it's not.
 So I've been complaining at length about the fact that mobile payments is fragmented and
 there was no unified ecosystem and you never know if you're going to be able to use it.
 And apparently all the big players listened to me, to me specifically, and in reaction
 to my specific complaints, because I'm so influential and powerful in the industry,
 they have formed the mobile payments committee, which consists of Google, ISIS, PayPal, Verifone,
 Intuit, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
 Basically-
 Can I just drop a quote in here?
 Just very briefly?
 I believe I'm quoting correctly from Civilization here.
 And the quote is, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the growing needs of the bureaucracy.
 That's how this feels to me.
 Let's have a committee to organize the organizational body.
 But it is, hey, laugh about it all you want, but it is a very important step.
 It is a step that was needed because it was starting to look like this was just going
 to devolve into a really consumer hostile fiefdom that served nobody's benefits, or
 best interest, excuse me.
 And I have to say, after using the latest version of Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus
 the past couple of days, it's starting to congeal.
 It's starting to really come together.
 And I want to see all of these carriers, and Google, and Apple, I want to see all these
 guys get on the same page, because this is something that has to happen.
 Yeah, I mean, what was the takeaway at CTI?
 I forget what that big article about fragmentation, what we called it.
 One of the original headlines was, mobile payments, nobody's winning, but we're all
 losing.
 And it's all, everybody was trying to win.
 And that just meant that you had no way of knowing if your particular wallet would work.
 And in theory, anyway, all these guys being on a committee together, sure, it's more bureaucracy,
 and it's all star chamber, and there's going to be backroom deals, and blah, blah, blah.
 But you know what?
 If the thing that gets kicked out of this is, here's the standard, you can have all
 these fragmented solutions, but here's a baseline standard that they're all going to use so
 that you can trust that your wallet will work when you go to CVS, or 7-Eleven, or Tiffany's,
 or I don't know, or People Shop.
 That's good.
 And I hope that that actually happens.
 Now, the interesting thing about this crazy committee is that there's one company that's
 not on it that you would expect to be on it, and that's Square, aka the company that's
 actually doing the best job at mobile payments right now.
 Yeah.
 I wouldn't actually expect Square to be on that committee.
 And just very briefly, to come back to them, the reason I was flippant with the point about
 bureaucracy was that, yes, it's a beautiful dream that they will organize themselves and
 have a cogent plan that applies to everybody.
 But I kind of feel like we've seen this with a whole bunch of such loose, voluntary organizations,
 things like the Open Handset Alliance.
 What does that stand for with Android?
 Who does what there?
 How does that contribute to the overall landscape?
 I don't think it does anything.
 And I kind of feel like this is going to go the same way.
 But also, this committee that is now being gathered seems to be exclusively focused on
 enabling mobile payments via the mobile phone itself, whereas Square is focused on its own
 service and also on its own appendage for a phone.
 So you need the Square card reader in order to have your cards read.
 I don't think Square has a- No, that's not true.
 Square has geofencing where you walk in and the cashier has got an iPad and they're like,
 oh, Vlad just walked in.
 And you're like, hey, I'm Vlad.
 And they're like, hey, Vlad, I would like this coffee.
 And here's your coffee.
 And then you say thanks and you walk away.
 And that's the whole transaction.
 You don't pull out your phone.
 You don't swipe a card.
 You don't tap an NFC thing.
 They know who you are.
 Your picture pops up because you walked into their geofence.
 And then you ask for what you want to buy, and they sell it to you, and you're done.
 So I have completely missed this business model pivot from Square.
 I still remember the Square card reader.
 Oh, no, they still have it.
 It still exists.
 It's still their most popular option.
 And in fact, they recently, I want to say like six months ago, they finally switched
 it to being encrypted.
 It used to be that it would just send the credit card data unencrypted, but now it's
 encrypted so it'll only work with Square's app, which was the thing that PayPal and Intuit
 were yelling at them about or saying they were better at.
 Anyway, but the thing about Square is you want to root for them.
 Jeff Dorsey, is that his name?
 And little startup, and is it an exciting story?
 And that's great, but that's not what gets you at the checkout register at Macy's.
 But then again, it got him in the checkout register at Starbucks.
 So maybe I'm wrong.
 Which is a big deal.
 Which is a really big deal.
 But my perception of Square from the very beginning was like, if you looked at their
 business model, number one on the list of goals was Starbucks.
 It was just obviously, I think even the initial pitch was like, here's how you pay for a cup
 of coffee.
 It's like, where do you go to bring that sort of functionality other than Starbucks, which
 has outlets so far and wide and so many of them.
 It's a huge coup for them.
 But just to salvage quickly my initial point about not expecting Square to be part of this
 committee, communion organization.
 Again, even with geofencing, their business model is different.
 They're not trying to do mobile apps for phones in the same way that everybody else is trying
 to do Google Wallet.
 Well, yeah, but do they need to?
 The argument that we've been making is that mobile payments in order to not suck need
 to be ubiquitous.
 And is Square on a path to being ubiquitous?
 In order to play that ubiquitous game, you've got to get in the dirty, dirty mess of talking
 to these gigantic players.
 They control the market, Visa and MasterCard and NEC and whoever else makes the checkout
 registers, that whole thing.
 Square could disrupt it and they've done it a little bit with their little dongle and
 direct payments on devices and yada, yada, yada.
 But these other companies aren't going to just go away and they're going to fight back.
 And so I would like to see Square go ahead and get its hands dirty and corrupt its ideals
 just a little bit to get us all on the path to a single ubiquitous solution that's maybe
 it's a meta solution, but it's at least something that we know will work.
 And that's been my thing since I started talking about mobile payments.
 What's a little surprising to me is that Starbucks, I feel like Starbucks is in the process of
 seeding its own very advanced mobile payment system.
 I mean, they have one of the most successful mobile payment systems in the world already.
 I think there was some stat that came out earlier this week or last week that what,
 40 or 50 or 60, some ridiculous percentage of all transactions at Starbucks currently
 in the United States are mobile based, which is insane.
 And I don't think there's any other major retailer that can claim that.
 Because they have their Starbucks app that is on iOS now.
 And you just you link up whatever card to it and it displays that 2D barcode.
 And they have those 2D scanners in every Starbucks already.
 So I mean, it's really cool that Starbucks is being so proactive about this and advancing
 the cause.
 But at the same time, they were already there.
 So I don't quite understand why they were the ones to step forward and support this
 on a really broad scale when they already had that capability.
 And they've been pushing that capability for years.
 That's a really good point.
 And I can't even come up with a good answer in that situation.
 I'm as surprised as Dieter.
 That's a high number.
 But then we also have to consider that Starbucks outlets aren't going to be parked next to
 a motel on the highway in Montana or someplace like that.
 Most Starbucks are in really urbanized central city areas where people already have smartphones
 and techies tend to hang out.
 Oh, there's Starbucks in Montana.
 You'd be surprised.
 Okay, you should probably actually.
 All right.
 What's next?
 So iMore has got a rumor that Apple's going to take pre-orders to the new iPhone right
 away on the 12th and that they'll start internationally on October 5th.
 And they should be shipping, I think, relatively quickly, pretty much right away.
 September 21st is when people will be able to start buying the device.
 If we buy that, they're going to be announcing the product on the 12th.
 Then Apple has always had pre-orders right away and shipped right away right after.
 So it's pretty much par for the course.
 So I don't really have any reason to doubt this.
 I'm excited for an LTE iPhone, which is weird for me to say because I'm totally not inspired
 by iOS 6.
 But I'm excited to see what an iPhone feels like with crazy fast LTE data.
 I've got bad news for you, Dieter.
 Your LTE is not going to be crazy fast because you and somewhere between 10 and 50 million
 other Americans are all going to be experiencing LTE on iOS for the first time, or on an iPhone
 for the first time, I should say.
 And these networks are going to slow to a crawl.
 I think that I talked about this a week or two ago.
 Maybe I didn't, but I think I did, that AT&T LTE in Chicago has already noticeably started
 to slow down.
 And I think that's the GS3 effect because I've seen GS3s everywhere since they launched.
 And I think that that's really started to have a negative pressure on LTE speeds.
 So if the GS3 is doing that, I can only imagine what the iPhone is going to do.
 Okay, so is it time for me to give up on AT&T?
 It's time for you to give up on wireless.
 Everybody is moving back to corded phones.
 And just stay on your cable modem.
 Don't leave your house.
 That's all I can recommend.
 You know, if I was in your shoes, Dieter, I would just switch to T-Mobile.
 Just curse everybody else off, switch to T-Mobile and support the little guy because that company
 is struggling.
 And yes, I am in the process of doing a really kickass segue right now because T-Mobile
 reported its quarterly results, yada, yada, yada.
 And they tried to patch over things, but they've lost half a million of their contract subscribers
 in the last quarter, or relative to the previous year, I think, which is a hugely worrying
 number.
 Like everybody else, Sprint was kind of able to hold on to subscribers.
 AT&T and Verizon keep growing subscribers, but the guys who are losing subscribers are
 T-Mobile and they're losing heavily.
 The interesting thing about that, I mean, I'm not too surprised to see them lose post
 pay subscribers, but both T-Mobile and Sprint are seeing huge growth in prepaid subscribers.
 And this has sort of been floating around on the internet, this idea that why are we
 all on these super expensive postpaid plans when prepaid plans are so much cheaper month
 to month for basically the exact same service?
 And I'm getting to the point where I don't have a good answer for that at all.
 I buy phones so often that the subsidies don't matter to me.
 I'm basically subsidizing nothing except for AT&T's profit margin at this point.
 The only reason for me to not move to a prepaid model is basically phone choice and phone
 selection.
 And that's it.
 But with prepaid, you just get at least on T-Mobile, you just get a SIM anyway, or you
 can just get a SIM if you want, and then you do whatever you want with it.
 Well, what I want is for there to be an LTE option.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, by the way, this isn't on the topic list, but we should briefly mention it.
 We are hearing rumors, this actually came in through Timo News, but we've kind of been
 able to semi-corroborate it.
 There's discussion of a Samsung SGHT899 for T-Mobile that appears to be a Wifi phone device
 with a 720p display and LTE.
 This is the Odyssey, right?
 Yes.
 This is the phone that we rumored as the Odyssey, well, not rumored, it was in Samsung's core
 documents from the Apple core case last month, which appears to be basically a GS3 chassis
 for Apollo, which when you think about it is exactly what Apollo needs.
 And so if T-Mobile gets this device and it's one of their launch LTE devices, that'll be
 a pretty compelling Windows Phone 8 argument.
 But my guess, since T-Mobile has previously said that they won't have commercial LTE
 until 2013, my guess is that they'll launch it with the LTE dormant.
 And if it launches in 2012 at all, we don't even know that much.
 But if it launches this year, you probably won't realistically be able to get any real
 LTE service until next year.
 That's too long to wait, man.
 I can't handle it.
 I know.
 I know.
 I hear you.
 No, but I mean, so I mean, I mean, you know, I have this article about Sprint trying to
 be like the nice guy, but what's interesting with both of these guys is they're struggling,
 but they are managing to pick up some customers in the prepaid market.
 But the prepaid market just isn't as profitable as a postpaid market.
 And so like I would be really interested to know, like if you go into the boardroom of
 T-Mobile and Sprint, how they really feel about all these customers on these other plans
 that are cheaper for the customer, but not making them as much money.
 Like, they're, they're right.
 They're at least offsetting their losses in postpaid customers, but they're doing it with
 people that bring in less ARPU.
 We all know that T-Mobile got ARPU rules all.
 I don't know about Sprint, but T-Mobile has actively been trying to reduce subsidies for
 a long time.
 I think that that there is a perception at T-Mobile that that really weighs on their
 bottom line having to really heavily subsidize hardware.
 So they, I mean, I can think of several examples of hardware that they've launched in the past
 couple of years that they've launched at a higher price point, even on postpaid than
 AT&T and Verizon have.
 And that's because they, you know, they're not as willing to put these giant subsidies
 on those devices.
 So from that perspective, you would think that moving to this subsidy free model, even
 at the cost of monthly ARPU would be exactly what they've been trying to do on some level.
 At least if you're trying to be-
 Yeah, but then with T-Mobile, we end up in this, they're doing this like this equipment
 installment plan, which again, like in principle, I think it's a good idea where you still get
 a subsidy, you still sign a contract, but once you're done paying off the subsidy, the
 20 bucks a month extra, then you just go back down to your regular cheaper plan.
 Like it's a great idea in principle, but in practice it just sort of is like another confusing
 mess.
 I just wish that somebody, Verizon, high Verizon would, you know, start listing the full unsubsidized
 price of phones.
 Even if you're paying the subsidized price, like they should list next to every phone,
 this is the full unsubsidized price first, and then this is the subsidized price if you're
 willing to sign into your contract.
 That should be how it is.
 Oh, but they do sometimes.
 They do.
 And the thing is when they do that, I'm never convinced that that's legitimate because they
 list things like 6599.99, what am I?
 Okay.
 659.99.
 Yeah.
 And they kind of seem like inflated prices and they seem like way too perfect prices
 when you consider that they're buying those phones in box from the, you know, phone makers.
 So I never really trust those prices when they say this is how much it used to be and
 this is how much it could be otherwise, et cetera.
 That doesn't feel like the right price.
 Well, they're not selling the phone at cost, right?
 Even when they're selling it off contract, they're selling it with a profit margin.
 I mean, that's their right as a retailer.
 But I think what Dieter is suggesting is that it would be nice to see the American carriers,
 and we've said this countless times, but it would be nice to see the American carriers
 move to a slightly more European model where it really is about the cost of the phone.
 And then if you want a tariff that knocks some some of that, you know, that that reduces
 sting of that hardware cost, then go ahead and sign up for it.
 Yeah.
 Now, I totally agree.
 Totally agree.
 I mean, to me, this this preceding conversation is kind of absurd because I see exactly what
 you're talking about.
 The European model, Chris, where in the UK you have Amazon, you have a bunch of importers,
 guys like Expanses, Hantech, Clove, et cetera, et cetera.
 There's actually a really well developed mini industry of people importing, bringing in
 phones and then competing on price, which I know is kind of absurd to the US phone market.
 But it do compete on price just on the phone itself.
 And Amazon, because it doesn't pay any tax in the UK because tax dodging, such and such,
 really go stupendously low prices.
 And that creates great competition.
 And then I mean, then you could you have a choice, then you could go prepaid, you could
 have a contract, but just get the SIM card as opposed to buying the phone, do the whole
 subsidy dance, which is data says it gives people better output because the subsidy automatically
 includes some extra cash for them.
 Like however much you subsidize the cost of the phone is not perfect.
 It was tack on a couple of extra dollars and that's how you increase the output.
 So I mean, my advice to anybody is always buy the phone by itself, buy the data and
 the contract by itself.
 They're perfectly separable things.
 They don't need to go together.
 Now, let's see, that's a lie because you can't go into AT&T or Verizon today on a postpaid
 plan and say, give me the data and don't charge the extra that you would have charged me if
 I had bought a phone with a subsidy.
 You can do that on T-Mobile and you can do it on some of the prepaid stuff that are both
 on VNOS on Sprint and blah, blah, blah.
 But if you go and go into AT&T and pay for an Android phone straight up, you do not,
 you still are paying the same amount per month that you would be paying if you had AT&T subsidizing
 the phone by 400 bucks over the course of two years.
 So if you think you're gonna be switching phones a lot, sure, pay, don't pay the subsidy.
 But in the US, on AT&T and Verizon, I think that you should go for the subsidy.
 Even though you're stuck on a contract and it sucks and blah, blah, blah, at least you
 know that you're getting that 400 bucks off the price of the phone and that gets spread
 out over the cost of your two-year contract.
 You're actually paying more by buying a phone straight out if you're not getting a discount
 on your data and voice on your contract.
 By the way, Creighton just whispered into my ear, he said, I know what ARPU is, but
 for the benefit of our listeners-
 We've talked about ARPU every week.
 Well, you know, and he knows what ARPU is.
 We all know what ARPU is, but we should say ARPU is average revenue per user, ARPU.
 It's how much money the carriers squeeze out of you every month.
 And they all have basically, Verizon, I think had record ARPU, the highest of any carrier.
 AT&T was very high.
 Sprint was very proud of theirs.
 I don't know what T-Mobile was, it probably wasn't great.
 But they're all making a ton of money.
 And I hate them.
 I hate everybody.
 Well, actually, I mean, Sprint is losing a ton of money.
 It's losing billions, but that's because of the financial engineering that goes on behind
 the scenes with all of these corporations and the complexity.
 In terms of, as you say, Dieter, just selling stuff to people, yeah, they're making way
 too much money.
 We should, I want to, okay, so I want to talk real quick about this federal report they're
 going to maybe reassess, quote unquote, how cell phone radiation gets measured and approved
 in the US for compliance with the FCC.
 And we've got this report from Adrian describing how the process looks now.
 And that's fine.
 And we can have an argument that is completely uninformed about which study is more likely
 to be correct or not correct about whether or not it causes cancer.
 But what's crazy to me is these things are designed as though they assume you're carrying
 your phone in a holster.
 And I guess it's not recommended that you carry your phone in a pocket.
 So like the radiation stuff is set assuming the phone is on a holster on your belt, not
 in your pocket.
 And that seems like a really small difference in terms of its proximity to your body.
 But it's enough to make me go, I'm not going to start carrying my phone in my holster because
 that's crazy.
 But I mean, let's be real.
 This is only a problem if you have any desire to have children whatsoever, which, you know,
 that's fair enough.
 Yeah, which I don't.
 Right.
 I mean, who wants to reproduce?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 No, I haven't seen a normal human being put their phone in a holster in a very, very long
 time.
 I mean, there's Dwight on The Office uses a holster.
 But other than that, it's not really a common sight.
 It's more I think it's more a common sight these days for someone who's using a Blackberry
 or an IDEN device.
 That's actually if you want to see a phone in a holster, go to a Microsoft store and
 you will see those Lumia 900s and like iPhone holsters, iPhone mother cases.
 Are you serious?
 Yeah.
 So what?
 I think that I've seen it.
 And I think Matthew Parrazzano on Twitter, he was he was tweeting about it the other
 day, too.
 Like we've both seen it.
 That's pretty amazing.
 Yeah.
 Just by the way, I'm going to wait.
 I'm sorry, but I have to interrupt before I forget.
 There's a very important Tumblr that everyone should check out that I just found out about
 myself today called Celebrity Windows Phone Sightings that Tumblr dot com where you will
 see the amazing pictures of real life celebrities.
 Where you see under construction, still awaiting building materials.
 You didn't know about Celebrity Windows Phone Sightings that Tumblr dot com?
 No, I had no idea.
 But you're a feature.
 I know.
 I had no idea.
 So the most amazing thing about this site is that there are like tons of B and C and
 D listers and E listers like myself.
 And all of the B and C listers are using glossy white Nokia Lumia 900s, sometimes with the
 matching monster headphones.
 And my suspicion is that Nokia like blanketed the entire B and C list community with these
 devices at some point earlier this year.
 And then they all felt compelled to take Instagrams of themselves using these phones.
 It's great.
 It's really wonderful.
 I hope Nokia does it again for their Apollo launches.
 I don't know who photoshopped this cyan Lumia 900 in your hand there, Chris, but it's not
 a very good Photoshop.
 It wasn't me.
 That's all I can tell you is that it definitely was not me.
 Yeah, you've got much more Photoshop skills than us.
 He's quite proud of his Windows phone usage.
 So I don't think Chris wants to hide from that fact.
 But quick correction.
 There is absolutely never justification to say there's a really important Tumblr that
 everybody needs to know about.
 Like that sentence, you can just slide it away, file it away.
 It's not going to use that again.
 My only question was, do we think that there is somebody who used to work for HTC when
 they designed the Nexus One who has moved to the US government's testing facility?
 Because it's the same kind of thing.
 Remember when...
 Okay, wait.
 It's a dubious connection, but it's there.
 Sticking a phone in a host and not putting it in your pocket.
 Remember when the Nexus One has some screen issues with people popping it in their pocket,
 and HTC's first reaction was tantamount...
 Or was it Google's?
 I don't know.
 But the first reaction was tantamount to saying, well, you're not supposed to put the phone
 in your pocket.
 And everyone was like, what?
 I don't remember this at all.
 Are you guys serious?
 The Nexus One?
 Yeah, like crazy.
 It was within the past few years, people.
 Okay, well, the Nexus One, it had some screen issues with scratching on the screen.
 And...
 Oh, it was...
 Okay.
 That was...
 Okay.
 Well, I'm sure that some of our listeners slash viewers will back me up on this.
 Oh, it's scratching.
 Okay, I do vaguely remember this, yes.
 Yeah.
 According to HTC's technical support, they don't go in pockets unless the screen gets
 cracked.
 It's like you're not supposed to put it in your back pockets.
 Like you're not supposed to sit on the damn things.
 Right.
 Which remains true even today.
 I don't think these crashes will happen if people sit in on them.
 Then you kind of get the shattering effect.
 Well, so I think that there are a lot of people...
 There are probably a lot of people who just throw their phone in a pocket with keys and
 coins and stuff.
 Which I mean, it doesn't matter what kind of space age materials the phone is made out
 of, you still shouldn't be doing that.
 So that's one conceivable explanation.
 Speaking of phones and holsters, RIM says that it is totally ready to license Blackberry
 10.
 So somebody should license it.
 Yeah.
 They have the A, now they need the B, you know?
 Yeah.
 I mean, we'll see.
 No, we won't.
 I mean, who...
 Man, who...
 No, we don't need to go into RIM anymore.
 That's dead.
 We also had the rumor that IBM was poking around at their enterprise services unit and
 maybe wanted to buy it.
 Came out of Bloomberg.
 My sense, and it's been this from the beginning since these rumors started, is the board has
 drank the Kool-Aid.
 They fully want to see what happens.
 They fully think that they're going to launch Blackberry 10 and then something's going to
 happen.
 I don't think they're even going to get that far.
 But I think they're going to get that far.
 It's going to be like it'll be out on the market for a month and then the board will
 be like, no, it didn't work.
 Let's sell the company.
 I think that you could very well be right.
 They could end up in a touchpad kind of situation where these phones hit the market for a very
 short period of time and then there's a bait and switch kind of thing and the company goes
 away or they break it up and sell it piecemeal or who knows.
 There are many, many different scenarios.
 None of them that I can see end well for RIM.
 I'm not a professional analyst and I don't have an MBA and I don't have a PhD in economics.
 So I don't want to make any diehard predictions on what's going to happen with this company.
 You look at every possible scenario.
 I don't know how or where they can succeed.
 And I'm sure to sort of back up this IBM thing that went around, I'm sure that there is a
 lot of value in what RIM has done and continues to do in that space.
 They have a lot of expertise in enterprise security and infrastructure and they can tie
 into all these different services and they're good supporting devices from an IT perspective.
 And that business undoubtedly has a lot of value.
 But as far as BlackGray10 specifically goes, they're starting from scratch.
 There's also the the the CUNIX business, which has a lot of value to there and a lot of cars.
 They're in a lot of other kinds of embedded systems so that there is value in the company
 that's waiting to be unlocked.
 But I don't see how, you know, I think that the end game for RIM is probably going to
 be that they, they break up pieces of the company that are worth a lot of money and
 sell them off and whatever's left just withers on the vine.
 That's that's dire, I know.
 But I mean, we've we've been through too much.
 You know, the downfall of the Symbian Foundation broke my heart.
 I'll never be able to get over that.
 And since then, I've just been a jaded son of a gun.
 I don't know.
 Well, you know, BlackGray10, like the Playbook, probably, well, no, in fact, I'm sure it will,
 will run Qt apps based on the Qt application framework, Qt, that Nokia has just sold off
 to, what is it, Digia?
 Digia?
 Must be Digia.
 And so like the core application, it's this framework that's actually like was pretty
 good for cross platform stuff.
 And I suppose it still is.
 It was, you know, for developing on Symbian and then on Meeco.
 I know that Qt apps were running on WebOS.
 They've got it running on the Playbook.
 So it seems like it's a relatively flexible application framework.
 But you know, if they'll get it running for Android, iOS, Windows 8, they say.
 But I mean, I think it's like I'm not a cute fanboy because I don't know that much about
 it.
 But it's always been like an interesting thing.
 It's always seemed like it was the closest to actually being cross platform app development
 before HTML5 and still probably better performance than some HTML5 stuff.
 And I'm a little bit sad to see Nokia drop it, but I'm not at all surprised.
 But Nokia wasn't really going to do anything with it.
 Qt was part of its former strategy, the one that revolved around the various Symbian,
 Meeco combinations that Nokia was going to hopefully try and develop and create.
 So it makes sense to set it up.
 I mean, Nokia initially sort of, I believe, some licensing rights to Digia, which is another
 Finnish company.
 So at least Qt is sticking around in Finland, even if Nokia's manufacturing facilities aren't.
 Zing.
 And the other thing really to be said about this is that Digia is paying 4 million euros
 to complete this deal, which tells you everything you need to know.
 Nokia is cutting ties with its former strategy, former operations.
 I mean, Stephen Neelop has already cut quite a few jobs, which presumably touch on this
 Qt development team.
 So the price of 4 million euros in corporate terms, I mean, to you and I, it's a lot of
 money.
 But in corporate terms, it's like, well, here's a bit of a moose change.
 It's like, you may as well have just open sourced it and given it away.
 You know, that is what I've gotten, you know, a little bit of goodwill.
 But I mean, I think it's a little bit like I think it's a little bit like dig.
 I think that there's a lot more to the story than the five hundred thousand dollars that
 was paid for dig.
 I think there's more to the story than the 4 million euro that did you play paid for
 Qt?
 Because, I mean, if nothing else, there's the ongoing expense of paying the the the
 engineers that are moving to Digia.
 I mean, you know, there's there's a whole thing.
 It's not just the upfront 4 million euro.
 Oh, yeah.
 No, no, that's a good point.
 I mean, Nokia could be saving a lot of money in redundancy payments if it decided, OK,
 well, this was in this we shut down the development.
 It might have had to pay off a whole bunch of these engineers, whereas Digia might be
 picking that up.
 A great example of a similar thing is over here in the UK with soccer clubs.
 A few of them have had debt problems and a club will be taken over for the price of a
 pound, like a single pound coin, but then the guy who takes over the club takes on the
 cost of like one hundred million, two hundred million pounds worth debts.
 So Digia might well be taking on some of that extra toxic baggage on Nokia's behalf and,
 you know, improving Nokia's bottom line at the end, because seriously, this 4 million
 euros, if we're talking Apple profits, it's like a rounding error.
 Yeah.
 It's relevant.
 Vlad, do you want to talk just really I mean, it's not strictly like smartphone related,
 but this this piece that you wrote about the surface and how it sort of might affect Nokia,
 it's just a really good piece.
 And I just wanted to at least tell people to go read it.
 But maybe you want to say something.
 Well, yes, briefly to try and get people not to jump my head off for it.
 Like, I'm not trying to attack anybody with this.
 It was more of rumination on the situation rather than anything else.
 And also, I readily admit this kind of late analysis to Microsoft's surface announcement,
 like Microsoft announced back in June.
 I'm writing this this week, but it just kind of dawned on me.
 It was surprising.
 And part of the reason why I came back to Nokia is because somebody emailed me asking,
 do you have any news about like a tablet?
 And then I was like, wait, hang on a second.
 We haven't heard anything about this.
 And the thing for me with surface is, first of all, Microsoft, in terms of publicity,
 it was a massive success, just getting people hyped up, interested in the product, etc.
 It was it was a brilliant success.
 And now it is when you say Windows eight and you say, what is the characteristic device
 for this platform?
 It's surface.
 And Microsoft is not shying away from that because it recently held a party to celebrate
 Windows eight going gold, being released to manufacturing.
 And at that party, it made a massive, massive cake.
 And it has surface tablets with the keyboards attached at the top of the cake.
 I mean, actually, the table was a cake.
 We had a pretty big discussion about this crazy Microsoft cake.
 The table was a cake.
 And then the surface on top, there was like three or four parts, which are all cake.
 It's madness.
 It's nuts.
 It's not a cake is what it is.
 Right.
 But the thing is, how does that impact Nokia?
 And some of the comments of my piece were like, well, you're overrating the importance
 of this Nokia tablet to Nokia's future because Nokia has never been in tablets.
 Nokia is about phones.
 I don't think I am.
 Like with all my love and respect to our readers, I think the tablet part of Nokia's strategy
 is going to be as huge as smartphone part of the strategy going forward.
 What do you guys think?
 Am I crazy?
 I think no.
 I mean, I.
 Go ahead.
 Speak.
 No, it's all you.
 You, you go.
 I was just going to say, yes, I think that Nokia in another world where Microsoft didn't
 create the surface definitely should have jumped into a Windows RT tablet and could
 have had a pretty decent level of success with it.
 Since we don't live in that world, then I if I were Nokia, I would scuttle plans for
 tablets as quickly as possible.
 I would I'd put them in the same building as all those cute developers were, you know,
 just like, oh, yeah, sure.
 You know, you guys work on some other future stuff.
 We'll get to it later because I just I don't see how even if they make something amazing,
 like you said, like it's what's the point?
 They're not going to be able to compete with Microsoft on that space.
 I kind of agree with you.
 But but I also feel like their expense in developing a Windows RT tablet has the potential
 to be pretty minimal because it's it really is essentially a scaled up phone.
 The software is written for them.
 They have their their design language, which is still very attractive, largely because,
 you know, their phones that use this design language, pretty low volume at this point.
 So it's still a kind of a novel thing that won't be true forever once they have a lot
 of success.
 That's no longer going to be a very interesting idea.
 But at this point, it is.
 So if they made a scaled up Lumia 900 that was a Windows RT tablet, I think that that
 they would be able to do something with that.
 They could for one thing.
 This is a very important point.
 Microsoft, correct me if I'm wrong.
 Maybe I'm completely crazy on this, but I don't think Microsoft has said anything about
 availability of LTE Windows or excuse me, surfaces.
 Is that right?
 That's true.
 That's totally right.
 They've only been Wi-Fi so far.
 Right.
 So so what?
 So maybe Nokia's angle can be, OK, we are going to work directly with the carriers.
 We're going to do bundles by this Lumia 910 or whatever they call their Apollo device
 and and get this this great LTE Windows RT tablet that looks exactly like your your Lumia
 or some discount.
 I don't know.
 No, seriously, I mean, I find the suggestion crazy that Nokia would just cut off plans
 for a tablet.
 I do feel like the company is already really heavily invested in developing this tablet.
 Like I don't think Nokia would do a tablet without like blowing it out and just doing
 something really impressive.
 In that respect, I do feel like Nokia is very much kind of like Apple and Sony, where those
 guys don't enter a new product category without having something that will blow people away,
 you know, and just recapture the hype.
 And this is the thing.
 Nokia's first tablet is a momentous product, completely separate of its specs and its looks
 and its operating system and whatever.
 It's like iconic brand, iconic company entering a new market segment.
 Let's see what happens.
 Let's see what they do.
 You know, they have such a great history of design.
 But then like Microsoft completely just took the wind out of that sale because Microsoft
 did the really nicely designed Windows RT tablet.
 It did the really nice little innovation, which the touch cover and the type cover and
 all these other tweaks and the integrated kickstand, which is like perfectly designed.
 So it's like, wait, wait, hang on a second.
 What is left for Nokia to do to blow people away?
 How do you do a Windows RT tablet that is so superior to Surface that it makes people
 not think about it?
 I don't know if you can do that right now.
 Well, I think their only option, their only smart option if they're going to continue
 with the tablet strategy is to search for demographics, search for kinds of customers
 that aren't completely or appropriately served with the Surface running RT or Pro.
 And I don't know, I'm not, you know, I'm not enough of an expert to know if those demographics
 exist.
 But if they do, that, you know, I find it hard to believe that that those two products
 are the be all end all solution to the, quote unquote, Windows tablet.
 There have to be other ways that that market can be addressed.
 Well, I will say this, the Surface, we don't know what the distribution is going to be
 on it.
 So Nokia is going to can get in every carrier store and Nokia can get in every Best Buy
 and everywhere else.
 We don't know if Microsoft is going to be doing more than just Microsoft store and online.
 You know, these might not be everywhere.
 They're certainly not going to be inside the carrier stores.
 And so I could see an argument for a Nokia tablet from that perspective.
 But from the perspective of like the ecosystem needs Nokia to swoop in and save Windows RT
 tablets by making something that is incredibly compelling hardware.
 I just don't see a huge need for it.
 Although Nokia will have the AT&T LTE that you crave, Dieter.
 That cannot live without.
 So there's your killer feature.
 Yeah.
 Chris, do you, speaking of.
 How do I put this, speaking of controversial arguments, do you want to talk about the reserve
 tank?
 Because I think you pretty much lost your mind.
 I think that this is this is a solution.
 Like this is this is just insane.
 I've gotten that exact reaction countless times over the past few days.
 I was actually really surprised that I don't think a single person said, oh, that's a pretty
 cool idea.
 Everyone's just like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
 You've lost your mind.
 Give us give us the 10 second pitch of what you're suggesting.
 So here's the basic idea.
 In the motorcycle world, it is very common for there to be this this thing on the somewhere
 on the engine that is essentially a valve that switches between two gas tank intakes.
 There's a normal and a reserve.
 And they're both again, they're both going into the same tank.
 But the reserve can access a little bit of extra fuel at the bottom of the tank.
 And the idea is that you have that emergency stash of gas that can't be accessed normally.
 So when the when the when the tank goes, quote unquote, dry and the engine putters to a stop,
 you have just enough gas to get to a gas station or get to your destination by switching over
 to the reserve.
 And then you go on.
 And this has been a thing in motorcycles for all of time.
 It's been there for four decades.
 And so I thought, well, why couldn't you adapt that to phones?
 Because I keep there are countless occasions where I don't properly manage the battery
 life that I have available to me on my device.
 It's not that I couldn't.
 It's that I don't either.
 I over browse.
 I'm checking my email too often.
 I'm sending too many picture messages.
 Something stupid is happening.
 And by four or five p.m., the phone is dead.
 Hang on. You're sending too many picture messages.
 You're like you're just messing it up.
 You're all like, I have sweet man.
 I totally love picture mail.
 I am going to just live stream with my life with little three twenty by three twenty images
 that I'm going to send to my friends.
 Look, look, man, MMS is the future.
 OK, mark my words.
 But anyway, OK, go ahead.
 Sorry.
 The basic idea is this.
 I want a forced shut off of the device before the battery is actually dead so that when
 that shut off occurs, I can do something to the phone that gives me access to that last
 remaining, you know, twenty five, thirty, thirty five, forty minutes of battery life
 just enough to make one last call or navigate to my destination or, you know, get to a charger.
 And my initial thinking and this is what I posited in the piece was that the way to do
 that would be a physical switch underneath the battery cover that you actually pry the
 battery cover off to get to.
 So it was really like, you know, it was a, you know, a come to Jesus moment when your
 battery ran out.
 Like you had to do something to the phone to actually switch the battery over to reserve.
 But but with the comments that I got on the piece, it got me to thinking about how you
 could actually do this in software.
 And I think the solution would be this and that there might even be a way to do this
 with like locale or one of those other situationally aware apps right now.
 I don't know.
 I haven't looked into it.
 But one option would be for, you know, when you get down to say 10 or 5 percent battery
 life, the phone just shuts off and then, you know, you pull the phone out of your pocket.
 So that way it's kind of a self preservation thing, right?
 The phone shuts itself off early so that you have enough battery life when you when you
 switch the phone back on.
 So you turn the phone back on at this point, you get a dire warning message on the phone
 that says, hey, doofus, your battery is just about dead.
 You need to do something about it.
 But you still have a few minutes to do those last few things that need to do.
 So maybe you could handle it that way.
 I still like the physical switch, but I think I'm literally the only human on the planet
 that thinks that's a good idea.
 Well, I'm smart actions does this on recent Motorola devices.
 There's like a low battery mode.
 I'm pretty sure that the Galaxy S3 has a low battery thing where it like it alerts you.
 Hey, you're down to 10 percent.
 We are turning off unnecessary services like.
 Oh, yeah.
 There's a battery saver.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Like how is that not a better solution?
 Because you really say.
 I'll tell you exactly why, because the battery saver mode, I've used the battery saver mode
 on the GS3.
 First of all, I'm not convinced that it does anything.
 I think it might just be psychosomatic.
 It seems to drain at the exact same rate.
 But more importantly, regardless, even if it is saving saving power drain, it's still
 draining power.
 I want to I want it to stop draining power, period, when I get down to a certain threshold
 so that by the time I recognize by the time I pull the phone out of my pocket and see
 what's happening, I have that guaranteed last remaining five or seven or 10 percent of the
 battery.
 Look, this is very, very simple.
 The problem here is that Chris is applying his petrol head mind to more problems.
 And the solutions that are coming out are just way too mechanical.
 That's just the basic simplicity of it.
 I mean, Chris, let's face it.
 You're also a watch enthusiast and your favorite watches are really intricate ones.
 Fellow watch enthusiasts get really giddy and excited about things that are actually
 called complications.
 Like a good thing in a watch is a complication.
 So coming from that sort of world, Chris, yeah, a reserve tank makes sense.
 Look, look, guys, once you try a phone with the reserve switch, you're not going to be
 able to go back.
 No, Chris, I'm not even joking.
 Your reserve tank in a phone is exactly like these really luxurious, really highly designed
 watches that have, I mean, a spectacularly sophisticated and, you know, brilliantly designed
 movements that represent time in the most obscure way.
 Like you need to look at it like it's Japanese and interpret that thing.
 And like one thing is twisting around and then another thing is rolling around and then
 the other one is snaking through and you've got the minutes and the seconds and it's all
 kind of weird and freaky and whatever.
 And it always takes you like seven seconds to figure out the time.
 That is your reserve tank, which, you know what?
 I think there's room for that.
 So what you're telling me is that this is going to end up on a Vertu.
 You're telling me that this is going to end up on a Vertu because that's designed to be
 like a watch.
 I mean, you'll love it.
 And it will be amazing.
 If you're selling Vertu phones, wouldn't that be kind of a nutty thing to be selling to
 people like, OK, we've got a battery.
 You can replace it.
 You can swap it.
 But if everything is desperation stage and you really just need to use the phone for
 emergencies, we've got a special battery.
 This is an extra one.
 So you can have the battery out and the phone still work because it's a Vertu and it's,
 you know, etc, etc.
 That's got marketing potential right there.
 It does.
 It does.
 Yeah.
 If we could do it, we're going to sue because we just came up with the entire pitch for
 it.
 We're suing everybody all the time.
 And I see where you're going with this.
 This is definitely a segue, isn't it?
 Oh, it is?
 The segue is to discussing the-
 Yes, it's a segue.
 Apple versus Samsung.
 We do not have time.
 We're not going to get into it.
 But the Apple versus Samsung trial, we do have insanely complete coverage.
 Brian Bishop is there on the ground every day.
 Matt and Nilay are doing analysis with him.
 There's a huge stream of everything that's happening at the trial.
 And if you're not subscribed to the official Vergecast feed, they're doing a weekly breakout
 podcast specifically for this trial, Nilay and Matt and Brian, to talk about all the
 insanity that is happening there.
 And so if you're at all interested in any of this, hit the stream and listen to that
 podcast.
 And I mean, there's just so much stuff that's happened.
 I don't even know if there's one thing I could pull out for us to talk about that.
 Dude, just say readtheverge.com.
 There it is.
 Go there.
 Just be there.
 We'll be there.
 You be there.
 And then good things will happen.
 Yeah.
 And that, I think, is going to wrap up our mobile show for the week.
 If you want to follow us, we're at Verge on Twitter.
 I'm at Backlant.
 Chris is at ZPower.
 Vlad is at Vlad Savov.
 We've got an email address.
 It's themobileshow at theverge.com.
 And next week, we'll be here.
 So you should be too.
 Thanks for listening.
 Bye, guys.
 Thanks, guys.
 Join us again next week.
 Bye.