 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of June 4th, 2012. I'm Josh Topolsky. I'm Nilay Patel. I'm David Pierce. David Pierce is here with us. And also on the big screen up in this section, our main man from Polygon, Christopher Grant. He has a first and middle name. Both Chris. Chris Grant, hello. Look how big my head is. Chris Christopher Grant. It's gigantic. It's gigantic and also highly erotic. Where are you? Where are you? That's an awesome thing behind you. Oh, it's just a little thing, a little piece called art. A little something called art. Get with it. Get used to it. Chris, thank you for joining us. Chris is in LA right now along with the most, well, the entire Polygon crew, I think. And a handful of the Verge crew as well. You were there. I was there. I just got back. And E3 is going on, in case you're wondering why everybody's in Los Angeles. I feel like I'm leaning forward too much for this mic. I really have mic problems. I'm sorry. Well, you've got the stand. I have the stand, but still... That you've always wanted. And yet still I'm unhappy. Yeah. Is that surprising to anybody? No. Shouldn't be. Let's talk about E3. Not at all. Anyhow... Were you there for just our party? By the way, I saw some pictures of our party. Oh, yeah. I'm very jealous. Do bow bow. Why? We had super time force. By the way, we had super time force, which is as awesome as you imagined it was going to be, if you imagine that. Yeah. Which I did. The party was off the chain. Do people still say that? No. It was off the hook. No. People still say that? No. Off the chain was what came after off the hook. The party was groovy. People say that? They definitely say that. By the way, I should say this is the Vergecast where we discuss the week in technology and technology culture. Is it really? And yes, if you can see, if you do see a little hint of my pants, they're red. So let loose in comments. But anyhow, yeah, the party, we threw a party on Sunday night. Why was I there? To party. I was there to party. No, I was at D and then I wanted to go to E3 and do some stuff. We had some meetings, which I ended up not going to. But we did have, well, that's not true. I went to a couple of things. Last of us. I got to see, the most important thing is I got to see the last of us in a meeting and it changed my life. Yeah, I watched the, I mean, I just watched it. Change who I was. I just got to watch the trailer. I turned into a piece of broccoli. I got to say the end of that trailer is. Well that trailer. So what's really interesting, sorry, I don't want to jump around, but what's really interesting about that, if you haven't seen this, there was a game that Naughty Dog showed off at E3 called the last of us, which is coming out for the PS3, which by the way is like to me, if you don't own a PS3, this is like a title. You have to buy a PS3 to play. This is from what I've seen. And yeah, they showed off this incredible demo at the Sony event and then they were showing further demos to people and they showed, it ended one way in the demo they showed to the public and then it ended, they showed lots of different things that could happen in other demos to the show to the press. And it was just fascinating looking game. Let's just jump into E3. Let's just talk about E3. Chris is here. We're already talking about it. So yeah. You want to just jump right into Sony? Let's talk about, tell us about what's happened at E3 this year. So E3, everyone here agrees as in the room, but also in Los Angeles, that is a slow E3. Oh really? Because I said that and I thought you guys disagreed with me. I said that to the Polygon guys. I was like, I was like, this kind of feels like a slow E3 and they're like, well, there's some great games. What are you talking about? How dare you? You idiot. Okay. I was called an idiot a number of times. It really happens. It happens a lot to me lately. There are a lot of great games and I think we have, I mean, we're late in a life cycle, right? There's a lot of mature, both in terms of violence, i.e. the Last of Us, but mature also in terms of like, you know, software development, a lot of mature products coming out right now. What we don't have, there are very few products, I think there's only one I can think of definitively, that's not coming out in the next 12 months. Everything is coming out this year. And that sort of... Watchdogs. There's a lot of opacity into the future because, I think the way I wrote about it was that there's the specter of next-gen gaming consoles looming over the whole show. And that specter means that, you know, the accompaniment to that is that next-gen software development isn't being shared. With the exception of one game, which everyone's pretty sure will come to next-gen consoles because it looks next-gen, and that's Ubisoft's Watchdogs. Watchdogs. Did you guys watch the trailer for Watchdogs? I didn't. What? Are you kidding me? I didn't see the trailer. Oh, you idiot. I mean, look, how many murders can I watch in one day, man? No, I'm telling you, the Watchdogs trailer, I had the experience of walking into the... We have a loft, that's where Chris is right now, we have a loft in downtown LA where the whole team is there, it's like the war room. And I walked in the day that... During the Ubisoft event and Watchdogs was on. And it was like a magic... He literally walked in and he was like, what's this? What is this? What are you watching? What is this? Yeah. And it was a magical moment because people were like, like jaws on the floor. And then like, I mean, polygon, jaws on the floor. And it's a crazy... You haven't seen it? No. No. It's like really... Tell us, what is it? You just described how awesome... It's like GTA meets Splinter Cell meets The Matrix meets The Last of Us. Oh, you'll like this. Yeah. Guess where it takes place? Open world city. Guess where? It's Chicago. Somebody sent me... Is it Chicago? Somebody sent me a picture of the Chicago theater. And it's like... I like it. I like it. I love it. There's a scene where they're in a club and the level of detail on the people in the background, just the random people there is crazy. They go... Well, they're talking a lot about how they want it to be like this giant open world. And there's parts of it that look really systemic. Things don't happen the same way, obviously, very emergent, like most open world games. I think when Brian Crescenti was telling me that his favorite part was when you... There's a car accident. That car accident doesn't have to happen, but it does in this case. And there's, I guess, a woman who's hunched over a steering wheel and her husband's in the passenger seat next to her. And you can overhear it if you happen to walk by or are paying attention. But he's yelling at her to get up, as in, I hope you're not dead. But it's like this giant teaming world. It feels very dense. It does not look like anything that could run on today's consoles. Ubisoft insists it's coming to today's consoles, but I think that might be in addition to new hardware. We, in the demo they show, I think the one that is online now, there's an odd part, which I don't think I fully understand, where the main character actually, after the accident, pulls someone out of the car. You know what I'm talking about, Chris? It's not for any particular reason, right? But it's like very GTA, but it's not like GTA. It's like the way it's... It looks very realistic to me. I would highly recommend you guys watch it. I think you'd be shocked. Could we show some of it right now? Could we show the Watch Dogs trailer? You guys too? Do we have the technology? I see them clicking. I can't believe you haven't punched up the Watch Dogs trailer while we're talking. There's a lot of clicking going on back there. I've never seen people use the Verge faster. Just search for Watch Dogs trailer on the internet. Okay, well they're queuing that up. Why are you queuing that up? What else, Chris? I want to go through the traditional kind of company line, and then we can talk about the game a little bit more. So we were already kind of talking about Sony. But Sony, to me, they were confused. I mean, there are a lot of games. I thought The Last of Us looked great, but then the sort of like, we're going to brand it Sony Mobile or PlayStation Mobile. I thought Sony had the strongest, one of the strongest to show. Really? Well, Chris, I'm curious. I agree. I think Sony did have the strongest one. And that doesn't mean it was the strong. It was the strongest. Right. But I think that you mentioned the mobile thing. I think that's a bold move. I think PlayStation Mobile is really smart. But there are no games. Yeah, I think it's a super smart move. I think they're getting ready to start showing. Whether or not Sony can execute on it, it's a software platform idea. That's never been their strong suit at all. But it's super ambitious. It's exactly where a company like Sony and an organization like PlayStation needs to be going to be relevant in the next five years. I think it comes down to Sony now to execute. I interviewed John Kohler, who's their head of consoles. And I asked him about the fact that on a PlayStation Mobile device, you're buying PlayStation 1 games that don't work as PlayStation 1 games on your PS3. You're buying two separate downloads of PlayStation 1 games. Sorry. Go ahead. And they, whoa. Hey. Anyway, so you're buying separate downloads. And as a user experience, that's terrible. If you have a Kindle Fire and a Kindle Touch one, I don't know what it's called. You have an expectation that both of your Kindles will be able to read the one book you bought. If you have two iPhones, if you have an iPhone or whatever. But with PlayStation right now, if you buy a PCOS one game from PlayStation Store on your PS3, you have to buy that same game again on PlayStation Mobile. Which is weird. So they have work to do. Kohler was very candid that he recognized that that was a terrible user experience and they had to get better. I think the whole idea behind PlayStation Mobile and bringing the whole thing in-house and away from Sony Ericsson and Xperia is that they can now do a lot of the hard work of unifying that experience instead of the sort of balkanized corporate mess that they had before. Yeah, but it's, hold on, wait, wait, wait. What's going on here? Hold on, hold on. Tell the person who is taping boxes, and I think I know who it is, tell them they have to stop while you're podcasting, okay? Is somebody taping, I can't even hear. Is somebody taping up boxes? I thought somebody was just like sanding a house. That's what it sounded like. I think it's someone taping up boxes. Whatever that noise, whatever the noises that sounds like someone taping up a box, can you just have them stop for like a half an hour? That would be great. Yeah, okay. I think they stopped. I literally can't hear anything besides you guys. That's what it sounds like when we were hearing about it, in case you're wondering. Sorry. So to get back on topic here, the mobile thing. So did you see it running on any HTC phones? They had them running in a case, didn't they? We did a thing. In a case. We did photos of them. Yeah, in a case. That to me is like... They were live, right? Those were live devices, I can't remember now. Well, I mean, it's just Android. It can't be that hard to do. Well, yeah, but I mean, it's just that I think this is an incredible... By the way, we broke a story about Sony doing Android gaming. Yeah, forever ago. Forever ago was when we broke the news of the PlayStation phone, which became... What is it called? The Xperia Play. The Xperia Play. Xperia Play. And which has now been abandoned. They're not even updating it to... I mean, seriously, the cycle of that product was, that was going to be the Google Halo device, and it went all the way to... And now it's totally abandoned. It just fizzled out. But the part of the thing about that device is, part of the problem with that device is it doesn't have the name PlayStation in it. Which was like... Huge problem. Guys, you made it PlayStation, but like, huge problem. Another part of the problem with that device is, like I said, the ecosystem is detached from the actual PlayStation ecosystem. So I mean, what does this have to do with PlayStation? Did you get the impression that with this new initiative, this PlayStation mobile, that's what they're calling it, right? PlayStation mobile. Yeah. Do you think they're going to bring these things more to parity? Do you think that this is going to be... They're actually going to care? I think they have to, and I think that's the whole reason for the initiative and bringing it inside the PlayStation team, is that they have to... So it is going to be in that same team. Yeah. Yeah. So I think... It rolls up there. And that's important. From a structural standpoint, that's the only way they're going to be able to ensure a consistency across three different devices. I think it's kind of an amazing move. I wish it had happened sooner. I think if they could really get their act together... They announced PlayStation Suite a long time ago. I've been asking about it in interviews for over a year. Yeah. When I was at E3 last year, I took an experience play interview. But they were vague about whether they were going to bring it to other partners, weren't they? They were vague about everything. Right. It was a... At that point, it was PlayStation Suite, and it was an SDK, but they didn't really talk about what it is. It's still relatively vague. They announced hardware partners, which is nice, but we'll see. I think it's really ambitious. Right. Sony's not going to nail it. And no games. I mean, it's still... No, no, no. We're still running PS1 games, which is like... Yeah. PS1 games are fine if there's actual games. I mean, like... It's the proof of concept, right? It's... This could work. I think Sony's not going to nail it on the first go-around. Yeah. Make no mistake. I think it has a lot of problems. We have the Watch Dogs trailer available. I want to punch it up here. Do you have a touchpad? Oh, God. This looks so amazing. Wait. That frame rate is not right. Can you get the frame rate up? Is this what our viewers are seeing? Okay. The frame rate is... This is perfectly smooth. But look at the detail. So he's got this PDA or this smartphone that he can manipulate the world with. He can hack stuff. Look at the detail on... I mean, obviously this frame rate is not really doing it justice. But some of the background details and the details on the trees and stuff... And by the way, look at the amount of non-player characters here. And they're all extremely detailed. They're all doing their own thing. They have very detailed faces. And this looks bonkers. Is he going to blow up the Scholar Theater? Is that what that is? Here's what Ubisoft was able to do with this trailer and the demo. It's not just a trailer. They're giving a demo on the floor, at least they were yesterday. Is that they've now gathered a huge amount of mindshare for next generation while everyone else, except for Nintendo, we'll get to Nintendo later. In terms of... I don't know. Do we have to call Wii U next generation? No. Looks like the frame rate just went up. You got the frame rate going? Next generation. All right, here we go. The frame rate is now working properly. Anyway, continue talking, Chris. Yeah, go ahead. But while Microsoft's not talking about what they're doing, Sony's not talking about what it's doing, even big third parties like EA aren't talking about their next gen strategy. Microsoft showed off this game, got a huge amount of mindshare, kicked off the discussion about next gen and they kicked it off wrapped around one of their games. And if this game doesn't come out for next gen systems, because they insist it's Xbox 360, PS3, I think what's more likely is it's going to be forward compatible. This game's going to cost a lot of money to make. It will look like this on a next gen system. It will look not like this on your Xbox 360. But they can't afford to make a game like this, the level of investment needed, and put it out on a system that, let's say, next year or two years from now, has five million units sold. I know, it just happens. Whereas Xbox 360 has 70 million units sold. Yeah, I mean, I actually will be disappointed if they bring this out for current gen consoles. I think they have to. I think you're going to see, with the exception of first party games, Microsoft and Sony games, I think any big game for the next couple years is going to be forward compatible. Because they won't be able to afford to do it. I get that. But I mean, this just looks so amazing. I don't want to play a version that doesn't look as amazing. Same thing you're buying a PS4. Yeah, you and I are going to play it on Xbox 720. I'm going to play head to head with you. I'll be on my Xbox 720, and you'll be on your PlayStation 4. And we'll be playing on the new device agnostic network that's going to be built to play. There'll be a wireless 5G network. How amazing, by the way, how incredible would it be if you could play against, if you're an Xbox owner, you could play against PlayStation owners? As incredible as it is completely impossible. It's not impossible. It's not impossible. It's not impossible. It's not impossible. They just don't want to do it. They just want to lock you into their ecosystem. It's the rule. It's not technologically impossible. Right, they could do it. We've seen demos at E3 before where they have it working across devices. That will work in a development staging area. But as soon as you start to go through the manufacturer certification process, all that stuff is like, nope. It could be. No, no, thank you. I mean, from a technical standpoint. Could you put the jail back in? Because it seems like you don't have a jail here. You would really like a jail. From a technical standpoint. Your walled garden doesn't have a lot of walls. The garden is nice. Yeah. The lack of walls is a little startling. Can we do something about that? Okay, so let's have a, you want to have a Nintendo? I was going to get a Microsoft. Microsoft? All right, fine. Whichever one you want. We'll end on the bleakness of Nintendo. No, look, everybody's very excited about Nintendo, right Chris? Okay, keep going. Microsoft. Microsoft. So Microsoft, they had smart glass, which I think, I mean, obviously partially meant to dull the impact of a Wii game pad. I think there's some really neat novel ideas to it. You know, it's so early, it remains to be seen how much they're going to integrate it. As far as I'm interested, specifically into games. And they're not smart glasses, let's just state what it is. It is a multi-screen experience for entertainment. It's not for games, right? They didn't show it off for games. No, hold on. No, it will be in games. I talked to Phil Spencer. He said every single game, so he's head of Microsoft Game Studios, first party. He said every game that comes across his desk, just like they ask the developer, can you put Kinect in this? You know, even if it's just voice menus, like, you know, do you want to put Kinect? He said every single game that comes across his desk, they'll be asking about smart glass implementation. So, so I'll be able to like on my phone, my Windows phone, I'll be able to have like, let's say I'm playing. Or your iPhone. Okay, let's say I'm playing Watch Dogs on my Xbox with smart glass. And I'll have like, the phone will be like the phone in the game that you have, right? Possibly. I mean, that's the idea. Yeah. You could have a second screen, the second screen companion experience for what's happening on the big screen. By the way, my question is how... Or separately, it's like part of their, you know, you can, part of smart glasses, you can be watching a movie or listening to music or something and kind of throw it to the TV or bring it back to the secondary device. Right. It's AirPlay. It's AirPlay. Here's some of the cool things about it. Number one, it's device agnostic. This is Microsoft saying, like, we recognize that our, you know, touch based, the best in the world or are the most popular in the world, at least, you know, I'll let you guys debate whether the best. But you know, for an Xbox user, the responsible and respectful thing to do is to make sure that it's available for iOS and for Android. I think that's really smart for them. It makes this device available on tons of different screens. It has a lot of other entertainment opportunities, right, where you can look up information on a movie while you're watching it, that kind of thing. Yeah. Which Wikipedia is no good for. Yeah. I never use Wikipedia for that. Smart Glass looks really interesting. It's way better to use there. All of the ideas around it that they demoed are like, huh. No, I will say one thing. No, like the gaming idea. The only gaming idea I've ever seen for a two screen device, the only gaming demo that any idea that anybody seems to have is when you play Madden, you can draw routes on your phone. No, I think there is. That's it. That's all they ever show. I think there is. Even that was like a mom. So Wii U has a lot more. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That, yes, Wii U has a lot more. This mic is screwed up again. The thing they showed with Game of Thrones, where, I mean, which didn't work in the demo they actually showed us, but it kind of, as the show progresses, it shows you where people are located on a map in sync. Yeah. Like the band in sync where they're located, are they in Westeros? Are they sailing through the narrow sea? We don't know. But the point is, no, that to me would be really helpful because I'm often watching the show, even when I'm reading the book, I'm like, wait a second, this is what's, because they talk a lot about where people are headed and you kind of don't know. So I feel like that's kind of an amazing, like that actually makes sense in context for that particular piece of content. But there is a lot of stuff like learn more about the director of this movie, which is like what Wikipedia was invented for. Yeah. And it's, I mean, all that's great and I appreciate the- Or IMDB. The bringing it together, but even the Wii U, the two screen gaming stuff is like, I still have to see it. It still has to make sense. The Wii U two screen gaming, and I'm sorry, I don't want to like gloss over Microsoft because- Yeah, no, there's so much more here. Is there a lot more with Microsoft? There is. There's smart glass, then there's Xbox Music, which they did. Oh, Xbox Music, right. They did all these new content providers. And they put Internet Explorer, that's part of smart glass, on the television. Microsoft really, uh oh. But you know- That's not good. That's bad. Great intern. I don't know. Well, we'll- That's back. Nope. Hey. Sorry, I'm trying to, I'm losing internet here. One second. Great. We'll talk about Microsoft here for a second. Their thing was not about gaming this year, really at all. And I- Are we on the internet right now? Yeah, we're on the internet. Yeah, we're on the internet. It's them. They're having the internet. My internet went down too. I don't know anything about that. We're good, right? We're still broadcasting? Great. Yeah, yeah. My internet here got weird for a second. Microsoft was all about, we are becoming, we are your cable box. We are your home entertainment system. Like we're where you listen to music. The Xbox is all of that stuff. And I think that they have had an enormous amount of success with this. I now use my Xbox more than any other connected device in my living room. And I have a Roku, Apple TV. Yeah, me too. I have a Boxee Box. And the one that I, nine times out of 10 now, it's got Hulu, it's got Netflix, it just got Amazon. I mean, it's actually kind of amazing. And HBO. And it's got HBO Go. Game of Thrones. And it's got, yes, Game of Thrones. And it's got, it's got Zune, which will become- Xbox. Which will become Xbox whatever. And then it's so, you've got all those offerings as well. I mean, it's an incredible array. It's easy to, you'd like to access. It works pretty much seamlessly. And so I feel like they're just, you know, they've just snuck in there. Microsoft is very far along in next gen kind of strategy and planning. I think they've got a lot of games in development for next gen. So they don't have the strongest kind of core gaming first party lineup. I think this is where Sony did a much better job in terms of appealing to gamers. Just for E3 though. Right, right. Microsoft's focus is really appealing and rolling out and expanding those entertainment services. Yeah. I think they have a ton of work to do there. I think if Apple ever really gets its head in this game, a lot of the headway that Microsoft's made is going to, I don't know, be less impactful. I'll give you an example. So on the Xbox dashboard, which is, I think, a disaster to navigate, you have the app marketplace. But those aren't really apps. There's no SDK. All those apps are built by Microsoft. I couldn't make a Polygon app if I wanted to. You guys couldn't make a Verge app for your video content. You should. There is no marketplace. Like there's no, you can't buy these apps. Nobody's selling them. Yeah. It's a very small curated portfolio. It's very much a proprietary kind of Microsoft's experience for you. Yeah. But the point is the fact that they use the language of that marketplace. Like they're trying to evoke something that they do not in fact have. But don't you think that's where they're headed? I mean, doesn't it seem like that's an obvious progression? Yeah. I don't think we'll be there on Xbox 360. I think that is, if they're smart, that is where we'll be on Xbox 720. Well, I don't know. They have to get a head start. I mean, look, because Apple's- Yeah. No, sure. Because it seems to me, I mean, it would be insane. I mean, we talked about this for a while. I had heard when we first talked about the new Apple TV that they were going to be coming with like an SDK for it and apps. It seems crazy to me that you wouldn't want to say to HBO and to Netflix, unless they've got something even more exciting in the pipe, that you wouldn't want to say, look, you guys can build and customize this thing as you would with your iPad or iPhone app and get it into this market and people can download and put it on their TV. To me, that seems obvious. So I feel like Microsoft has to have some awareness of the possibility of that. There's no way they're waiting until next year and even beyond next year. I mean, if they announced at E3 next year, we think holiday season 2013, right? For the new console? There's a good chance, yeah. So they're going to wait until holiday season 2013 to let people build apps for that? I mean, I feel like there's no- Absolutely. I don't feel like there's anything stopping them from doing it in the near future. Like what's stopping them? I think it's a question of resources that they're going to build it for a platform and it's not going to be the same platform they use for 720. They don't have the same infrastructure. The dashboard does not work really well. Purchasing doesn't work as well. It's not as seamless. I think that- Yeah, that's a mess. Their buying of stuff is ridiculous. Well, it's still like a set top- It's like Xbox Live Indie games. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's still sort of- But if you get Xbox Live Indie games, that service was announced before the iOS app store took off. And like, I remember going on NPR and they were asking me about the YouTube of games and they were talking about Xbox Live Indie games. That service has been an abject failure versus the iOS app store. Has it? Has it? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But for- It has been a failure. But there are some very successful and popular games on the service. Nobody's made a million dollars on that app store before. Oh, in comparison, sure. I think barely, there's maybe a few games that have made six figures. But also the market is somewhat smaller, right? I mean, there's what, 66 million Xbox users? Yeah, but- Or owners? Yeah, the big Xbox game- I forget the number. Makes billions of dollars. Well, the big Xbox game costs $60 to buy. Yeah, but- Hold on. But you can make it- No, it's not true. Minecraft sold, what, two million units already? Yeah. Right? So like, Xbox and arcade games can do huge sales numbers. No, but I'm saying that two million is nothing compared to what they do on the app store. Maybe that's what we're saying. Two million is a completely outrageous amount compared to what they do on the indie games marketplace. You know, like, not a lot of that's UI. Like they don't, and Microsoft knows this. I talked to them for years. There's no push for it. They don't curate it that well. Their discoverability is impossible. But also, like, you know, I just think the market is different. You know, also, I mean- I think the market doesn't have to be different. I think the market is different because they have not- I agree. They have not properly built a UI and a system that encourages people to discover new types of experiences. And wait till Apple and Steam announce the new piece of hardware they're working on for the living room. Yeah, that's gonna happen. Whoa. Is that confirmed? Totally happening. Totally happening. So, Chris, let me ask you about Kinect real quick, because that leads into the Internet Explorer thing. So they put IE on the TV. They said, we know that keyboards and mice are bad in the living room, but we have Kinect and we have smart glass. So now we can put the browser on TV and do all this additional gesture navigation. But then every game I saw them demo that had Kinect was just the microphone. I don't think I saw- unless it was, like, the new Dance Central, which they brought Usher out for. Usher. Which made me very happy. Usher. Yeah. It was all voice. So what's going on with Kinect? Like why- I mean, it seems like they backed way up. They showed some- They showed- All the demos were people screaming at the TV. And they were all games where you murder people. I was getting flashbacks to the Pottermore demo, the Book of Spells demo for Sony. We have you. Yeah, no, that's different. No, no, no, I know. But they showed some stuff with motion besides Dance Central. Not very much. During the press conference, they might not have leaned into it too hard. I think they were going over a lot of entertainment stuff and smart glass. Kinect- I mean, Microsoft's investment from a marketing and development standpoint in Kinect is still pretty staggering. And the fact that the Xbox has been the number one best selling console in North America for 16 months in a row now, a huge part of that is just because of Kinect. And they're going to continue to invest in it like crazy. The bigger question for me and for obviously your audience is, when are key Kinect games going to be better? One of Microsoft's biggest games was Star Wars Kinect. It was terrible. So and maybe they'll never get better. But either way, they sell. And Microsoft is going to continue investing in it. I was just thinking about that Han Solo song from the Star Wars Kinect game. You know what, sorry, Paul is on the line. Paul Miller. On a phone. Yeah, I want to bring him into the conversation. I think you're Paul Miller. Is this Paul Miller? This is Paul Miller. Wow. This is like talking to somebody in the 1980s. This is why I don't talk on the phone. I just realized. Sounds so terrible. How are you, Paul? You guys are like really- I'm good. You guys are really quiet. Well, that's probably because your phone is a Huawei from 1972. Hi, Paul. You know what's weird about this? I can see Paul. He's right there. Is he really? So we had a big debate. Let's query the group here. If Paul appears on Chris Grant's Skype camera range, does that mean he's on the Internet? I mean, does that mean he- What if I just do like an accidental walk by? Does that mean that Paul- Yeah, they're all saying it's cheating. Yeah, I think it's cheating. Okay, so Paul has been being very strict here. He's in the room, but he's not going near the camera. Yeah. I won't look. I'm just going to walk by. No, don't do it. Ready for this? Don't do it? Okay, you know, go ahead. People are freaking out. Do it. What's going to happen? Blow some minds, yeah. He walks by cameras on the Internet all the time. There he is. I mean, think about how many- That was a mind blow. Think about how many IP cameras he's walking by constantly. Paul, your picture gets taken so many times a day. He just fell into something. Are you okay, Paul? So Paul- Don't go outside. Don't go outside. Don't come back in. We can't hear you. It's so noisy out there. By the way, I've been on this- Is it noisy out here? Yeah, I've been on this fire escape, and you really get to see all of what's happening in downtown LA, which is people being sent to the hospital. People being set on fire, rapes, cops beating people for no reason. Downtown LA is like Mad Max. It's like Beyond Thunderdome and Thunderdome is- Also, a lot of guys in leather. A lot of leather. A lot of leather, yes. A lot of like souped up crazy vehicles as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, downtown LA is the scariest place I've ever been in my life. Late night in downtown LA is truly the scariest place you can be in America. But as long as you're looking from the fire escape- Do you guys know my great story from the show? No. Oh, no. Let's hear this. Paul, is this what I think it is, Paul? Your sad story? Yeah, it is. Check out Paul's sad story coming out for E3. I showed up here, and I was like, you know, I hate driving cars, and I'm not sure if the subway system works, so I'm going to rent a bike. And it turned out it was like cheaper to basically buy a bike, so I bought a bike. And then that night, it got stolen. He bought a bike for $250. It was purple with yellow wheels. It was purple and yellow. It looked like the Joker's bike. It had no brake on it. I was actually referring to it as the Joker's bike. Nice. And then immediately stole it. Like how fast? Like less than- I had the bike for less than 12 hours. It's amazing. Anyhow, that's just a taste of what's going on in LA. Did you buy a lock? Yes, I locked it up. Yeah, of course you bought a lock. LA, man. More like hell-ay. I like LA, don't get me wrong. So Paul, tell us about E3. I mean, I read your report, and that's kind of what we're getting at with Chris here. Paul has other stuff coming, too. Yeah. But you know- Oh yeah, I'm blowing it out. You know what's funny? The most fun I've really had here is playing We Fit You. It's just- there's a bobsledding game, and it works your core really well, and it feels very immersive. He's like near tears. You're like near tears, right? You're like, there's a bobsledding game? I feel like my mom said this exact same thing to me like four years ago. And you know what? It really- It's a bobsled game? Oh yeah. It really works your core. Yeah. And that's what you're interested in. It's another game where you're a waiter at a restaurant, and you've got to carry desserts on your tray. And your tray is the Wii U, and you've got to balance your Wii U so that the desserts don't fall over or fall off the tray. And then you walk up to Wii Fit, and you navigate this restaurant and deliver desserts to customers. Is this what happens when you don't have the internet? Paul has a playful mind. Honestly, his mind may have softened a little bit due to the lack of internet. I will say something though. I think that waiter game sounds pretty fun. Yeah. It sounds really fun. It is fun. Yeah, it sounds fun. Does it vibrate? Like a tray would vibrate. I don't know if it vibrates. Does the Wii gamepad have vibration? Yes, I think so. Yeah. I trust Chris. Chris is a professional game joker. I'm a hobbyist. Actually, I don't know if any of the demos I saw showed it. No, no, because that would be crazy if it didn't have vibration. It might not be necessary, depending on the type of game you're playing. So Paul, you like Wii Fit U. Wii Fit U, is that what it's called? Yes. I mean, is that what it is? Wii Fit U is what it's called. Wow. And so... You know, Zombie U is pretty fun too. Yeah. Can I ask a question? Is Zombie U... And I didn't play it. Now, they're letting people play it out on the floor? Yeah. Is Zombie U like a fully... Like a first person, like fully playable... Or is it on rails? No, it's not on rails at all. No, you run around with dual analog sticks, but everyone's all like, you pull out your crossbow, you pull the Wii U up, and you're looking through the Wii U as your crossbow goes. I'll be honest with you. That sounds awesome. That sounds pretty awesome. Yeah. That sounds pretty... That's the point of Wii U. That's like what it is about. Like after the Mizuna Post Conference, which is insanely disappointing, someone behind me is like, Zombie U better be bleeping good. Bleeping good. Like effing good? Or assing good? Yeah, effing good. Yeah. E-F-F. Better be effing good. That was the only game that they showed that was really like a Wii U game. They look like a real game. A lot of the games had like... Like there's a game, was it P100 or Project 100 or whatever? It looked cool and fun, but like the whole use of the Wii U gamepad was to draw... There's like four different shapes you could draw. Right, that's what I'm saying. All of these second screen games, except for the one you just described, seem insane. Zombie U... Actually, the graphics looked kind of decent on that too, didn't they? Yeah, that was an Xbox graphic. Zombie U... They also showed... What was the game they showed where you could hold... Oh, it was Arkham City Armored Edition, is that what they're calling it? Yep. So they have Arkham City that they're bringing out for the Wii U, which by the way, I think is weak, like so weak. Like they should have gone to those developers and said, we want to do a new Batman game, like a brand new one. So are you ready to get into Nintendo and just dive in? Do it. Go for the thing? Yes. First, I'm trying to find you guys a quote, if I can bring it up. Satoru Iwata, who's the CEO of Nintendo. Sorry, while you're doing this, can we get some footage of Zombie U up? Not the horrible demo they showed of the guy playing it, but if there's some better... Because they showed a really bad... Okay, Michael's on it. Go ahead, Chris. So, Nintendo. I think they had a lot of expectations. On Saturday afternoon, they sent out an email saying that there was going to be a streaming web event on Sunday afternoon. One day, heads up, right before the biggest event of the year. They announced a lot of the details of the Wii U and the new controller and all this stuff at that streaming web event, which was very, I don't know, anticlimactic. And they announced big stuff. Like they announced all this online stuff you could do, like real-time... The Miiverse. Like Miiverse, real-time chat with people where you could like ask people for help in the game and you could video chat with them for help in the game. Can you help me show my penis in this game? That's all I imagine that's going to be. I mean, it's chat roulette meets... We fit you....meets the forum walkthrough. We fit you. That would be amazing. You're holding a tray. Is there a camera? There's a camera on that thing, right? Oh, this is going to get... Miiverse is going to get real nasty. So, here's the thing about Miiverse. Every single message and image will be moderated by a human being. Nintendo. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Well, those people are going to use some really sick shit. They use all the DS for sketching games, do they? What's that? You know, the DS has a messaging system where you could sketch things for each other. Do they moderate that? No, because that's peer-to-peer. Although, every time you go to a Nintendo event, if you go to a Nintendo event and you turn that thing on, it's just drawings of wieners. Anyone, you just bring your DS and open that up. It's everywhere. Just all over the place. That's beautiful. So, here's the thing about Nintendo. I'm going to read you guys a quote. This is from CNBC. Yeah. This is from Nintendo. My impression is that we should have... Sorry, this is from Nintendo. My impression is that we should have... Yeah, from Port A Water. Okay. My impression is that we should have done a better job, because in effect, we could not fully convey what Wii U is all about. So, I am not 100% satisfied as far as this year's presentation. Yeah. Here's the thing. They had this Sunday presentation that was seemingly last minute. They had their Tuesday morning press conference, which the whole time they said, guys, there's so much to talk about, we can't possibly talk about it all, so we'll have two more press conferences this week. Then they had a Wii U press conference later that had really nothing in it. Then they barely talked about 3DS in the major press conference. They had a whole separate 3DS press conference and announced zero new games, not a single one. They had four press conferences and managed to flop all four. And I think the impressive thing about what Nintendo did this year is that they had a couple things that they really had to nail, and they managed to not nail any of them. No, I mean... Sorry, go ahead. One of the biggest ones, for example, is a competent online system. Right? They have never had one before, historically. I think they had to come out and have a lot of details and really lean into what they were doing for online. Instead, they're like, we have Miiverse, and you could have your Miis on there, and you could leave messages, and it's like, guys, this is not what people want. This isn't what people have been asking for. Yeah. Wait, just, does Nintendo... Have you ever asked anybody at Nintendo if they've heard of the iPhone? Just throwing it at them. Because it seems like Microsoft and Sony are like, here's all this stuff with phones, they make their own phones. In Nintendo, they're like, what's a phone? Have you seen our giant controller? It just doesn't make any sense to me. So Satoru Iwata at GDC last year came out, did a keynote, and proceeded to talk about how crappy phone games were to an audience full of phone game developers. Yeah, yeah. No, they're so crappy, they're so crappy that they're eating your market. Yeah. They're eating you alive. Miiverse tied them a little bit too far, or is supposed to eventually tie into a phone for like a message. Yeah, but the messaging stuff, but it's very like, it's browser based. We actually thought, because when they first showed it, we caught a glimpse of it, and we were like, oh my God, is that an iOS app? And it was like, whoa, they're finally actually doing something. Even if it's a messaging thing, they're not even doing that. They're not even doing like an Android and iOS app for messaging in Miiverse. It's like, they want to be, they're almost like Sony-ing this thing, where they're like, Sony's kind of going in the other direction. And so is Microsoft. Both of those companies acknowledge other screens exist that you want to be part of. And Nintendo's like, no, no. Here's our giant controller. Yeah, no. Can you, I mean, what I see, what I envision in my head is, parents go into the store for the holidays, and they can buy this huge thing, the Wii U with this huge controller, that kind of looks like a tablet, or they can just buy the tablet. And I think that is actually going to be a dead competition. Tablet's a lot more expensive. Well, how much is the Wii U? Well, here's the thing. $300? I've had two is like... They have not announced the price, or release date. I don't see how they can do it for less than $300, personally. Here's the thing, though. Here's where it gets weird in terms of how they're going to sell it. And so this gets down to, I think they're confused about how they're going to market this product. So for starters, CNN reported that they had their press release. This is great. The day of their press conference, the Wii U was a tablet accessory for your Wii. Mainstream, killing it. CNN really reported, and I don't know if they ever even changed it. They did, but after like a long time. They didn't know. That night they did not. They watched the presentation. This is the second year they've given a presentation about what the Wii U is. And we're like, the Wii U accessory, which will hopefully breathe new life, literally it said it will hopefully breathe new life into the Wii. By killing it because it's a new console. Here's the crazy thing about that. It makes sense why people would be confused about that. They've downplayed the whole idea that there's a console. We actually said in the presentation, they don't even show, there's one shot where they showed somebody like the Sing Star or whatever. What was the game where they're singing? Thank you, Paul. Just sing, whatever. They show the console, and by the way, they show the console with a wired mic, like this cord dangling out of the console up to this microphone, which is like the saddest looking thing in the world. Let me play devil's advocate. We just got this by the way. From the chat room, somebody in the chat room. If you're watching the video, can somebody print this out and show it to Paul at the loft? Because this is really. I'll screen grab it. Let me play Bowser's advocate here. Bowser's advocate. Is Bowser the devil of Nintendo? Microsoft or Sony talked about cross play, and I saw one game on the show floor where you had the same menu. If you pull up the menu in the game, we're also on the Vita all the time. You could use the same menu on your Vita as you could, or you use your Vita sometimes maybe as a gamepad. Microsoft showed off, hey, what if, what would be cool if, that you could do these big game things on the tablet, but they didn't show anything real. Nintendo, because it is very constrained, because it's its own tablet, but also it's actually pulling these things off right now for real, that I was able to play with on the show floor. I think Nintendo has a jumpstart. It just definitely doesn't have the long play at all. We are going to want to start using our own tablet. They've got something going on, and it is part of the future. It's a simulcrum. Simulcrum? Simulcrum is a word. Yeah. A simulcrum of what the future is. But the difference is, and not that Microsoft doesn't want you to use their tablet and Sony doesn't want you to use their tablet or whatever, but buy our tablet and our console and use them together. And by the way, this tablet doesn't have a browser. It doesn't do anything. It's not really a tablet. It only works with our console. But it looks exactly like a tablet. Let's be honest. It's just a fancy Dreamcast controller. Can we just say what it is? Can we just all admit it? That's the reason Nintendo could potentially afford to sell this for a competitive price like 300 or under. There's a Sega engineer who was the guy who was like, let's put this screen in the Dreamcast controller, this little LCD, who right now is contemplating suicide. To the press conference, they were like, this is the first time anybody's had a screen in your controller. Oh, how quickly they forget. How quickly they forget. Here's the thing, though. So if you look at the... We have a lot of people, more of their... There's a new little fitness, like a Fitbit clone or something for Wii Fit coming. They're probably going to hope to sell even more Wii Fit. They're going to make up their margin a little bit on these peripherals. I mean, that's great. But to me, it just sounds like you have to buy everything from Nintendo and everything looks like a cartoon. And that sucks. That's a problem. So maybe my mom bought a Wii Fit and a Wii. That was their blue ocean strategy for Wii, is that everyone sitting here wrestling in bloody waters and there's a whole other ocean out there. They made a lot of money selling Wii's to people and expanding the gaming audience. However, if the analysts and focus groups are to be believed, those people didn't play their Wii's. I definitely bought my Wii, played it for like two weeks, like tried to, and then unhooked it. The Wii is in that category of products that I bought that I was really excited about that I now have no idea where they even are. So I don't know where my Wii is. My second-gen Kindle... I mean, there were moments, there were definitely moments of gaming experiences where I was like, this is great and amazing and like a revelation. It just went off very quickly. And to go beyond... First off, it was underpowered. And by the way, again, this will be obsolete in a year. This hardware will be last-generation hardware in one year. We have specs. It's basically an Xbox 360. I mean, it already is obsolete. The Xbox is pushing what it can do to its limits. It's at the end of its life. Wii U is beginning now where it's ending. The other thing I forgot though is that you are... I would put you in the core gamer category. How many hours did you spend in Fallout 3? Like you're not the blue ocean. That's different. Fallout 3 became a different... That's a whole different story. Josh doesn't want to talk about it. Fallout 3 was a place that I went to. To relax, to talk to people, to make friendships. You were talking to those people? So here's the thing about Wii U though. Is that Nintendo, I think the blue ocean strategy in a lot of ways, especially with the brand name Wii, it's a one-time use ripcord. They pulled it. A lot of that audience isn't picking up another Wii. It's like, hey, we know you bought a Solo Flex and never used it. Do you want this new Solo Flex? Nope. I got the other one in the garage. In that sense, Wii has written WII, right? You bought a Solo Flex. Anyhow, sorry, go ahead. I think Wii U could have a really strong first year and a little bit of a next year and then it will trail off pretty rapidly. It will have some of the early success like the Wii did, but then it will trail off more rapidly than the Wii did. Well, I think it's going to come down to the experiences. I mean, I really do. Have you seen the footage of that yet? We have footage of Zombie U I want to show. If Zombie U is this amazing experience that really puts you in a game the way no other console has ever done it, and there are more experiences like that, is this it? I like that we have the IGN logo on this. Yeah, it's really nice. IGN, they have such a great... There's these gaming monopolies. The gaming world is a mysterious place, but Spike TV had all these exclusives at E3. Game play. Chris, you can see this, right? No, no, I've seen it. Wait a second. Are they actually using Johnny Cash? No, it's not. I thought they were using a Johnny Cash song. Wow. I don't think Johnny Cash ever sang that song. No, I couldn't tell. It sounded alike. It sounds like a social distortion cover band. This stuff looks amazing. It sounds like The Poets. Yeah, it does. Zombie U is my favorite thing, but outside of Wii Fit U. But Zombie U isn't what sells Nintendo consoles. Because Ubisoft, as you remember, what's it called, the sword fighting game that came out for the Wii originally. It did well. Wow, this is dark. This is really dark. Sorry, I've never seen this. This just got super real. I've never seen this. This is the worst episode of House of Houses ever. This is not the actual game play though. Is there game play in this trailer? No, that's a cinematic trailer. Well, we don't care about this trailer, guys. We want the one with the game play. So way to freak us all out with that guy blowing his brains out in a graphic slow-mo pan shot of the back of his head. So here's what I would say about Zombie U. Zombie U is a really impressive... UbiSoft is throwing a ton of money into Wii development, so good for them. Watch Dogs for Wii? The third-party game... Wii U, Watch Dogs? Yeah, Watch Dogs is coming to Wii U. They didn't announce that, did they? They said Xbox and PS3, but no Wii U. And PC. And PC. Huge market. No Wii U. They spent a lot of time on stage talking about third-party kind of core gamer games. They brought up Batman Arkham City, and that was maybe their biggest third-party presentation, and it was a game that I played last year. Yeah. And it's coming out later this year. They talk about Mass Effect 3. They were really defiant about... Somebody asked them a question, I forget where it was, and they were like, is this a new... This is the same game we've already played. And they're like, no, it has new content. And it's like, no, but this game is going to end in a couple of new cutscenes or some weird thing you can do with the controller, but this is... It's going to be like a year and a half old by the time anybody plays it on your console, which is Wii U. What I'm saying is, I'm actually going to buy Wii Fit U for Mario Kart and the next real Mario game. I mean Wii U. A new Smash Brothers and Wii Fit U, you know? And I think that's what most people buy. I'm going to steal that bike. Can we bring this up? Sorry, we're jumping around here. Somebody actually posed with Paul outside of our party with the purple bike that got stolen. I would steal that bike. Now check it out. Does that not look like the Joker's bike? It definitely looks like the Joker's bike. Where did you buy this bike, Paul? Where'd you get that wonderful toy? The bike up the street. What did he say? Wonderful what? Is that what you said? Where did you get that wonderful toy? This is the Joker. No, we get it. I didn't hear what you said. It's brilliant. Did you only listen to Party Man while you were out? Yeah, were you just driving around listening to the Bat Dance on that? Screaming this town needs an animal? Our jokes are so old, we're just really showing our age. We're doing the Batman movie from 1989. I thought it was a Lakers bike. Do you know what an L.A. Lakers is? Oh, Lakers. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, that makes sense. You have a real gameplay trailer now? Okay, here we go. Our guys, our video team thinks they have a gameplay trailer of Zombie U. No? Don't know? You don't know? They're starting it apparently. Did it scare you? You know what's funny? I'm not very good at scary games anyway, so I got my heart pounding pretty much no matter what. But the scariest, most intense part was I had a shotgun, which is by far the best weapon in that game. And I ran out of shells, so I had to pull up the inventory. And the inventory is on the... Yeah, we're watching that. And your guy on the TV kneels down and looks into his backpack. And you can still work the analog sticks and look around him to see if any zombies are... So I'm like... There's a lot of things I know that they're coming in. I'm kind of looking to see where they're coming from, and I'm trying to swap out my shotgun for a cricket bat. Now, this looks amazing. You have the sniper rifle, and you bring the Wii U up to the screen, and it becomes the scope of the sniper rifle. Right, and you're really moving it, and it's really nice. I mean, that does seem... These seem like scenarios that I will be personally really into. This one is great. They're showing one now where you're hacking a door, and there's zombies coming behind you, and it's like the screen of the Wii U becomes the door hacking, the door entry keypad, and you're looking behind you at these guys coming your way. Oh, look at that. It does a... Oh, good. Oh, wow. That's pretty intense. No, very effective murder weapon as well. I don't know. I have to say, watch it. So our entire chat room is screaming that this is an actual game play we were watching. That was actual game play. That was CGI. That's actual game play. I mean, that might have been... Look, the game... Let me just let everybody know. The game doesn't look great. It kind of looks like an Xbox game. You know, like, they're like scattered debris on the floor, right? But it's all one flat texture, you know? Wait a second. So are they saying that's not... That's not the game plan, right? I couldn't see it. It's the demo from where they show... It's the one from the presentation where they showed the different things that it could do. That's game play. Is that pre-rendered? I don't think so. Yeah, that's game play. He's saying, the Wii U looks good. It's kind of Xbox 360. I mean, probably better than Xbox 360 graphics. The bigger question isn't the power of the system. It's the developers and how far they want to push it. For a launch title on a system that might not do well, I don't think Ubisoft's going to go crazy. Well, that's the thing. The Wii never got hardly any big budget exclusive development. Nintendo never even spends very much money on the games it makes for the Wii. I mean, like, the big game that they showed off with, like, new Super Mario Bros. Wii U, which looks like the Super NES Mario. Yeah, no, dude. That game looks like Mario 64 and Mario 1 had a baby. I feel like Nintendo's been beating a dead horse for a while with the Mario franchise. I know some of the games are really good. I feel like, you know, they did something for the 3DS that was like... Well, they're beating a dead horse with you. They did this thing. My niece and nephew still love Mario. They're like, you know who we haven't seen enough of is Luigi. And it's like, that's because nobody wants to see Luigi. It's us. We want to murder people. That's what we're doing, right? Can you find a more innovative way for us to murder people? My niece and nephew are like, oh my God, it's Luigi. I actually... Okay, now I'm being told that we have more footage or real footage of Zombie U. But I don't just want to murder people. I want to do other things, but I don't want to play Super Mario Bros. I guess that's true. But they keep making children, you know? More sterilization for everyone. Is that a problem? So that nobody wants to play Super Mario Bros. anymore? And they make a better game? We have footage here? What do we have? Okay. Oh, now this is gameplay. Oh, we have to explore Buckingham Palace. This looks pretty good. This looks like our first show next month. Ouch. No, this looks decent. This guy needs a look. That's the particular motion you're doing there. It looks like Xbox games look in kind of the middle generation of the series. I'm sorry, I think this looks pretty good. Look at the lighting and the fire effects there. I think there's some pretty decent stuff going on in this game. Like I said, it's not bad. Yeah, I will say the characters look like they're kind of like not a ton of polygons on them. I don't think that has to do with the power of the Wii U. It's in a launch title with a new IP on a new system that has new mechanics. It's a camera shooting a screen. Oh, I see. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, you can still see the... There's no generational loss of polygons on the camera screen. Yeah, the guy was made up of 100 polygons. When we filled it with a video camera, he only had 50. Anyhow, I mean, look, there's some cool water effects there on the camera. Yeah. I mean, this looks decent. I would play this and enjoy it. I wouldn't be taken out of the experience by seeing this. Though, you know, when the 720 and the PlayStation 4 come around and they have like... Watch Dogs is like pre... It's like pre those devices. You know, like it's better than Watch Dogs. This is going to look silly. But I feel like that's been Nintendo's thing the whole time. As long as we're good enough and make fun, experience-y games. That would have shot that guy in the ass. I mean, that's what they do, but it's like... It worked for a little while with Wii Sports. It's the same thing. My six and five-year-old nephews play just Wii bowling just for days. All day. But then for anything else, I get bored with that. Can I ask you a Mario Kart related question? Always. Peach is the fastest in time trials. I play Mario Kart with my... This is true. I play Mario Kart with my niece, who is seven. With the Wii. She is a terrible... She's an adorable child, but she hates losing. Adorkable. Adorkable. She hates losing. And so whenever I'm in first place, she will insist that if I stay in first place for too long, a giant bird will come and kill me. And I'm like, I don't think so. It's just never happened. She's always like, you better watch out because that bird is coming. She's in the house, right? So can anybody... She's just going to beat you with the controller. Her father probably fears that a bird will come and kill him. It comes like sailing down from the edge of the sofa. It's very like... I just... I'd be clear. There's no actual bird in Mario Kart. No, there's a shell that can hit the first place player, and that shell has wings on it. Oh. She sets to me all the time. You need to get her a book on what birds look like. They don't look like turtles with wings. She can pair. All right. So I think we need to wrap the E3 stuff. Really quickly, who won E3 this year? Who's the best? It's always a horse race. The correct answer this year is nobody. We'd all agree on that. I would actually pick... Can we get AVP up on the screen? I would actually say... I'm going to say Ubisoft. I think Ubisoft... The game company. You can't win if you don't play. Yeah. A third-party software publisher. I think they kicked off the next-gen discussion in a big way. I think they attracted a huge amount of mindshare doing so, and I think they got people really excited for what we're going to see here next year. I think they had that. But they also... Every single press conference for Microsoft, Mixing, Node, and Sony had a big Ubisoft presence. They do Assassin's Creed. They do, obviously, Splinter Cell, Zombie U. They don't all over the place. Just Dance. If you want to murder people while getting down, Ubisoft. Assassin's Creed with Just Dance. You know, they're French. French company. I have never heard a better definition of the French ever. That's good. All right. On that note, I think we should wrap up. Any final thoughts? Any final E3 thoughts? The Last of Us is great. I'm sure you guys have already talked about that. Yeah, we talked extensively about The Last of Us. By the way, which takes place partially in Pittsburgh, which I'm very excited about. And I suck. I have to say, at one point, I was... Well, we went in for the presentation. I actually asked the developers why Pittsburgh. Because I'm from Pittsburgh, and they were like, it's just a very beautiful city, which it is. I highly recommend you visit. But I was looking at images from still... I was freeze framing the intro of the game, trying to figure out where they were in downtown Pittsburgh. You spent like three hours on that the other night. No. Brian was working on the post about smart glass, and I was kind of chilling and talking with him about it. Josh was just Googling. I was like, street view. Trying to position street view to match the frame so I could figure out where exactly it was. You know, I have a lot of important stuff I need to do. Here's my closing thoughts. I saw the Square Enix Final Fantasy tech demo, and it's just incredibly beautiful. Yeah. My only worry is that just a lot of this next gen stuff is talking about graphics and not next gen game. Which that's why Watch Dogs sounds really interesting. I never got a chance to see it. But they're really thinking about what a next gen, more simulated world would be. Which I think that's the thing. You get more GPU for more graphics, but you're also going to get a lot more CPU. I'm excited about that. I need more RAM to load in that sort of stuff. I'm really excited about that. Are you taking a bite of Neely's head? Is that what you're saying? I went the wrong way. No, you went the right way. So, I just think it's funny because Paul can't see it. Also, that's on a phone. Paul's on a phone that looks like one of the free phones that old people have. Because it is one of those. It's like a jitterbug. Paul's on his jitterbug. It makes sense. Here's my last thought before I go and drink more coffee. Theverge.com slash E3. That's it. Yeah. Nice. Go to that promotion. Drop the mic. We have an E3 hub. All the news that's fit to publish on the internet and read. All right, guys. Well, thank you for joining us. Paul, are you going to stick around? Chris, thank you obviously for joining us. Paul, are you sticking around for further topics or are you hitting the road? What happened this week? What else do we have? It's on our list. I was thinking about renting a bike and then riding the LA River. A pad phone? Okay. We have pad phone to talk about. There's a bunch of crazy stuff at Computex. Computex. David, did you go to Computex? I'm aware that David's there because he talked one time. David's here. I didn't go to Computex. He didn't go. Sean Hollister, Sam, and Jeff went. Forget about Computex. No, I thought Nate went. Nate's there. Nate's there. I don't think Jeff went. Here's what I want to know. Is the Galaxy Tab Wacom thing ever happening? No, because they're going to redo the processor or something. S Pen. No, don't worry about it, Paul. Your dreams are still unfulfilled. Yeah. Okay. Well, I will say this. I've come all the way around to kind of wanting a Galaxy Note 10.1 version 2. If they got paper on that thing. I don't want a Galaxy Note. Oh, Galaxy Note. Yeah. The big one. I think this is a horrible form factor. I think this is a, it's too tall. It's too wide. The 16 nine Android tablet form factor is, is awful. And everyone I've put in my hands, I'm like, I don't want to hold it like this. And I don't want to hold it like this because they're both ridiculous. I want to put it down and get my iPad. Yeah. You know, and like this is a real, this is a real problem. Like they don't seem to understand that like this doesn't work that well. And Microsoft is doing the same thing. All the stuff they showed at Computex is 16 nine. But I'd rather have black bars and something that's comfortable to hold. Yeah. You know, sorry. Game over. D.O.A. No, I apologize to me. I'm going to take off. Bye. OK, Paul, thank you for joining us as always. But you'll be back next week when we when we go. I'm going to be in Chicago next week. Yeah. He's getting married. I don't know what's going on with the Virgcast next week. I'm going to be doing it live from the wedding, which Becky will love. I'm sorry, Becky. There are nuptials here, whatever you do to them. A flamethrower? Yeah, some sort of I don't know. Anyhow, but I just have to do this Virgcast. OK, go ahead, Paul. We'll we'll we'll talk to you next week. All right. Can I say that Becky just immediately I own me to say that we will not podcast. It would be fun. We all we will be there on Friday. It might be fun to do it from the hotel room or hotel room or something. Live live from the life of Hell's wedding. I mean, the Virgcast Chicago. That's ridiculous. All right, David, I'm just going to tell us what you're holding. I'm just going to relax now. Yeah, I'm really like I have nothing to say about the pad phone. I have a lot of things. I mean, I hate the palace. What it is. Wait, I want to know why you hate the. OK, so the. I'll tell you why. There's there's like I can in 30 seconds. It's a phone. The phone is OK. The phone. Yeah, it's not bad. Reminds me of the G2 X. Yeah, I can see that. But it's like, you know, it feels all right. And then there's this big tablet which does exactly nothing until you slide the phone inside. And then it just becomes a tablet. Hey, until you slide the phone, until you slide the phone. There's that kind of that eject situation. Can we get this on video, folks? Can we get this on video doing this? This is the Asus. This had phone. Yeah. OK, let me explain about let me explain to you in case you don't know what it is. OK, it is a phone and a tablet screen. And the phone goes inside the tablet screen and the tablet and then it becomes a tablet. Yeah, but the tablet is basically just the tablet doesn't do anything on its own. It's a bad. It's a bad. Here it is. Here it is. It runs ice cream sandwich with Asus modifications. Yeah, they changed the font. They changed the font and they changed some other stuff. And it's like it's like little things. It's just enough. It's just made the icons taller. Very useful. Yeah, they made a horrible notification window. So tell us about it. So it's I mean, it's it's a weird concept. Like I love the concept. I was really irrationally excited about the Motorola Atrix way back when. So did I. We all did. Everyone did. Because it's like I think I still think it's a great idea. I like this notification window. What are you talking about? It's too much stuff. No, I think it's great. I'm a big fan. Brightness right there. You're right. It's good. Look at that. But the thing is like it's and as a phone, it's not bad. There's nothing really exciting and it's kind of a crappy screen. But it's a it's a fine resolution. What's it? What's resolution? 440. But you know, otherwise, it's a good phone. It has the S4 processor and it's super fast and works pretty well. But then you put it in this and I agree about the aspect ratio. I think it's the worst. And then it just it becomes like this is really heavy even without anything inside because it doesn't do anything currently. But it's still really heavy. They put a massive battery. It's giant. And then literally this thing I've charged. I've had this thing for like a week and a half now. And because I ran our battery test. What does watch calendar mean? It's that is a really terrific question. I mean, this is like, of course, I mean, this isn't for the US market. No. I mean, it's not. It might be someday. No, you know, probably not. I have a long, long rant, by the way, about how this product is like exemplifies everything that's wrong with like US carriers. Because I should just sell this in the US market. What's your reason? What is your reasoning behind that? I guarantee you AT&T is like, no, we're not selling this. Why not though? Why wouldn't AT&T be excited about it? This screen does feel very cramped. Yeah. Because you're totally used to HD. That's what this is for. No, right. When you need a bigger screen. So if you think like this concept is generally the future. So you could talk on the pen. Is that true? Yeah. Shut up. Are you kidding me? Yeah. Hello. This is the most ridiculous set of products ever. Yeah, that's cool. That looks great. This pen is ridiculous. How do you charge it? You have to plug it into a USB port. Yeah. Does it have like a thing? That's amazing. Oh my God. Why? This is so cramped. All right, David, the future. Why is it the future? I'm not going to lie. I pay Dropbox way too much money to keep all my crap everywhere I want it to be. And even that is kind of a weird, clunky system. But this is like I have everything, all my apps, all whatever I want in one place. And then it's like, oh, if I need a keyboard, I just pop it into a keyboard. And if I need a bigger screen, I just pop it into a bigger screen. So with the Atrix, I got all excited because I decided they're going to have these in coffee shops. And you just go like plop it down and work. Yeah, Starbucks is going to just be like, hey, Motorola. Yeah. And for some reason. Let's do this because everybody's going to be carrying the Atrix. Right. And I got really excited about that. But the Atrix didn't really work well at all. I thought as a phone it was pretty good. Yeah, it's fine. Early. Early on my experience with it was excellent. And then it just got worse and worse. Well, that was the case with all Android phones for a long time. And again, it works fine as a phone. And it's kind of a crappy tablet. And then luckily we don't have to actually have to be confronted with trying to buy it here in America. True. Does that come with it? It's just such a crazy. Can I see the pen? It's just such a crazy idea. The fact that it exists is wild. And this comes with it. Hello. I mean, just the worst. Are you there? Excuse me, I got to take a call. Yeah, no, I'm not just holding a pen up to my head. You look totally normal. I'm not just literally holding a Sharpie up to my head. Does that thing stay paired to this or is it paired to this? This to me is like, if I saw someone doing this, I would be like, I get you don't want to talk to me right now. You don't have to pretend to talk on a pen. Sorry, I'm really busy. I got to take this. Just give me one minute. This is a pretty important call. Yeah. Hello? Hello? I think he hung up on me. I don't know what's going on. Is this working? This doesn't seem to be going on with this. But it says it paired with the phone or the tablet. So it pairs automatically. There is no tablet. No, there is. It can't pair with the tablet. It pairs with the tablet. Well, so yeah, when you put it in, it just automatically. There's no radio in there. Yeah, well, no, so it's a software thing. It just knows to automatically pair as soon as you put it into the tablet. But you can pair these two manually. I'm sorry, I'm getting a call. You guys quiet down for a second. Seriously. Hello? Yes? No, I'm, yes. Oh, yeah, I can make that, no problem. So far from good. Well, I have a... Right, so you definitely can't hear anything that's on. You're not selling it. Excuse me, Neal. I'm on the phone right now, and you're interrupting this call that I'm on with this actual phone. And it's upsetting to me. I'm going to have to go. I got a real problem here. Yeah. Sorry. Goodbye. You hang it up, I slam it in. Sorry, this is great. So this leads right into... This leads right into... Thank you. Sorry. See? He's not passed out drunk. You really want a Galaxy Note 10.1. He's not passed out drunk. Go ahead. Real me-verse situation. Well, this is great, but it's... You said it was kind of a demo. Yeah, it's like... Nobody should buy it. So with the Atrix, it just couldn't power all the stuff it had to power. It almost feels like it can, but there's still some stuff that's just not totally there. And you want... Do you feel cool carrying around a dead tablet with you in case you wanted to go into tablet mode? Yes. Really? Not nearly as cool as I felt talking on a pen while I walked down the street. David, is it just... Just, you know, don't pussyfoot it, okay? Buy it or don't buy it? Don't buy it. Well, you can't buy it. Buy it or don't buy it? I don't want to hear your even-tempered... Is this the best iPad stylus in the market? I don't want to hear your even... Can you pair this with an iPhone and then use it as an iPad stylus? Ellis Hamburger said, it's pretty okay. David, I don't want to hear your even-keeled description of what it's like. This is the worst piece of crap I've ever seen in my entire life. I want to hear it. I need an opinion because opinions are real and important, okay? And you got to have one. If you have a billion dollars... Let me ask you something. Which is the best? Which phone should I buy? Tell me which one is the best, which one wins? iOS or Android? Could you tell me that information, please? I need a factual opinion from you. I hear good things about Tizen. Tizen's where it's at. Limo Foundation. Hey, hey, Alien Predator. Which one? Shut up. Don't talk about it. No, wait, can I just tell a really quick story? I will dive across this table and kill you. I will strangle you to death. I will spoil nothing. So I go to the movie theater. We're going to see it at 12.01. Please stop talking about Prometheus. We get there at like 10.15, right? Spoiler alert. Because we're nerds, we want to be first. Spoiler alert. And we show up, we sit down, 12.01 comes, we watch like five trailers, and then up comes Windows 97 saying, Windows 9 desktop has crashed. You've got to be kidding me. Swear to you I'm not lying. Shut up. It just crashed, it just broke and died. Are you serious? So we sit there and... Windows 97, by the way? Wait, that's powering the digital projector? I'm just a product reviewer at the Verge. Old Windows. They should put Linux on there. Limo Foundation. Tizen. Yeah. You tell me Windows crashed, you couldn't watch Prometheus? Windows crashed and we couldn't watch Prometheus. And so it comes up, they were dealing with this for like 20 minutes, and they're like, okay, we're going to play it in another theater. We watch all the trailers again, and it crashes again. Same error message, same thing. Did you see that on the image? Yes, this is what happened. We have the image. Wow. So I'm at this theater for four hours. I watched all the trailers twice. Oh my God. It's now like 2.30 in the morning, I got there at 10, and I still have not seen Prometheus. Keep going, getting closer. Wow. That was my midnight showing of Prometheus. No, it's really good. I really see the fear in Numeirah Pace's eyes. Yeah, it is a pre-XP version of Windows, that's all I know. Wow. I've blocked out which one. Windows 97. How did that happen? I have no idea. It was remarkable, though. I mean, how did that happen? Where's that system? Who invented that? That's the digital production system that they're all using. They built it in like 97? They're like, it's stable. They broke twice. It was the most depressing thing ever. Maybe it was the I love you virus. Or whatever it is. Our chat's like, they should have used Metro. That'd be cool. Swipe past it. You want to talk about Computex? Because this to me, this is what's going on at Computex, right? It's all of the companies who are building Windows 8. Ubooks. In Metro. They're building Folding. They're the same thing. It's because the operating system enables it. One thing's not a shell, and the other's not the brains. It's like, their Windows 8 is a tablet and laptop OS. No, but I'm saying to me, they're playing with form factors in a way that... Playing with fire is what they're doing. Yeah. Well, no, I mean, Asus and Acer used to play with form factor left and right. And they kind of stopped doing it for a while. It's the same thing. All of the Windows 8 stuff is insane. What's the Tai Chi? The screens on both sides of the lid. It's wild. It doesn't seem useful. I like that Acer, I think, was it? Or Asus, the one with the big chunky white dock looks really futuristic. Which one's that? It's either Acer or... The two companies that showed a lot of stuff. Do they have it on screen there? I don't know if that's it. It's got a big white, it's almost like... No, that's not it. This is the Tai Chi, which is definitely cool. But there was one that had actually a very, almost like a Prometheus-y looking, like very sci-fi-ish looking dock. It's called the Acer Wonder Dock. The Acer Wonder Dock? The Acer PC. Wonder Dock PC. The Acer Wonder Dock PC 8X. I'm just naming randomly naming products now. That's not it, that's a lady. I can see what they're looking at. Anyhow, let's take some calls. Did you see anything Computex, Windows 8, that you liked? You've read our coverage, I assume. Call it 888-418-4074. Would love to hear your thoughts. Frankly, you can talk about whatever you want. But I think it's a thrill, a feeling of excitement. 888-418-4074. Call in, tell us what you're thinking about right now. It doesn't have to be about Computex. You can tell me how bad you feel that I didn't get to see Prometheus last night. You can talk about Prometheus? No. You cannot talk about Prometheus. If you say a single word about Prometheus, the call will end. Josh will come to your home and find you. And I will end you. I will snap you like a twig. And then I will use that twig for kindling. And then I will take the ashes from the twig. And I will shoot them with a laser. And I will take the whatever remaining from the laser. And I will put it in a capsule. And I will eject it into space, into the sun. Okay? This sounds like one of those Direct TV commercials. Don't you mention Prometheus to me. We have a caller. Caller, you're on the air saying nothing about Prometheus. What do you want to talk about? Computex? What's up? Who are you? What's your name? Hey guys, it's Dave here. Hey Dave, how are you? What up? Good, thanks. Hey guys. So yeah, the one that I saw that I'm really excited about and I can't wait to get is the ASUS running on WinRT. Which one is it? ASUS. But it's running WinRT. And there's a video floating on YouTube which is a demo of a, it's part laptop. It's part laptop and part tablet. If you've got the tablet in your... Do we have that, Dave?...you dock it to a keyboard. Yeah, do we have that on the site? I think so. I think we must. And why are you excited about it? Well, first of all, it's armed. So the battery life. I'm not interested in Intel. I mean, I haven't seen CloverTill yet. But I haven't seen anything working in CloverTill. But being armed, long battery life, the fact that I can... Because I do use Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. So being able to dock and use it with a mouse and keyboard, that's I think a particular feature for me. Are you at all concerned about the fact that you're basically starting from scratch with... I mean, you're not going to be using any other Windows apps essentially that you've ever used before. You're going to go to Office and then... Does it concern you that you'll basically be starting over and it's going to be all Metro stuff? Not really. I think it's going to pick up pretty fast. Faster than actually Windows 1. I think I wouldn't be too concerned about it. I do own another laptop and I do own an iPad. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. Right. And most of the things that I own, all the apps that I own on the iPad are games that I could live without. Right. I'm really picking it up and I love the new apps, the sports app, the news app, the finance apps, and all those. And there are a couple of games that I could play. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's very interesting. And do they say when that'll be... Well, obviously they didn't say because Windows 8 has to come out. But we're guessing around October, right? Yeah. Nobody's really coming up with a date. Do they say price point? Do they talk about price point for that device? I don't think so. Yeah. What do you think it's going to be? Probably it's going to be less than an Intel, yes. But the fact that it has a keyboard and it's stocked, I would say it's going to be in the range of about $500 to $700. I mean, if it's any more than $700, does it here, the Tablet 600? Well, if it replaces a laptop, I don't know. I mean, people are complaining about it. If it's more than $400, it's not worth it. I mean, it's as good as a laptop. It's a hard sell, though, if you're going against the iPad. If you're going against a laptop, totally makes sense. I guess the question is, the value proposition will be, look, you can get a laptop and an iPad, or you can spend ultimately less money and get the best of both worlds. That's kind of going to be how they're selling these things. Yeah, that's the pitch. You're going to have the tablet, and you're going to have this great laptop, traditional laptop experience. Right. I don't want to think about one device. I don't want to think about, oh, should I carry my iPad with my keyboard, or should I carry my laptop, which is pretty heavy. So I just want to think about one device, and that's what I'm looking forward to. Right. Let's see, it's this concept. All right, cool. We're moving on. Thanks so much for calling in. We're going to take another caller here. But, I mean, it seems like... Caller, you're on the line. I don't talk about my name. Oh, my name is... My name is Renal. It was pretty... I saw it on IT, and I thought it was pretty cool, but it just like, it kind of struck me like a pad phone. It was like, is it really going to... Is anyone really going to... That's not really going to happen. I mean, I'll say this. I'll say this. So I travel quite a bit, and I use my laptop on the plane, and I also bring my iPad. And it would be really great to be able to have a very discreet... I've got my iPad, essentially, and I've got this very discreet trackpad keyboard component for it that does not take up a ton of room, doesn't take up as much as a laptop, and I can be in either state if I want without having to take two different devices. That to me is a pretty exciting idea. Yeah, but the Tai Chi is like the folding two-screen... Right, the Tai Chi is the one that flips over. It's Intel. It doesn't... Like the Transformers, those seemed a lot more like... Those seemed real. Like I would get one of those, like if it wasn't like a billion dollars, I'd totally get one of those. I think that's the place where... I personally feel like the ARM devices that are the detachable, like they do basically dual duty, and they're detachable. You don't end up with the same, like, oh, I have to flip this or fold this or bend. I can have it one way or have it the other. That to me is actually really enticing. To not have to browse the internet using an iPad browser all the time, to be able to have what is essentially a full browser with a trackpad and a keyboard in a full computing environment, not like this sort of partial one. I could see that obviating my need for taking both things. Yeah, that was my epiphany. The thing is, okay, you can use... I can use an iPad for fun. I'm just like chilling, but I just can't see myself typing. I mean, I have a 10-page essay due today. I cannot see myself writing that thing on an iPad. That's why I really love the Transformer. Even the iPad keyboards that people are making, they leave a lot to be desired. There's some okay ones out there, but the things where you can kind of dock the iPad, and it's still like... Yeah, you're talking about the Logitech. The Logitech. There's a couple of other variations. See, here's the thing. Here's a question. I think that we're rapidly coming to a place where you have to kind of decide, do you have multiple devices that have overlapping, redundant capabilities, or do you have one thing that fulfills multiple different form factor kind of experiences? One true device. Right, and the PadTone's like really... You think it's one? I don't know. I think it's two. I think it's two for one. Well, I mean, not something as crazy as a PadTone, but I mean, if you have a Transformer, to me, it's not really that much different from a G2, which I think is almost as good as the G2. I think it's a little bit more challenging to find a new one. It's to me it's not really that much different from like I don't know having a laptop and you know Putting in an external mouse. It's kind of the same concept. It's a little bit higher level I mean, I I definitely get what Charles is saying about the keyword I mean like I have a that's why I bought like a ThinkPad x1 because the key words like Amazing. I can't live without a good keyboard, you know, it's really productive and so that's why the Transformers are pretty exciting But I mean, they don't really like I mean like they seem so clunky. I mean They just I don't know like the execution on like the conversion is so It's just terrible. Yeah, I agree. But the operating system isn't well, right? That's that's not made for that. You can't It's hard to get mad at it Companies like a serious for like not being good at like the software right because they're not software companies They clearly being clear. No, no, no, I actually mean the hardware I mean like not so much the not so much to the fact that like I like to me It just doesn't seem that seamless when you like, you know, transform it, you know, it Doesn't make it doesn't make it always is what you're saying If it made the noise would it seem? Yeah, I mean was like No, no, I mean like it just it just seems like a huge ordeal to put it in and take it out It's not like like okay when you have an iPad and you put on you know You're your little smart cover that that just to me is so seamless Like why can't we have something so seamless when you? Transform your tablet to a notebook. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean like You just want that like I'm not saying that like Apple needs to make some Phone Apple could make something Like the hardware was really good. Yeah, you know, maybe Maybe maybe we'll see something. You never know man Mondays Yeah, you might be switching all right, we're gonna move on thanks I hope thanks so much for calling in We appreciate it. You want to take some? WWDC prediction calls, let's do that. I think we need to wrap up pretty soon I don't know what time it is, but let's say okay. Okay caller. Oh, we have one more caller I don't know what you're calling you're on the line. Hi. Hello Hello, well, you might want to mute us in the background if you can turn us up Um, don't listen. What's your name? And what are you calling about? Hello. Hello Hey, how you doing? Hey, what's your name? And what are you calling about? My name is Sean talking about Windows 8. Yeah I Just don't see it. I Don't think consumers actually going to that at all. I still like you just Try it. If I try and do too much you think so I mean, you think it'll be confusing to consumers that they'll look at it and go Like what is this thing supposed to be? Exactly and And just looking at it. I'm all like, okay, you want to do arrow or Metro wherever to call it put on the tablet Right you want to do Windows put on the desktop, right? You chop all these things together Yeah, I'm down beyond this because some of the stupid things work at Best Buy. I know how consumers Take stuff how to look at things and I quote consumers are stupid. I used to work at Best Buy I think I think I think your point is that a lot of people go into the store and they don't know what they want They don't really know understand Well, I mean they're really dumb, but I don't know what I'm talking about, but they go in there just not knowing what's going on, right and and Best and you go in and try and buy these things and nobody knows what they're doing what you're talking about You're not gonna sell well, right? Yeah, I just like a safe worker Best Buy. I Quit that like two months. Nobody knew nobody in there knew what they were talking about Dude, don't you think that comes along but don't you think Microsoft's will go? Don't think Microsoft will be doing it like a ton of outreach and saying Look when somebody comes in the store and they're looking at the iPad you can say oh check this out You can get the best of the iPad like all this tablet stuff Plus you can have a full laptop Full laptop, but don't you feel like they're gonna be pushed to sell it like that? It could But I mean, I don't know man Microsoft ain't really all that great at Apportion new concepts of stuff that is true. They're a little slow to evolve sometimes They got the Xbox right? Yeah, but it took him two generations. It took him two generations But I think normally the people got Xbox until the halos. I mean halo helped Yeah, I was just I like to be beeped at the end yeah You're not interested in getting one when they come out you're not gonna get one I mean, I'm not I like to try it out first. Let's see what it does how You know, let me ask you What do you have right now? I got to say I have a laptop with an iPad and I got an iMac desktop. Nice. That's an interesting comment What kind of you have an iPhone? Yeah, I got the iPhone as well. So you're all Apple you have all Apple stuff? Well, I don't have all Apple stuff and I got a few desktops here and there But not like your daily But your daily driver is not any Microsoft product No, no, so do you feel like you might have a tablet? You're ready. Do you think you might be careful man? You think you might be predisposed to not want to get? Microsoft fine It's like you've internalized all the hate Mac users are going like yeah, I may switch to Windows. I think a lot actually I don't just say I think you're crazy I think no Mac user is going I'm gonna switch to Windows now because of Windows 8 Oh, you think I'm kidding. I will I'm not like I want a Windows at all I know you want one but you're gonna switch it as your main you're asking me your main device It depending on how much they move Switch over you're not gonna fully switch over. Oh no. No, no, no, no, but like I said though I just say You know if you're if you're in the ecosystem, you don't suddenly go I'm jumping ship Especially in the Mac ecosystem where you're like, oh, I'm gonna switch to Windows But especially in the Mac ecosystem, which is you know pretty good The products work pretty well, right? The iPad is really a great tablet every time I plug in my iPad and iTunes opens I'm like, yes, I love this ecosystem It's my favorite you're like I'm in this I'm in the rain forest the Apple rain forest uh, well I was judging from what I saw because I was on the verge I was looking at all those stuff They had one where you like it's a keyboard and a laptop you can fold it make it like a laptop. I'm like I'm looking at some of these things like didn't Microsoft try to do this stuff before? Yeah, yeah, but they didn't have Windows 8 which is gonna be the real difference because it's it's made right made for a tablet But yeah, remember Dell made the Dell is trying this again where they make the screen that flips around Yeah, you know, maybe they'll get it right. I gotta say whenever Dell does the the form factor innovation gives you chills Why he shows all right caller. Thank you so much for calling in. We're gonna take some more calls. Thanks a lot There's two things we need to talk about by Sean. Yeah, that's not Sean's gone What we had a huge story that we have completely. Yeah, no I actually just looked at Twitter and I realized that my I'm being berated by people who think that we're a leftist liberal leftist rag Romney I wasn't there on me. I was not talking about anything we can talk about people were like so we ran a story Sorry, what's the other story? The web OS story web OS story story and the fact that HTC may or may not be denied Windows. Oh my god. There's so many stories. Let's let's since I brought it up with you I was quick So Joe flatly who wrote the original scam world piece which exposed the the underbelly of internet scamming wrote a follow-up story today and and Basically not basically literally. Yeah, this company called Prosper Inc Which is like one of the largest boiler rooms in America now boiler rooms are where all these high-pressure sales happen that get people into Like getting scammed. Um, they are holding fundraisers. They're like big. Yeah, they're huge They hold like five thousand dollar connection is the more specific connection is that they're all in Utah Well, they're all in Utah. They're all in Utah and they're tied and they're tied to the Utah political establishment, which is tied to Mormonism right and tied to Mitt Romney and and and if you read the article Which by the way a bunch of people who wrote to me on Twitter clearly didn't they're like it's not even mentioned this headlines misleading It's not even mentioned in the article It's like well your reading comprehension sucks If you don't see where it's mentioned the article because towards the end of the article we bring it all together to talk about how these You guys are basically holding five thousand dollar plate dinners You know the guys who run Prosper Inc are holding five thousand dollar plate dinners for Mitt Romney They're putting giving him money for his campaign Which I think is really interesting. I mean look believe me. Well, I'm sure we could dig up some dirt I mean if this was that we weren't going looking for it this stuff comes from You know the fact that it was related as it was complete surprise to us. Yeah And it's actually where this started was a bunch of people reached out to us after the first scam world and we're like I have more information. Do you guys want to hear about this? You know people came out of the woodwork wanting to talk about it and that's actually one of the more interesting things about doing Any sort of investigative piece that we do? Yeah Because we have to run around with like ideas and like dig and push and then as soon as we or any Journalist like shines a light you probably oh my god. I have so much to tell you about it I mean, here's here's that's like kind of the point. Here's a tweet that is God This is it. This is a that is a disgrace to journalism pathetic clickbait Here's another one Good read scam of a headline. Why is the Romney connection even mentioned? Why is it even mentioned? Yeah, there's no reason we want to mention that a gigantic scam organization is also funding presidential candidates That's not leftist lean or trolling for clicks. It's not a question. That's a statement Wow, that is some shady journalism I expect better from you Josh. Yeah. Yeah, you know us and it's your fault Shady just trying to be shady. Yeah, you did it But read the article. Have you seen my new slideshow? RTFA our TFA top ten babes with Mitt Romney. Yeah babes with me But anyhow, but but so that was that's watch this so many babes. What are the comments like on this? Is it a mess? 162 I mean the first one is oh We didn't Joe didn't attempt to veil his agenda. Yes, that's right his agenda to take down Romney. Yes I'll tell you what man politics a guy with a Canadian flag icon who says he went to school in Utah Politics. Yeah, the most dangerous I this is what I would expect it from Gawker media dangerous deadliest and sexiest game Like I always thought Android versus iOS was scary. But like politics is it's so much worse. It's well. Yeah, I mean You know I mean this use Andrew. It's a different I've heard that kind of it's a different kind of commenter that gets riled up over politics true, I think Anyhow, so that's one thing we read but but hey, can I just say this I'm gonna um, oh Oh, no, I mean look it's an election year. There's a huge callers waiting on the line. There's a huge amount of I mean The government is like they're like, oh my god the internet. They know it's there this This will not be the last story you read on the verge about politics and we're we're gonna ramp it up as the election This actually the story isn't about politics But what I thought was most striking about this story is the how far it goes That that is what that is the point of the headline and that is the point of mentioning Mitt Romney in this story Which is Prosper Inc is a large entity that has ties that are very big important ties to very big important people and they're also part of a business that is Essentially illegal. I mean is essentially I mean is a crime, you know There's a criminal organization and what they do to people is criminal right? Not only do they make tons of money off of people But they like wield real influence exactly another and that's and that should scare the shit out of everybody Honestly when you think about it, you should be scared that it goes that far Mitt Romney shouldn't be taking money from boiler rooms That's what I think. Of course I think you know We should have way more reasonable campaign spending because it's completely both on Obama and Romney You know the amount of money they they spend and the way it's done is I think we have it all wrong in this country That's just one man's opinion that our chat room just explode one man one man who will be getting shot It's a really rough thing I mean I got you know that Citizens United verdict that said corporations can Confine whatever it was like change the nature of campaigning. Yeah, but you know the flip side of it is it's not a bad argument I mean you tell people how they can spend their money, right? You are telling people how they can exercise the right to free speech free speech. Sure, and I don't it's just it's a very It's a very tricky It's a very I think the way to do it is to end outside contributions to campaigns So to just say to say you can't state will give you the money corporations and people can't contribute to yeah Literally set aside money. I'd rather I would pay money in my tax dollars You mean there's public to say and to say set aside X amount of dollars each candidate gets this You know determine you obviously would be you know You'd look at inflation and things and figure out what seems reasonable based on past campaigns You know, we're getting way in the weeds here. We're getting to a dangerous. We're deep in the scary political place I mean right now there are people penning Emails to me about how I'm a socialist. It's not even funny. I just tweeted at you about it. Thank you But anyhow, but so then the other big story we had this week huge story Web inside this what you're talking about, right? Yeah, so we have callers on the line What do you want to do with these call? I want I want the callers to talk about WWDC They're in there waiting. Yeah, let's before we talk about let's let's do WWDC right now Sure, and then we'll do and then we'll talk about web OS and then and then we'll touch on HTC and then we'll wrap Yeah, which will be in five hours No, you're on the line. Sorry for keeping you waiting WWDC WWDC predictions. Yeah, is that why you're calling? Yeah, so what do you got I brought a blog post Recently looks like my top five wants for WWDC Some of them are pretty obvious, but some of them might be worth discussing. What are they? Let's hear them. Go down the list. I won't All right. So five I Presume series six is just an obvious thing. It's gonna be probably on all platforms right iPhone iPad I just stop my iOS six. Yeah, I See you guys series gonna be on the platform. Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe just be completely stable Yeah, I mean, I think there's been some leaks. I buy it. I think it's possible. Why not? and Four was and I remember you guys talking about this. I think a week two ago about Mail client for iOS since they can't really default You know sparrow or something like that for to do completely everything that the client does maybe they'll think about Making what fewer steps every time you're trying to access something on your mail app wouldn't be wonderful I don't just get an attachment by clicking an attachment icon and asking, you know saying which attachment do you want to put in here? That would be amazing. Yeah Okay You're breaking up a little hang on no you're breaking up we're all breaking up. No, I'm just kidding Well, I think the worst part is when I'm on like listservs or something and I have two messages from a single listserv I feel like I have to go through four steps just to hear what someone says And that drives me crazy on the mail app first of Gmail. Yeah. All right number three. What's number three? so Apple TV UI this is actually not really something I'm expecting it's kind of a question I raised as I was writing it I realized I was just asking the question Would they really show off the UI without any kind of hardware to unveil with it because it seems like never anything That might be a proof. That's never happened No, they might update the existing Apple TV UI, but they just did way over here. Yeah, like February. Yeah Yeah, sorry the guy responded to me who said that Said the connection was tenuous. I'm sorry. I hate to break up your He's in the connection was tenuous, but he agrees on the financing. I don't think it's a tenuous connect connection at all It's a direct connection. Anyway, I'm sorry number four number. No, no, he's on number two now. He's counting down Oh, you're kind of down kind down right here on number two number two in that list three is a confusing one to hear Wait, what was okay, right number two dose It's too yeah, so Uh number two is this might be at WWDC, but maybe it'll be something Related to an announcement they make that will be like a subsequent Presentation on the campus like they did with the iOS roadmap back in iOS Do I think mm-hmm or iOS 3 maybe? I'm just thinking maybe they'll do an OS 10 roadmap presentation I Mean because we only have two versions of OS 10 left before it becomes what? Yes, no, it's at another. I can just do it. I can just start calling it OS 10 again. I mean right No, I don't so I disagree with you I don't think they'll do that the reason they used to the iOS Roadmaps Was because they had to have developers to do the App Store They had to show new api's and they couldn't do that without a new phone They sell Mac OS separate from the devices so they can display here's the new version of iOS You know start developing for it. I don't think they'll do it. I think whatever they showed WWDC will just be whatever All right, and number one Number one was I really hope they do this native turn-by-turn navigation with the rumors Maps that they're gonna do themselves. I feel like I think they'll do I think I think if they don't do native turn-by-turn I'd be pretty surprised but I could see them not doing it I feel like they could almost bake that into Siri somehow. Oh, yeah You know like Siri could be the voice of the turn-by-turn and if she could somehow it could be like You know Siri navigate me to X and like it would just jump you into their map thing because that would be amazing Yeah, if you could say to Siri like navigate me to specific address and then she immediately it's one step You don't have to look at the phone and you're navigating That would be really great. I mean she already does that. Yeah, that's the best thing. I loved about Android. Yeah That the native turn-by-turn. I mean I was in I was in Android yeah, I was in LA all last week and I used it because I was driving everywhere constantly Yeah, everywhere I went I was using it All right, the best part about it is you don't have to have an address. That's right. That's right All right, we navigate to target in this area. Damn it. Damn it. We got to move on. Thank you so much for calling Really appreciate it. All right. We got one more here Hello WWDC predictions, what's your name? And what do you hope to see? I am an immigrant. My my predictions are That's a along with the normal stuff like iOS 6 and mountain lane. I think we're going to see Siri API We probably see Siri API could be huge. I mean if they do it the right way that could open up a whole new world of Functionality the question is for me the question the Siri API is Does it always work with the third-party apps or do you have to open the third-party app? Yeah, right Because then you run into a question we have maybe competing apps trying to do the same services So if you have the built-in, I mean that's true if you have two Twitter clients That is a tricky You've got it. You've got to know well, but you know the way they do with notifications they assign They say do this notification for this app, you know, maybe they that's per app. I mean that's like It's a lot like a Siri setting. Each app will have a keyword Yeah, well you think it'll be like, you know, you'll say Siri Twitter You know tweet this message or something We have to say that goes far away from the natural language kind of well not really How about tweet you could do? Okay, you could say say so maybe it'll be like, you know, Siri you press it down And then it's like Twitter say man. It's really hot outside Yeah, you know and then it's like it just hears Twitter and say and it knows that's what you want to say something on Twitter That to me is pretty natural You know, yeah it is It just it it adds one layer of management and Apple's typically very reticent to add that layer Well, I think that if you want to do it with apps, you know, you say foursquare check in here Yeah, that makes sense to me. But what you really want to say is check in Well, what you really want to say is I'm at Starbucks and it just Or if I just know where you are So to that point, maybe you'll say I'm at Starbucks and Siri will say do you want to check in on foursquare? That's not bad. I think you should that's actually That's actually not a bad idea. That's too many interactions. I think you want it Is it? Yeah, because it should know where you are I said where I am and then I say yes No, but it should you don't have to tell it where you are John Mavrvic wouldn't mind You don't have to tell it where you are Right because the phone knows where you are Geofences What you should really be able to say is check in you just hold the Alright, caller, what else? In ten minutes I'm taking this into the weeds Besides the API's what are you thinking? What else? I think they will open up an Apple TV SDK which will enable Bluetooth 4.0 and allow an app to be a secondary screen There won't be apps on the TV itself because there's only 8 gigabytes on an Apple TV but the iPad itself will be a secondary screen like a smart glass Interesting. Could happen Over Bluetooth you think? Well they could do it. There's no Bluetooth in the new Apple TV is there? There is. It's Bluetooth 4.0 and it's a standard It's Bluetooth 4.0 it disables It's disabled That's bizarre It was disabled in the iPod touch for a long time too You know why? Because it's basically the same SOC as the iPhone Do we have any leftover stuff? Yeah throw it in the Apple TV Anything else? Any other ideas? No, just a MacBook Air MacBook Pro 15 inch you'll probably get a redesign of the 13 inch Here's what I want. Here's what I really want I want black aluminum. Matte black aluminum Like the old MacBook from a couple years ago Like the old MacBook but that material Black aluminum It's a good album title Alright caller thank you for calling in. Really appreciate it Thank you Alright do you want to wrap up these last two stories very quickly? Well it's hard to wrap up WebOS quickly I want to see if this guy responded to me. We're having a good back and forth here Good, good The Josh Apolsky Twitter moment Nothing Twitter minute Somebody wants to talk about Apple ditching Google Maps and iOS 6 They're going to do it. I mean who didn't know they were doing that? Here's the thing though. Don't all third party apps have hooks into Google Maps right now? No they have hooks into the core Maps API I mean Apple builds itself naturally No, no, no but they hook into They hook into Maps on iOS The back end of Maps is Google Maps Aren't they, but they're specifically using like Foursquare, not Foursquare because they're actually using Something else now aren't they? Yeah Aren't they specifically using Google Maps for things? Like things that Google Maps does But there is a Maps API in the standard In the OS So when you write an iPhone app you write Get a map and then the OS delivers you a map Interesting And you say put this stuff on this map and the OS figures it out But it doesn't have, but that has to have So all those, anything that that map app Map API is doing right now hooks into Google You're saying like they can just reassign They can just reassign those actions Yeah, and there might be some tweak, I mean obviously Everything about it perfectly, but that's the idea Right, I mean everybody will have to change their Everybody will have to update their app To work with this new No I think the idea is that you don't have to update the map No, no, but I think that I feel like it's going to present problems, I think there are very specific use cases I feel like what they'll have to do is give developers an option I think, sure But I think at the system level If you're just using the system Maps API The iOS API, it'll be seamless If you're going beyond that functionality and hooking into Google It won't be Do you think, so do you think that then Google will Release a full Google Maps app for the Oh yeah, without question, they had that event And they said this is all coming to every platform Do you think that Apple will allow other apps to be assigned To handle specific functions No On the iPhone I don't think they'll do that, I think they'll accept the map happily And say that we provide the service Interesting It's going to be very, I mean that's What else do you think is coming? So I really don't think they're going to do any TV stuff I think they're going to I actually I really am almost 100% We were just talking about this in the car over here I feel like they just did TVs with the iPad With the new iPad I feel like this is going to be focused on Well they've already shown Mountain Lion We already looked at it They're going to show it again They previewed it, I think they're going to have a much more advanced preview Without question And then I have to assume they're going to do iOS So this is going to be laptops and mobile And they're not even going to do like They're not going to show everything Let's say the new iPhone has a slightly larger screen They can't exactly go like Now you have room for this You know Like how could they, if that area is to be used for something More than just like extra real estate Which I assume they're not just putting it in there to make another row of icons Right They can't show what that does yet Nope, they'll do that with the phone They'll do it with the phone Which is crazy But here's my guess, I think I figured it out I think that that area is going to be a static widget slash notification area Right And that there won't be any interaction with I mean I think essentially your iPhone screen is going to stay Exactly the way it's always been for interaction Except when you go into full screen apps Which will do the full 16.9 Right But for like That actually really lets them solve the problem Because the thing is you don't want to Because it lets them put out the phone and make use of the extra space Apps they preserve the way they are Yeah And then when the apps get updated they can take away the widget The question will be like can they do notifications in that manner Because notifications are still somewhat intrusive on iOS We've talked about this a bunch I think it makes sense like you could stick a widget there right You could have your weather widget up all the time when you're looking at the screen And you could swipe through that area to different widgets Right Or different like data or applications you may want to interact with The question is like would you swipe to notifications Maybe it's like a right swipe for one thing and a left swipe for something else Right I mean how much room are we talking about How many more pixels would that be up there Do you know the number It's 130 something I think that's right Our chat would know but the wifi is broken Is it Yeah It's a pretty good chunk of pixels Sorry chat I want to ask you I just think that I feel like But they're not going to show that Do you think Absolutely not Do you think iOS 6 will have any kind of a redesign It's 136 pixels Any kind of a redesign Thank you chat Oh good way to go chat Do we think iOS 6 will have any kind of a visual redesign I think they'll refresh a bunch of stuff they almost have to Will everything be stitched leather Yeah God that's the worst Maybe they'll introduce themes No like old OS 9 themes Yeah No like Swiggly lines Yeah like you could do like an all stitched leather theme No Or like a steel I don't think that will ever happen Blue steel I think they'll just do what they do with Mac OS 10 They'll just keep refining it into various directions I mean Now everything is a square Right I wonder if there will be any notable I mean I actually we talked about this last time I think But I heard a lot of people in the industry they were like Boy I'm really tired of iOS it looks really dated to me Yeah Like a lot of people People who have iPhones Wait until everything is a square That's true I mean that's like Apple's like move like You think they'll take off the rounded edges on the icons Yeah they'll just mean that they do it with OS 10 all the time They could I'd be into that I would I actually don't think squares look that good like that personally I'm saying like I use Snow Leopard on this machine And then I've been using my iMac which has Lion on it And every time I come back to this one which I think is more functional Because I think Snow Leopard is more functional than mine I don't even remember what Snow Leopard is like I'm like wow this looks ancient but it's not It's just different one thing is a little less glossy It's Apple's move they're very good at it Slight tweaks So let's talk about webOS real quick and then maybe we can David you don't have any predictions about WWDC? I really don't No nothing? Dub dub You don't have anything to say about it? No I think Siri is the one I'm less convinced is going to be like a huge part of everything I don't know Tim Cook basically alluded to Siri stuff coming Yeah no I think there's going to be some stuff but like Siri and the iPad is the one thing I'm really curious about Because Siri basically becomes functionally useless when you're offline And the offline use case for your iPad is much higher than with your iPhone And so I don't think they'd want to have this like horribly broken feature on your iPad Well the best thing they might do is if you're offline it just says Siri is not available offline Right but that's kind of a crappy experience then Because they're promoting Siri like crazy but then 60% of the time There are crappy experiences all over iOS Yeah and Siri itself is almost always a crappy experience I use Siri consistently for one thing I'm just saying that like all modern mobile operating systems there are wonderful transcendent experiences And then there are ones that just seem a little bit broken So there may be things like the notifications which really aren't quite there No but with Siri in particular they already have such an air of this kind of works Adding on one huge piece of well this doesn't work in all these places that you use your iPad I mean I play this game every time Every time I want to make a phone call to one of the eight people on my favorites list I always try to use Siri and then I wait for it And I'm like why am I asking AT&T to figure this out We got to wrap up let's talk about webOS So we ran a huge piece this week It's basically a here's a screenshot pre-to-post-mortem the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS And this is we conducted tons of interviews I did, Chris did, Dieter did And they wrote the bulk of this I barely didn't I really didn't touch any of it This piece which is just basically tell us the story of what the hell happened with Palm What happened from before the launch of the pre from the development of webOS to where it is now Which is like basically dead in the water at HP the entire team is broken apart A lot of them went to Google a lot of them have gone elsewhere And they're not making any webOS based products at HP And they've opened webOS up as an open source piece of software Which I don't think has gained a ton of traction And it's for all intents and purposes right now is dead And how did they get there and it's a fascinating if you haven't read it like take 15 minutes 20 minutes out of your day Sit down because it really doesn't take that long to read you'd be surprised what you can get done In just this short few minutes sit down and read the thing it is a fascinating look And I think one of the best things we've ever published it's I mean I have to say again I mean it's great But you know the driving thing that I got out of it was American Wireless Carriers killed Palm I don't know they definitely did like without question you hear and by the way this is like from the horse's mouth Like we talked to people who really knew this isn't speculation this isn't oh you know he said she said So this is like people who were there at the time you know who know what happened or basically give Verizon killed the pre You know they use the pre as leverage to get a deal with Google like it was their choice on how many to buy on how they would sell them And whether the people in the retail stores knew how to sell them and you couldn't go get them anywhere else right you know going with Sprint hurt them They wanted to go with the Verizon originally because there's only and all that is only two because there's only two big carriers in America But all of and yeah and if you don't get a device if you put a device out on Sprint or T-Mobile it's not going to be a big success Right you're not going to have a big hit you know you need to put it on one of the two big monopolies And it also not only does it need to be on that care need to support it they need to sell it and advertise around it and want to support you It's a crazy it's crazy I mean that to me is it's like if you're it's like if you want to buy a car you know and they're only there's big warehouses where you could get cars They would only like push one kind of car can you imagine buying a car where like you know it had to be supported by this I mean it's just crazy that's bad analogy But it's just crazy cars about analogy I can't think of a you know it's a monopoly it's a monopoly that needs to be crushed Yeah. Yeah. You're busy reading the other thing that really struck me about this was just made me remember how awesome the pre was when it came out and how excited everybody was because it kind of gets lost now But really I've never wanted to phone as much as I wanted to and I know you agree with that But I mean you don't know I mean you weren't part of our team at the time unfortunately for us You were just a baby you were like five years old You were literally three. Yeah. But you know that was an event that first off it came out of the blue we knew the Palm was doing something there it was such a surprise what they showed And I know that like Laura told me this story I think it was Laura that told me this story how people were like in our trailer at CES like screaming like you were there right were you in the trailer Yeah. People were like freaking out. That was a crazy moment they really did something impressive and they really had a product that look they made a lot of mistakes. And it wasn't just Verizon because there were other things that happened. They had internal conflict I think early on that had repercussions. And you know this guy Paul Mercer who talked about who had essentially like the thing that they didn't use as the basis of the OS who had been working on it at Palm. And at some point they decided to switch over to WebOS which was this more HTML 5 based much smarter much more forward thinking than what they had been working on previously. Yeah. Which somebody told us took in that OS it took five lines of code to center text in something. Wow. Which is really crazy. But you know they had to move away from this thing that they had built this that they thought they were moving towards and that caused a lot of conflict and a lot of I think trouble early on in this process. But seriously you got to read the story to me you just read it like you don't want to hear me talk about it. But it's depressing but it also ends a kind of a hopeful note a hopeful note which is 24 hour party people 24 hour party. Let a thousand web OS's bloom. And I do think like you'll see you do see now already. Can I just say. I mean I mean some of the guys went to went to Apple right there is then the notification guy go to Apple. No that was a jailbreak guy. No the other one. Yeah I think the notification guy guys did. Yeah obviously Matias went to Matias went to Google and you'll see you know all this stuff. They're huge. Already in fact in fact you see like the guy who the guy the notification do what is his name. I can't think of his name. Pretty sure he went to Apple like six months later notifications change on the iPhone and the I'm not saying it's just a one to step like this but you know Matias went to Google. And six months later suddenly like the UI is a lot better and a lot more beautiful. Here's some pictures amazing. Here's some of the graphics. We've some really some really excellent cropping around. Yeah. Yeah. James our designer spent a lot of time on this. And every time I see this picture of John Rubenstein just like sadly walking down the street where he's a little further down a little bit. The thing is such a. Yeah. So why'd you do this to me. HP. That's my. I mean HP really mean he blew it in one way. But we've been on the air for like three hours now. And so we wrap this up. Sorry I know you're enjoying this but but I have to eat. OK. And sleep. Yeah. Once in a while and I have to take down the. I'm just about the way I'm so I'm so tired right now. I came back for I don't want to complain you know it's champagne problems. But you know I came back from D and E3 and now I'm going back out to WWDC on Sunday. And then we have Google I.O. There's a big Microsoft is doing a Windows phone event this month. Come on guys. You know what there's twelve months in the year. Yeah. You don't all have to do your stuff in June. All right. That's it. That's the Verge cast this week. If you would like to get in touch with us you can email us at Verge cast at the verge dot com. You find us on Twitter it's at Verge or we also have Twitter accounts. I'm Josh with the Polsky and Eli is reckless. David Pierce is Pierce David which is you know the worst. Chris Chris. Chris Grant is Chris Grant I believe. Yeah Paul is not on the Internet so don't you. And it was anybody else I'm missing. No. OK. That's our show for this week. We'll be back next week with with more delicious tasty morsels of information. And until then I wish your family the very best and I'm sure I won't see them anytime soon. Just your family for you. Don't even care. And rock and roll is what I want to say. Polygon. Polygon. You're a punk.
 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of June 4th, 2012.
 I'm Josh Topolsky.
 I'm Nilay Patel.
 I'm David Pierce.
 David Pierce is here with us.
 And also on the big screen up in this section, our main man from Polygon, Christopher Grant.
 He has a first and middle name.
 Both Chris.
 Chris Grant, hello.
 Look how big my head is.
 Chris Christopher Grant.
 It's gigantic.
 It's gigantic and also highly erotic.
 Where are you?
 Where are you?
 That's an awesome thing behind you.
 Oh, it's just a little thing, a little piece called art.
 A little something called art.
 Get with it.
 Get used to it.
 Chris, thank you for joining us.
 Chris is in LA right now along with the most, well, the entire Polygon crew, I think.
 And a handful of the Verge crew as well.
 You were there.
 I was there.
 I just got back.
 And E3 is going on, in case you're wondering why everybody's in Los Angeles.
 I feel like I'm leaning forward too much for this mic.
 I really have mic problems.
 I'm sorry.
 Well, you've got the stand.
 I have the stand, but still...
 That you've always wanted.
 And yet still I'm unhappy.
 Yeah.
 Is that surprising to anybody?
 No.
 Shouldn't be.
 Let's talk about E3.
 Not at all.
 Anyhow...
 Were you there for just our party?
 By the way, I saw some pictures of our party.
 Oh, yeah.
 I'm very jealous.
 Do bow bow.
 Why?
 We had super time force.
 By the way, we had super time force, which is as awesome as you imagined it was going
 to be, if you imagine that.
 Yeah.
 Which I did.
 The party was off the chain.
 Do people still say that?
 No.
 It was off the hook.
 No.
 People still say that?
 No.
 Off the chain was what came after off the hook.
 The party was groovy.
 People say that?
 They definitely say that.
 By the way, I should say this is the Vergecast where we discuss the week in technology and
 technology culture.
 Is it really?
 And yes, if you can see, if you do see a little hint of my pants, they're red.
 So let loose in comments.
 But anyhow, yeah, the party, we threw a party on Sunday night.
 Why was I there?
 To party.
 I was there to party.
 No, I was at D and then I wanted to go to E3 and do some stuff.
 We had some meetings, which I ended up not going to.
 But we did have, well, that's not true.
 I went to a couple of things.
 Last of us.
 I got to see, the most important thing is I got to see the last of us in a meeting and
 it changed my life.
 Yeah, I watched the, I mean, I just watched it.
 Change who I was.
 I just got to watch the trailer.
 I turned into a piece of broccoli.
 I got to say the end of that trailer is.
 Well that trailer.
 So what's really interesting, sorry, I don't want to jump around, but what's really interesting
 about that, if you haven't seen this, there was a game that Naughty Dog showed off at
 E3 called the last of us, which is coming out for the PS3, which by the way is like
 to me, if you don't own a PS3, this is like a title.
 You have to buy a PS3 to play.
 This is from what I've seen.
 And yeah, they showed off this incredible demo at the Sony event and then they were
 showing further demos to people and they showed, it ended one way in the demo they showed to
 the public and then it ended, they showed lots of different things that could happen
 in other demos to the show to the press.
 And it was just fascinating looking game.
 Let's just jump into E3.
 Let's just talk about E3.
 Chris is here.
 We're already talking about it.
 So yeah.
 You want to just jump right into Sony?
 Let's talk about, tell us about what's happened at E3 this year.
 So E3, everyone here agrees as in the room, but also in Los Angeles, that is a slow E3.
 Oh really?
 Because I said that and I thought you guys disagreed with me.
 I said that to the Polygon guys.
 I was like, I was like, this kind of feels like a slow E3 and they're like, well, there's
 some great games.
 What are you talking about?
 How dare you?
 You idiot.
 Okay.
 I was called an idiot a number of times.
 It really happens.
 It happens a lot to me lately.
 There are a lot of great games and I think we have, I mean, we're late in a life cycle,
 right?
 There's a lot of mature, both in terms of violence, i.e. the Last of Us, but mature
 also in terms of like, you know, software development, a lot of mature products coming
 out right now.
 What we don't have, there are very few products, I think there's only one I can think of definitively,
 that's not coming out in the next 12 months.
 Everything is coming out this year.
 And that sort of...
 Watchdogs.
 There's a lot of opacity into the future because, I think the way I wrote about it was that
 there's the specter of next-gen gaming consoles looming over the whole show.
 And that specter means that, you know, the accompaniment to that is that next-gen software
 development isn't being shared.
 With the exception of one game, which everyone's pretty sure will come to next-gen consoles
 because it looks next-gen, and that's Ubisoft's Watchdogs.
 Watchdogs.
 Did you guys watch the trailer for Watchdogs?
 I didn't.
 What?
 Are you kidding me?
 I didn't see the trailer.
 Oh, you idiot.
 I mean, look, how many murders can I watch in one day, man?
 No, I'm telling you, the Watchdogs trailer, I had the experience of walking into the...
 We have a loft, that's where Chris is right now, we have a loft in downtown LA where the
 whole team is there, it's like the war room.
 And I walked in the day that...
 During the Ubisoft event and Watchdogs was on.
 And it was like a magic...
 He literally walked in and he was like, what's this?
 What is this?
 What are you watching?
 What is this?
 Yeah.
 And it was a magical moment because people were like, like jaws on the floor.
 And then like, I mean, polygon, jaws on the floor.
 And it's a crazy...
 You haven't seen it?
 No.
 No.
 It's like really...
 Tell us, what is it?
 You just described how awesome...
 It's like GTA meets Splinter Cell meets The Matrix meets The Last of Us.
 Oh, you'll like this.
 Yeah.
 Guess where it takes place?
 Open world city.
 Guess where?
 It's Chicago.
 Somebody sent me...
 Is it Chicago?
 Somebody sent me a picture of the Chicago theater.
 And it's like...
 I like it.
 I like it.
 I love it.
 There's a scene where they're in a club and the level of detail on the people in the background,
 just the random people there is crazy.
 They go...
 Well, they're talking a lot about how they want it to be like this giant open world.
 And there's parts of it that look really systemic.
 Things don't happen the same way, obviously, very emergent, like most open world games.
 I think when Brian Crescenti was telling me that his favorite part was when you...
 There's a car accident.
 That car accident doesn't have to happen, but it does in this case.
 And there's, I guess, a woman who's hunched over a steering wheel and her husband's in
 the passenger seat next to her.
 And you can overhear it if you happen to walk by or are paying attention.
 But he's yelling at her to get up, as in, I hope you're not dead.
 But it's like this giant teaming world.
 It feels very dense.
 It does not look like anything that could run on today's consoles.
 Ubisoft insists it's coming to today's consoles, but I think that might be in addition to new
 hardware.
 We, in the demo they show, I think the one that is online now, there's an odd part, which
 I don't think I fully understand, where the main character actually, after the accident,
 pulls someone out of the car.
 You know what I'm talking about, Chris?
 It's not for any particular reason, right?
 But it's like very GTA, but it's not like GTA.
 It's like the way it's...
 It looks very realistic to me.
 I would highly recommend you guys watch it.
 I think you'd be shocked.
 Could we show some of it right now?
 Could we show the Watch Dogs trailer?
 You guys too?
 Do we have the technology?
 I see them clicking.
 I can't believe you haven't punched up the Watch Dogs trailer while we're talking.
 There's a lot of clicking going on back there.
 I've never seen people use the Verge faster.
 Just search for Watch Dogs trailer on the internet.
 Okay, well they're queuing that up.
 Why are you queuing that up?
 What else, Chris?
 I want to go through the traditional kind of company line, and then we can talk about
 the game a little bit more.
 So we were already kind of talking about Sony.
 But Sony, to me, they were confused.
 I mean, there are a lot of games.
 I thought The Last of Us looked great, but then the sort of like, we're going to brand
 it Sony Mobile or PlayStation Mobile.
 I thought Sony had the strongest, one of the strongest to show.
 Really?
 Well, Chris, I'm curious.
 I agree.
 I think Sony did have the strongest one.
 And that doesn't mean it was the strong.
 It was the strongest.
 Right.
 But I think that you mentioned the mobile thing.
 I think that's a bold move.
 I think PlayStation Mobile is really smart.
 But there are no games.
 Yeah, I think it's a super smart move.
 I think they're getting ready to start showing.
 Whether or not Sony can execute on it, it's a software platform idea.
 That's never been their strong suit at all.
 But it's super ambitious.
 It's exactly where a company like Sony and an organization like PlayStation needs to
 be going to be relevant in the next five years.
 I think it comes down to Sony now to execute.
 I interviewed John Kohler, who's their head of consoles.
 And I asked him about the fact that on a PlayStation Mobile device, you're buying PlayStation
 1 games that don't work as PlayStation 1 games on your PS3.
 You're buying two separate downloads of PlayStation 1 games.
 Sorry.
 Go ahead.
 And they, whoa.
 Hey.
 Anyway, so you're buying separate downloads.
 And as a user experience, that's terrible.
 If you have a Kindle Fire and a Kindle Touch one, I don't know what it's called.
 You have an expectation that both of your Kindles will be able to read the one book
 you bought.
 If you have two iPhones, if you have an iPhone or whatever.
 But with PlayStation right now, if you buy a PCOS one game from PlayStation Store on
 your PS3, you have to buy that same game again on PlayStation Mobile.
 Which is weird.
 So they have work to do.
 Kohler was very candid that he recognized that that was a terrible user experience and
 they had to get better.
 I think the whole idea behind PlayStation Mobile and bringing the whole thing in-house
 and away from Sony Ericsson and Xperia is that they can now do a lot of the hard work
 of unifying that experience instead of the sort of balkanized corporate mess that they
 had before.
 Yeah, but it's, hold on, wait, wait, wait.
 What's going on here?
 Hold on, hold on.
 Tell the person who is taping boxes, and I think I know who it is, tell them they have
 to stop while you're podcasting, okay?
 Is somebody taping, I can't even hear.
 Is somebody taping up boxes?
 I thought somebody was just like sanding a house.
 That's what it sounded like.
 I think it's someone taping up boxes.
 Whatever that noise, whatever the noises that sounds like someone taping up a box, can you
 just have them stop for like a half an hour?
 That would be great.
 Yeah, okay.
 I think they stopped.
 I literally can't hear anything besides you guys.
 That's what it sounds like when we were hearing about it, in case you're wondering.
 Sorry.
 So to get back on topic here, the mobile thing.
 So did you see it running on any HTC phones?
 They had them running in a case, didn't they?
 We did a thing.
 In a case.
 We did photos of them.
 Yeah, in a case.
 That to me is like...
 They were live, right?
 Those were live devices, I can't remember now.
 Well, I mean, it's just Android.
 It can't be that hard to do.
 Well, yeah, but I mean, it's just that I think this is an incredible...
 By the way, we broke a story about Sony doing Android gaming.
 Yeah, forever ago.
 Forever ago was when we broke the news of the PlayStation phone, which became...
 What is it called?
 The Xperia Play.
 The Xperia Play.
 Xperia Play.
 And which has now been abandoned.
 They're not even updating it to...
 I mean, seriously, the cycle of that product was, that was going to be the Google Halo
 device, and it went all the way to...
 And now it's totally abandoned.
 It just fizzled out.
 But the part of the thing about that device is, part of the problem with that device is
 it doesn't have the name PlayStation in it.
 Which was like...
 Huge problem.
 Guys, you made it PlayStation, but like, huge problem.
 Another part of the problem with that device is, like I said, the ecosystem is detached
 from the actual PlayStation ecosystem.
 So I mean, what does this have to do with PlayStation?
 Did you get the impression that with this new initiative, this PlayStation mobile, that's
 what they're calling it, right?
 PlayStation mobile.
 Yeah.
 Do you think they're going to bring these things more to parity?
 Do you think that this is going to be...
 They're actually going to care?
 I think they have to, and I think that's the whole reason for the initiative and bringing
 it inside the PlayStation team, is that they have to...
 So it is going to be in that same team.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 So I think...
 It rolls up there.
 And that's important.
 From a structural standpoint, that's the only way they're going to be able to ensure a consistency
 across three different devices.
 I think it's kind of an amazing move.
 I wish it had happened sooner.
 I think if they could really get their act together...
 They announced PlayStation Suite a long time ago.
 I've been asking about it in interviews for over a year.
 Yeah.
 When I was at E3 last year, I took an experience play interview.
 But they were vague about whether they were going to bring it to other partners, weren't
 they?
 They were vague about everything.
 Right.
 It was a...
 At that point, it was PlayStation Suite, and it was an SDK, but they didn't really talk
 about what it is.
 It's still relatively vague.
 They announced hardware partners, which is nice, but we'll see.
 I think it's really ambitious.
 Right.
 Sony's not going to nail it.
 And no games.
 I mean, it's still...
 No, no, no.
 We're still running PS1 games, which is like...
 Yeah.
 PS1 games are fine if there's actual games.
 I mean, like...
 It's the proof of concept, right?
 It's...
 This could work.
 I think Sony's not going to nail it on the first go-around.
 Yeah.
 Make no mistake.
 I think it has a lot of problems.
 We have the Watch Dogs trailer available.
 I want to punch it up here.
 Do you have a touchpad?
 Oh, God.
 This looks so amazing.
 Wait.
 That frame rate is not right.
 Can you get the frame rate up?
 Is this what our viewers are seeing?
 Okay.
 The frame rate is...
 This is perfectly smooth.
 But look at the detail.
 So he's got this PDA or this smartphone that he can manipulate the world with.
 He can hack stuff.
 Look at the detail on...
 I mean, obviously this frame rate is not really doing it justice.
 But some of the background details and the details on the trees and stuff...
 And by the way, look at the amount of non-player characters here.
 And they're all extremely detailed.
 They're all doing their own thing.
 They have very detailed faces.
 And this looks bonkers.
 Is he going to blow up the Scholar Theater?
 Is that what that is?
 Here's what Ubisoft was able to do with this trailer and the demo.
 It's not just a trailer.
 They're giving a demo on the floor, at least they were yesterday.
 Is that they've now gathered a huge amount of mindshare for next generation while everyone
 else, except for Nintendo, we'll get to Nintendo later.
 In terms of...
 I don't know.
 Do we have to call Wii U next generation?
 No.
 Looks like the frame rate just went up.
 You got the frame rate going?
 Next generation.
 All right, here we go.
 The frame rate is now working properly.
 Anyway, continue talking, Chris.
 Yeah, go ahead.
 But while Microsoft's not talking about what they're doing, Sony's not talking about what
 it's doing, even big third parties like EA aren't talking about their next gen strategy.
 Microsoft showed off this game, got a huge amount of mindshare, kicked off the discussion
 about next gen and they kicked it off wrapped around one of their games.
 And if this game doesn't come out for next gen systems, because they insist it's Xbox
 360, PS3, I think what's more likely is it's going to be forward compatible.
 This game's going to cost a lot of money to make.
 It will look like this on a next gen system.
 It will look not like this on your Xbox 360.
 But they can't afford to make a game like this, the level of investment needed, and
 put it out on a system that, let's say, next year or two years from now, has five million
 units sold.
 I know, it just happens.
 Whereas Xbox 360 has 70 million units sold.
 Yeah, I mean, I actually will be disappointed if they bring this out for current gen consoles.
 I think they have to.
 I think you're going to see, with the exception of first party games, Microsoft and Sony games,
 I think any big game for the next couple years is going to be forward compatible.
 Because they won't be able to afford to do it.
 I get that.
 But I mean, this just looks so amazing.
 I don't want to play a version that doesn't look as amazing.
 Same thing you're buying a PS4.
 Yeah, you and I are going to play it on Xbox 720.
 I'm going to play head to head with you.
 I'll be on my Xbox 720, and you'll be on your PlayStation 4.
 And we'll be playing on the new device agnostic network that's going to be built to play.
 There'll be a wireless 5G network.
 How amazing, by the way, how incredible would it be if you could play against, if you're
 an Xbox owner, you could play against PlayStation owners?
 As incredible as it is completely impossible.
 It's not impossible.
 It's not impossible.
 It's not impossible.
 It's not impossible.
 They just don't want to do it.
 They just want to lock you into their ecosystem.
 It's the rule.
 It's not technologically impossible.
 Right, they could do it.
 We've seen demos at E3 before where they have it working across devices.
 That will work in a development staging area.
 But as soon as you start to go through the manufacturer certification process, all that
 stuff is like, nope.
 It could be.
 No, no, thank you.
 I mean, from a technical standpoint.
 Could you put the jail back in?
 Because it seems like you don't have a jail here.
 You would really like a jail.
 From a technical standpoint.
 Your walled garden doesn't have a lot of walls.
 The garden is nice.
 Yeah.
 The lack of walls is a little startling.
 Can we do something about that?
 Okay, so let's have a, you want to have a Nintendo?
 I was going to get a Microsoft.
 Microsoft?
 All right, fine.
 Whichever one you want.
 We'll end on the bleakness of Nintendo.
 No, look, everybody's very excited about Nintendo, right Chris?
 Okay, keep going.
 Microsoft.
 Microsoft.
 So Microsoft, they had smart glass, which I think, I mean, obviously partially meant
 to dull the impact of a Wii game pad.
 I think there's some really neat novel ideas to it.
 You know, it's so early, it remains to be seen how much they're going to integrate it.
 As far as I'm interested, specifically into games.
 And they're not smart glasses, let's just state what it is.
 It is a multi-screen experience for entertainment.
 It's not for games, right?
 They didn't show it off for games.
 No, hold on.
 No, it will be in games.
 I talked to Phil Spencer.
 He said every single game, so he's head of Microsoft Game Studios, first party.
 He said every game that comes across his desk, just like they ask the developer, can you
 put Kinect in this?
 You know, even if it's just voice menus, like, you know, do you want to put Kinect?
 He said every single game that comes across his desk, they'll be asking about smart glass
 implementation.
 So, so I'll be able to like on my phone, my Windows phone, I'll be able to have like,
 let's say I'm playing.
 Or your iPhone.
 Okay, let's say I'm playing Watch Dogs on my Xbox with smart glass.
 And I'll have like, the phone will be like the phone in the game that you have, right?
 Possibly.
 I mean, that's the idea.
 Yeah.
 You could have a second screen, the second screen companion experience for what's happening
 on the big screen.
 By the way, my question is how...
 Or separately, it's like part of their, you know, you can, part of smart glasses, you
 can be watching a movie or listening to music or something and kind of throw it to the TV
 or bring it back to the secondary device.
 Right.
 It's AirPlay.
 It's AirPlay.
 Here's some of the cool things about it.
 Number one, it's device agnostic.
 This is Microsoft saying, like, we recognize that our, you know, touch based, the best
 in the world or are the most popular in the world, at least, you know, I'll let you guys
 debate whether the best.
 But you know, for an Xbox user, the responsible and respectful thing to do is to make sure
 that it's available for iOS and for Android.
 I think that's really smart for them.
 It makes this device available on tons of different screens.
 It has a lot of other entertainment opportunities, right, where you can look up information on
 a movie while you're watching it, that kind of thing.
 Yeah.
 Which Wikipedia is no good for.
 Yeah.
 I never use Wikipedia for that.
 Smart Glass looks really interesting.
 It's way better to use there.
 All of the ideas around it that they demoed are like, huh.
 No, I will say one thing.
 No, like the gaming idea.
 The only gaming idea I've ever seen for a two screen device, the only gaming demo that
 any idea that anybody seems to have is when you play Madden, you can draw routes on your
 phone.
 No, I think there is.
 That's it.
 That's all they ever show.
 I think there is.
 Even that was like a mom.
 So Wii U has a lot more.
 No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
 That, yes, Wii U has a lot more.
 This mic is screwed up again.
 The thing they showed with Game of Thrones, where, I mean, which didn't work in the demo
 they actually showed us, but it kind of, as the show progresses, it shows you where
 people are located on a map in sync.
 Yeah.
 Like the band in sync where they're located, are they in Westeros?
 Are they sailing through the narrow sea?
 We don't know.
 But the point is, no, that to me would be really helpful because I'm often watching
 the show, even when I'm reading the book, I'm like, wait a second, this is what's, because
 they talk a lot about where people are headed and you kind of don't know.
 So I feel like that's kind of an amazing, like that actually makes sense in context
 for that particular piece of content.
 But there is a lot of stuff like learn more about the director of this movie, which is
 like what Wikipedia was invented for.
 Yeah.
 And it's, I mean, all that's great and I appreciate the-
 Or IMDB.
 The bringing it together, but even the Wii U, the two screen gaming stuff is like, I
 still have to see it.
 It still has to make sense.
 The Wii U two screen gaming, and I'm sorry, I don't want to like gloss over Microsoft
 because-
 Yeah, no, there's so much more here.
 Is there a lot more with Microsoft?
 There is.
 There's smart glass, then there's Xbox Music, which they did.
 Oh, Xbox Music, right.
 They did all these new content providers.
 And they put Internet Explorer, that's part of smart glass, on the television.
 Microsoft really, uh oh.
 But you know-
 That's not good.
 That's bad.
 Great intern.
 I don't know.
 Well, we'll-
 That's back.
 Nope.
 Hey.
 Sorry, I'm trying to, I'm losing internet here.
 One second.
 Great.
 We'll talk about Microsoft here for a second.
 Their thing was not about gaming this year, really at all.
 And I-
 Are we on the internet right now?
 Yeah, we're on the internet.
 Yeah, we're on the internet.
 It's them.
 They're having the internet.
 My internet went down too.
 I don't know anything about that.
 We're good, right?
 We're still broadcasting?
 Great.
 Yeah, yeah.
 My internet here got weird for a second.
 Microsoft was all about, we are becoming, we are your cable box.
 We are your home entertainment system.
 Like we're where you listen to music.
 The Xbox is all of that stuff.
 And I think that they have had an enormous amount of success with this.
 I now use my Xbox more than any other connected device in my living room.
 And I have a Roku, Apple TV.
 Yeah, me too.
 I have a Boxee Box.
 And the one that I, nine times out of 10 now, it's got Hulu, it's got Netflix, it just got
 Amazon.
 I mean, it's actually kind of amazing.
 And HBO.
 And it's got HBO Go.
 Game of Thrones.
 And it's got, yes, Game of Thrones.
 And it's got, it's got Zune, which will become-
 Xbox.
 Which will become Xbox whatever.
 And then it's so, you've got all those offerings as well.
 I mean, it's an incredible array.
 It's easy to, you'd like to access.
 It works pretty much seamlessly.
 And so I feel like they're just, you know, they've just snuck in there.
 Microsoft is very far along in next gen kind of strategy and planning.
 I think they've got a lot of games in development for next gen.
 So they don't have the strongest kind of core gaming first party lineup.
 I think this is where Sony did a much better job in terms of appealing to gamers.
 Just for E3 though.
 Right, right.
 Microsoft's focus is really appealing and rolling out and expanding those entertainment
 services.
 Yeah.
 I think they have a ton of work to do there.
 I think if Apple ever really gets its head in this game, a lot of the headway that Microsoft's
 made is going to, I don't know, be less impactful.
 I'll give you an example.
 So on the Xbox dashboard, which is, I think, a disaster to navigate, you have the app marketplace.
 But those aren't really apps.
 There's no SDK.
 All those apps are built by Microsoft.
 I couldn't make a Polygon app if I wanted to.
 You guys couldn't make a Verge app for your video content.
 You should.
 There is no marketplace.
 Like there's no, you can't buy these apps.
 Nobody's selling them.
 Yeah.
 It's a very small curated portfolio.
 It's very much a proprietary kind of Microsoft's experience for you.
 Yeah.
 But the point is the fact that they use the language of that marketplace.
 Like they're trying to evoke something that they do not in fact have.
 But don't you think that's where they're headed?
 I mean, doesn't it seem like that's an obvious progression?
 Yeah.
 I don't think we'll be there on Xbox 360.
 I think that is, if they're smart, that is where we'll be on Xbox 720.
 Well, I don't know.
 They have to get a head start.
 I mean, look, because Apple's-
 Yeah.
 No, sure.
 Because it seems to me, I mean, it would be insane.
 I mean, we talked about this for a while.
 I had heard when we first talked about the new Apple TV that they were going to be coming
 with like an SDK for it and apps.
 It seems crazy to me that you wouldn't want to say to HBO and to Netflix, unless they've
 got something even more exciting in the pipe, that you wouldn't want to say, look, you guys
 can build and customize this thing as you would with your iPad or iPhone app and get
 it into this market and people can download and put it on their TV.
 To me, that seems obvious.
 So I feel like Microsoft has to have some awareness of the possibility of that.
 There's no way they're waiting until next year and even beyond next year.
 I mean, if they announced at E3 next year, we think holiday season 2013, right?
 For the new console?
 There's a good chance, yeah.
 So they're going to wait until holiday season 2013 to let people build apps for that?
 I mean, I feel like there's no-
 Absolutely.
 I don't feel like there's anything stopping them from doing it in the near future.
 Like what's stopping them?
 I think it's a question of resources that they're going to build it for a platform and
 it's not going to be the same platform they use for 720.
 They don't have the same infrastructure.
 The dashboard does not work really well.
 Purchasing doesn't work as well.
 It's not as seamless.
 I think that-
 Yeah, that's a mess.
 Their buying of stuff is ridiculous.
 Well, it's still like a set top-
 It's like Xbox Live Indie games.
 Yeah.
 Well, yeah.
 It's still sort of-
 But if you get Xbox Live Indie games, that service was announced before the iOS app store
 took off.
 And like, I remember going on NPR and they were asking me about the YouTube of games
 and they were talking about Xbox Live Indie games.
 That service has been an abject failure versus the iOS app store.
 Has it?
 Has it?
 Yeah.
 Yeah, absolutely.
 But for-
 It has been a failure.
 But there are some very successful and popular games on the service.
 Nobody's made a million dollars on that app store before.
 Oh, in comparison, sure.
 I think barely, there's maybe a few games that have made six figures.
 But also the market is somewhat smaller, right?
 I mean, there's what, 66 million Xbox users?
 Yeah, but-
 Or owners?
 Yeah, the big Xbox game-
 I forget the number.
 Makes billions of dollars.
 Well, the big Xbox game costs $60 to buy.
 Yeah, but-
 Hold on.
 But you can make it-
 No, it's not true.
 Minecraft sold, what, two million units already?
 Yeah.
 Right?
 So like, Xbox and arcade games can do huge sales numbers.
 No, but I'm saying that two million is nothing compared to what they do on the app store.
 Maybe that's what we're saying.
 Two million is a completely outrageous amount compared to what they do on the indie games
 marketplace.
 You know, like, not a lot of that's UI.
 Like they don't, and Microsoft knows this.
 I talked to them for years.
 There's no push for it.
 They don't curate it that well.
 Their discoverability is impossible.
 But also, like, you know, I just think the market is different.
 You know, also, I mean-
 I think the market doesn't have to be different.
 I think the market is different because they have not-
 I agree.
 They have not properly built a UI and a system that encourages people to discover new types
 of experiences.
 And wait till Apple and Steam announce the new piece of hardware they're working on for
 the living room.
 Yeah, that's gonna happen.
 Whoa.
 Is that confirmed?
 Totally happening.
 Totally happening.
 So, Chris, let me ask you about Kinect real quick, because that leads into the Internet
 Explorer thing.
 So they put IE on the TV.
 They said, we know that keyboards and mice are bad in the living room, but we have Kinect
 and we have smart glass.
 So now we can put the browser on TV and do all this additional gesture navigation.
 But then every game I saw them demo that had Kinect was just the microphone.
 I don't think I saw-
 unless it was, like, the new Dance Central, which they brought Usher out for.
 Usher.
 Which made me very happy.
 Usher.
 Yeah.
 It was all voice.
 So what's going on with Kinect?
 Like why-
 I mean, it seems like they backed way up.
 They showed some-
 They showed-
 All the demos were people screaming at the TV.
 And they were all games where you murder people.
 I was getting flashbacks to the Pottermore demo, the Book of Spells demo for Sony.
 We have you.
 Yeah, no, that's different.
 No, no, no, I know.
 But they showed some stuff with motion besides Dance Central.
 Not very much.
 During the press conference, they might not have leaned into it too hard.
 I think they were going over a lot of entertainment stuff and smart glass.
 Kinect- I mean, Microsoft's investment from a marketing and development standpoint in
 Kinect is still pretty staggering.
 And the fact that the Xbox has been the number one best selling console in North America
 for 16 months in a row now, a huge part of that is just because of Kinect.
 And they're going to continue to invest in it like crazy.
 The bigger question for me and for obviously your audience is, when are key Kinect games
 going to be better?
 One of Microsoft's biggest games was Star Wars Kinect.
 It was terrible.
 So and maybe they'll never get better.
 But either way, they sell.
 And Microsoft is going to continue investing in it.
 I was just thinking about that Han Solo song from the Star Wars Kinect game.
 You know what, sorry, Paul is on the line.
 Paul Miller.
 On a phone.
 Yeah, I want to bring him into the conversation.
 I think you're Paul Miller.
 Is this Paul Miller?
 This is Paul Miller.
 Wow.
 This is like talking to somebody in the 1980s.
 This is why I don't talk on the phone.
 I just realized.
 Sounds so terrible.
 How are you, Paul?
 You guys are like really- I'm good.
 You guys are really quiet.
 Well, that's probably because your phone is a Huawei from 1972.
 Hi, Paul.
 You know what's weird about this?
 I can see Paul.
 He's right there.
 Is he really?
 So we had a big debate.
 Let's query the group here.
 If Paul appears on Chris Grant's Skype camera range, does that mean he's on the Internet?
 I mean, does that mean he-
 What if I just do like an accidental walk by?
 Does that mean that Paul-
 Yeah, they're all saying it's cheating.
 Yeah, I think it's cheating.
 Okay, so Paul has been being very strict here.
 He's in the room, but he's not going near the camera.
 Yeah.
 I won't look.
 I'm just going to walk by.
 No, don't do it.
 Ready for this?
 Don't do it?
 Okay, you know, go ahead.
 People are freaking out.
 Do it.
 What's going to happen?
 Blow some minds, yeah.
 He walks by cameras on the Internet all the time.
 There he is.
 I mean, think about how many-
 That was a mind blow.
 Think about how many IP cameras he's walking by constantly.
 Paul, your picture gets taken so many times a day.
 He just fell into something.
 Are you okay, Paul?
 So Paul-
 Don't go outside.
 Don't go outside.
 Don't come back in.
 We can't hear you.
 It's so noisy out there.
 By the way, I've been on this-
 Is it noisy out here?
 Yeah, I've been on this fire escape, and you really get to see all of what's happening
 in downtown LA, which is people being sent to the hospital.
 People being set on fire, rapes, cops beating people for no reason.
 Downtown LA is like Mad Max.
 It's like Beyond Thunderdome and Thunderdome is-
 Also, a lot of guys in leather.
 A lot of leather.
 A lot of leather, yes.
 A lot of like souped up crazy vehicles as well.
 Oh, yeah.
 Yeah.
 No, downtown LA is the scariest place I've ever been in my life.
 Late night in downtown LA is truly the scariest place you can be in America.
 But as long as you're looking from the fire escape-
 Do you guys know my great story from the show?
 No.
 Oh, no.
 Let's hear this.
 Paul, is this what I think it is, Paul?
 Your sad story?
 Yeah, it is.
 Check out Paul's sad story coming out for E3.
 I showed up here, and I was like, you know, I hate driving cars, and I'm not sure if the
 subway system works, so I'm going to rent a bike.
 And it turned out it was like cheaper to basically buy a bike, so I bought a bike.
 And then that night, it got stolen.
 He bought a bike for $250.
 It was purple with yellow wheels.
 It was purple and yellow.
 It looked like the Joker's bike.
 It had no brake on it.
 I was actually referring to it as the Joker's bike.
 Nice.
 And then immediately stole it.
 Like how fast?
 Like less than- I had the bike for less than 12 hours.
 It's amazing.
 Anyhow, that's just a taste of what's going on in LA.
 Did you buy a lock?
 Yes, I locked it up.
 Yeah, of course you bought a lock.
 LA, man.
 More like hell-ay.
 I like LA, don't get me wrong.
 So Paul, tell us about E3.
 I mean, I read your report, and that's kind of what we're getting at with Chris here.
 Paul has other stuff coming, too.
 Yeah.
 But you know-
 Oh yeah, I'm blowing it out.
 You know what's funny?
 The most fun I've really had here is playing We Fit You.
 It's just- there's a bobsledding game, and it works your core really well, and it feels
 very immersive.
 He's like near tears.
 You're like near tears, right?
 You're like, there's a bobsledding game?
 I feel like my mom said this exact same thing to me like four years ago.
 And you know what?
 It really-
 It's a bobsled game?
 Oh yeah.
 It really works your core.
 Yeah.
 And that's what you're interested in.
 It's another game where you're a waiter at a restaurant, and you've got to carry desserts
 on your tray.
 And your tray is the Wii U, and you've got to balance your Wii U so that the desserts
 don't fall over or fall off the tray.
 And then you walk up to Wii Fit, and you navigate this restaurant and deliver desserts to customers.
 Is this what happens when you don't have the internet?
 Paul has a playful mind.
 Honestly, his mind may have softened a little bit due to the lack of internet.
 I will say something though.
 I think that waiter game sounds pretty fun.
 Yeah.
 It sounds really fun.
 It is fun.
 Yeah, it sounds fun.
 Does it vibrate?
 Like a tray would vibrate.
 I don't know if it vibrates.
 Does the Wii gamepad have vibration?
 Yes, I think so.
 Yeah.
 I trust Chris.
 Chris is a professional game joker.
 I'm a hobbyist.
 Actually, I don't know if any of the demos I saw showed it.
 No, no, because that would be crazy if it didn't have vibration.
 It might not be necessary, depending on the type of game you're playing.
 So Paul, you like Wii Fit U.
 Wii Fit U, is that what it's called?
 Yes.
 I mean, is that what it is?
 Wii Fit U is what it's called.
 Wow.
 And so...
 You know, Zombie U is pretty fun too.
 Yeah.
 Can I ask a question?
 Is Zombie U...
 And I didn't play it.
 Now, they're letting people play it out on the floor?
 Yeah.
 Is Zombie U like a fully...
 Like a first person, like fully playable...
 Or is it on rails?
 No, it's not on rails at all.
 No, you run around with dual analog sticks, but everyone's all like,
 you pull out your crossbow, you pull the Wii U up,
 and you're looking through the Wii U as your crossbow goes.
 I'll be honest with you.
 That sounds awesome.
 That sounds pretty awesome.
 Yeah.
 That sounds pretty...
 That's the point of Wii U.
 That's like what it is about.
 Like after the Mizuna Post Conference, which is insanely disappointing,
 someone behind me is like,
 Zombie U better be bleeping good.
 Bleeping good.
 Like effing good?
 Or assing good?
 Yeah, effing good.
 Yeah.
 E-F-F.
 Better be effing good.
 That was the only game that they showed that was really like a Wii U game.
 They look like a real game.
 A lot of the games had like...
 Like there's a game, was it P100 or Project 100 or whatever?
 It looked cool and fun, but like the whole use of the Wii U gamepad was to draw...
 There's like four different shapes you could draw.
 Right, that's what I'm saying.
 All of these second screen games, except for the one you just described, seem insane.
 Zombie U...
 Actually, the graphics looked kind of decent on that too, didn't they?
 Yeah, that was an Xbox graphic.
 Zombie U...
 They also showed...
 What was the game they showed where you could hold...
 Oh, it was Arkham City Armored Edition, is that what they're calling it?
 Yep.
 So they have Arkham City that they're bringing out for the Wii U,
 which by the way, I think is weak, like so weak.
 Like they should have gone to those developers and said,
 we want to do a new Batman game, like a brand new one.
 So are you ready to get into Nintendo and just dive in?
 Do it.
 Go for the thing?
 Yes.
 First, I'm trying to find you guys a quote, if I can bring it up.
 Satoru Iwata, who's the CEO of Nintendo.
 Sorry, while you're doing this, can we get some footage of Zombie U up?
 Not the horrible demo they showed of the guy playing it,
 but if there's some better...
 Because they showed a really bad...
 Okay, Michael's on it.
 Go ahead, Chris.
 So, Nintendo.
 I think they had a lot of expectations.
 On Saturday afternoon, they sent out an email saying that there was going to be
 a streaming web event on Sunday afternoon.
 One day, heads up, right before the biggest event of the year.
 They announced a lot of the details of the Wii U and the new controller
 and all this stuff at that streaming web event,
 which was very, I don't know, anticlimactic.
 And they announced big stuff.
 Like they announced all this online stuff you could do, like real-time...
 The Miiverse.
 Like Miiverse, real-time chat with people where you could like ask people
 for help in the game and you could video chat with them for help in the game.
 Can you help me show my penis in this game?
 That's all I imagine that's going to be.
 I mean, it's chat roulette meets...
 We fit you.
...meets the forum walkthrough.
 We fit you.
 That would be amazing.
 You're holding a tray.
 Is there a camera?
 There's a camera on that thing, right?
 Oh, this is going to get...
 Miiverse is going to get real nasty.
 So, here's the thing about Miiverse.
 Every single message and image will be moderated by a human being.
 Nintendo.
 That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.
 Well, those people are going to use some really sick shit.
 They use all the DS for sketching games, do they?
 What's that?
 You know, the DS has a messaging system where you could sketch things for each other.
 Do they moderate that?
 No, because that's peer-to-peer.
 Although, every time you go to a Nintendo event,
 if you go to a Nintendo event and you turn that thing on,
 it's just drawings of wieners.
 Anyone, you just bring your DS and open that up.
 It's everywhere.
 Just all over the place.
 That's beautiful.
 So, here's the thing about Nintendo.
 I'm going to read you guys a quote.
 This is from CNBC.
 Yeah.
 This is from Nintendo.
 My impression is that we should have...
 Sorry, this is from Nintendo.
 My impression is that we should have...
 Yeah, from Port A Water.
 Okay.
 My impression is that we should have done a better job,
 because in effect, we could not fully convey what Wii U is all about.
 So, I am not 100% satisfied as far as this year's presentation.
 Yeah.
 Here's the thing.
 They had this Sunday presentation that was seemingly last minute.
 They had their Tuesday morning press conference,
 which the whole time they said,
 guys, there's so much to talk about,
 we can't possibly talk about it all,
 so we'll have two more press conferences this week.
 Then they had a Wii U press conference later
 that had really nothing in it.
 Then they barely talked about 3DS in the major press conference.
 They had a whole separate 3DS press conference
 and announced zero new games, not a single one.
 They had four press conferences and managed to flop all four.
 And I think the impressive thing about what Nintendo did this year
 is that they had a couple things that they really had to nail,
 and they managed to not nail any of them.
 No, I mean...
 Sorry, go ahead.
 One of the biggest ones, for example, is a competent online system.
 Right?
 They have never had one before, historically.
 I think they had to come out and have a lot of details
 and really lean into what they were doing for online.
 Instead, they're like, we have Miiverse,
 and you could have your Miis on there,
 and you could leave messages,
 and it's like, guys, this is not what people want.
 This isn't what people have been asking for.
 Yeah.
 Wait, just, does Nintendo...
 Have you ever asked anybody at Nintendo if they've heard of the iPhone?
 Just throwing it at them.
 Because it seems like Microsoft and Sony are like,
 here's all this stuff with phones, they make their own phones.
 In Nintendo, they're like,
 what's a phone? Have you seen our giant controller?
 It just doesn't make any sense to me.
 So Satoru Iwata at GDC last year came out,
 did a keynote, and proceeded to talk about how crappy phone games were
 to an audience full of phone game developers.
 Yeah, yeah.
 No, they're so crappy, they're so crappy that they're eating your market.
 Yeah.
 They're eating you alive.
 Miiverse tied them a little bit too far,
 or is supposed to eventually tie into a phone for like a message.
 Yeah, but the messaging stuff, but it's very like, it's browser based.
 We actually thought, because when they first showed it,
 we caught a glimpse of it, and we were like, oh my God, is that an iOS app?
 And it was like, whoa, they're finally actually doing something.
 Even if it's a messaging thing, they're not even doing that.
 They're not even doing like an Android and iOS app for messaging in Miiverse.
 It's like, they want to be, they're almost like Sony-ing this thing,
 where they're like, Sony's kind of going in the other direction.
 And so is Microsoft.
 Both of those companies acknowledge other screens exist that you want to be part of.
 And Nintendo's like, no, no.
 Here's our giant controller.
 Yeah, no.
 Can you, I mean, what I see, what I envision in my head is,
 parents go into the store for the holidays,
 and they can buy this huge thing, the Wii U with this huge controller,
 that kind of looks like a tablet, or they can just buy the tablet.
 And I think that is actually going to be a dead competition.
 Tablet's a lot more expensive.
 Well, how much is the Wii U?
 Well, here's the thing.
 $300?
 I've had two is like...
 They have not announced the price, or release date.
 I don't see how they can do it for less than $300, personally.
 Here's the thing, though.
 Here's where it gets weird in terms of how they're going to sell it.
 And so this gets down to,
 I think they're confused about how they're going to market this product.
 So for starters, CNN reported that they had their press release.
 This is great.
 The day of their press conference,
 the Wii U was a tablet accessory for your Wii.
 Mainstream, killing it.
 CNN really reported, and I don't know if they ever even changed it.
 They did, but after like a long time.
 They didn't know.
 That night they did not.
 They watched the presentation.
 This is the second year they've given a presentation about what the Wii U is.
 And we're like, the Wii U accessory,
 which will hopefully breathe new life,
 literally it said it will hopefully breathe new life into the Wii.
 By killing it because it's a new console.
 Here's the crazy thing about that.
 It makes sense why people would be confused about that.
 They've downplayed the whole idea that there's a console.
 We actually said in the presentation, they don't even show,
 there's one shot where they showed somebody like the Sing Star or whatever.
 What was the game where they're singing?
 Thank you, Paul.
 Just sing, whatever.
 They show the console, and by the way,
 they show the console with a wired mic,
 like this cord dangling out of the console up to this microphone,
 which is like the saddest looking thing in the world.
 Let me play devil's advocate.
 We just got this by the way.
 From the chat room, somebody in the chat room.
 If you're watching the video,
 can somebody print this out and show it to Paul at the loft?
 Because this is really.
 I'll screen grab it.
 Let me play Bowser's advocate here.
 Bowser's advocate.
 Is Bowser the devil of Nintendo?
 Microsoft or Sony talked about cross play,
 and I saw one game on the show floor where you had the same menu.
 If you pull up the menu in the game,
 we're also on the Vita all the time.
 You could use the same menu on your Vita as you could,
 or you use your Vita sometimes maybe as a gamepad.
 Microsoft showed off,
 hey, what if, what would be cool if,
 that you could do these big game things on the tablet,
 but they didn't show anything real.
 Nintendo, because it is very constrained,
 because it's its own tablet,
 but also it's actually pulling these things off right now for real,
 that I was able to play with on the show floor.
 I think Nintendo has a jumpstart.
 It just definitely doesn't have the long play at all.
 We are going to want to start using our own tablet.
 They've got something going on,
 and it is part of the future.
 It's a simulcrum.
 Simulcrum?
 Simulcrum is a word.
 Yeah.
 A simulcrum of what the future is.
 But the difference is,
 and not that Microsoft doesn't want you to use their tablet
 and Sony doesn't want you to use their tablet or whatever,
 but buy our tablet and our console and use them together.
 And by the way, this tablet doesn't have a browser.
 It doesn't do anything.
 It's not really a tablet.
 It only works with our console.
 But it looks exactly like a tablet.
 Let's be honest.
 It's just a fancy Dreamcast controller.
 Can we just say what it is?
 Can we just all admit it?
 That's the reason Nintendo could potentially afford to sell this
 for a competitive price like 300 or under.
 There's a Sega engineer who was the guy who was like,
 let's put this screen in the Dreamcast controller,
 this little LCD, who right now is contemplating suicide.
 To the press conference, they were like,
 this is the first time anybody's had a screen in your controller.
 Oh, how quickly they forget.
 How quickly they forget.
 Here's the thing, though.
 So if you look at the...
 We have a lot of people, more of their...
 There's a new little fitness, like a Fitbit clone or something for Wii Fit coming.
 They're probably going to hope to sell even more Wii Fit.
 They're going to make up their margin a little bit on these peripherals.
 I mean, that's great.
 But to me, it just sounds like you have to buy everything from Nintendo
 and everything looks like a cartoon.
 And that sucks.
 That's a problem.
 So maybe my mom bought a Wii Fit and a Wii.
 That was their blue ocean strategy for Wii,
 is that everyone sitting here wrestling in bloody waters
 and there's a whole other ocean out there.
 They made a lot of money selling Wii's to people
 and expanding the gaming audience.
 However, if the analysts and focus groups are to be believed,
 those people didn't play their Wii's.
 I definitely bought my Wii, played it for like two weeks,
 like tried to, and then unhooked it.
 The Wii is in that category of products that I bought
 that I was really excited about
 that I now have no idea where they even are.
 So I don't know where my Wii is.
 My second-gen Kindle...
 I mean, there were moments, there were definitely moments
 of gaming experiences where I was like,
 this is great and amazing and like a revelation.
 It just went off very quickly.
 And to go beyond...
 First off, it was underpowered.
 And by the way, again, this will be obsolete in a year.
 This hardware will be last-generation hardware
 in one year.
 We have specs.
 It's basically an Xbox 360.
 I mean, it already is obsolete.
 The Xbox is pushing what it can do to its limits.
 It's at the end of its life.
 Wii U is beginning now where it's ending.
 The other thing I forgot though is that you are...
 I would put you in the core gamer category.
 How many hours did you spend in Fallout 3?
 Like you're not the blue ocean.
 That's different.
 Fallout 3 became a different...
 That's a whole different story.
 Josh doesn't want to talk about it.
 Fallout 3 was a place that I went to.
 To relax, to talk to people, to make friendships.
 You were talking to those people?
 So here's the thing about Wii U though.
 Is that Nintendo, I think the blue ocean strategy
 in a lot of ways, especially with the brand name Wii,
 it's a one-time use ripcord.
 They pulled it.
 A lot of that audience isn't picking up another Wii.
 It's like, hey, we know you bought a Solo Flex
 and never used it.
 Do you want this new Solo Flex?
 Nope.
 I got the other one in the garage.
 In that sense, Wii has written WII, right?
 You bought a Solo Flex.
 Anyhow, sorry, go ahead.
 I think Wii U could have a really strong first year
 and a little bit of a next year
 and then it will trail off pretty rapidly.
 It will have some of the early success like the Wii did,
 but then it will trail off more rapidly than the Wii did.
 Well, I think it's going to come down to the experiences.
 I mean, I really do.
 Have you seen the footage of that yet?
 We have footage of Zombie U I want to show.
 If Zombie U is this amazing experience
 that really puts you in a game
 the way no other console has ever done it,
 and there are more experiences like that, is this it?
 I like that we have the IGN logo on this.
 Yeah, it's really nice.
 IGN, they have such a great...
 There's these gaming monopolies.
 The gaming world is a mysterious place,
 but Spike TV had all these exclusives at E3.
 Game play.
 Chris, you can see this, right?
 No, no, I've seen it.
 Wait a second.
 Are they actually using Johnny Cash?
 No, it's not.
 I thought they were using a Johnny Cash song.
 Wow.
 I don't think Johnny Cash ever sang that song.
 No, I couldn't tell.
 It sounded alike.
 It sounds like a social distortion cover band.
 This stuff looks amazing.
 It sounds like The Poets.
 Yeah, it does.
 Zombie U is my favorite thing,
 but outside of Wii Fit U.
 But Zombie U isn't what sells Nintendo consoles.
 Because Ubisoft, as you remember,
 what's it called,
 the sword fighting game that came out for the Wii originally.
 It did well.
 Wow, this is dark.
 This is really dark.
 Sorry, I've never seen this.
 This just got super real.
 I've never seen this.
 This is the worst episode of House of Houses ever.
 This is not the actual game play though.
 Is there game play in this trailer?
 No, that's a cinematic trailer.
 Well, we don't care about this trailer, guys.
 We want the one with the game play.
 So way to freak us all out
 with that guy blowing his brains out
 in a graphic slow-mo pan shot of the back of his head.
 So here's what I would say about Zombie U.
 Zombie U is a really impressive...
 UbiSoft is throwing a ton of money into Wii development,
 so good for them.
 Watch Dogs for Wii?
 The third-party game...
 Wii U, Watch Dogs?
 Yeah, Watch Dogs is coming to Wii U.
 They didn't announce that, did they?
 They said Xbox and PS3, but no Wii U.
 And PC.
 And PC.
 Huge market.
 No Wii U.
 They spent a lot of time on stage
 talking about third-party kind of core gamer games.
 They brought up Batman Arkham City,
 and that was maybe their biggest third-party presentation,
 and it was a game that I played last year.
 Yeah.
 And it's coming out later this year.
 They talk about Mass Effect 3.
 They were really defiant about...
 Somebody asked them a question, I forget where it was,
 and they were like,
 is this a new...
 This is the same game we've already played.
 And they're like, no, it has new content.
 And it's like, no, but this game is going to end
 in a couple of new cutscenes or some weird thing
 you can do with the controller, but this is...
 It's going to be like a year and a half old
 by the time anybody plays it on your console, which is Wii U.
 What I'm saying is, I'm actually going to buy Wii Fit U
 for Mario Kart and the next real Mario game.
 I mean Wii U.
 A new Smash Brothers and Wii Fit U, you know?
 And I think that's what most people buy.
 I'm going to steal that bike.
 Can we bring this up?
 Sorry, we're jumping around here.
 Somebody actually posed with Paul outside of our party
 with the purple bike that got stolen.
 I would steal that bike.
 Now check it out.
 Does that not look like the Joker's bike?
 It definitely looks like the Joker's bike.
 Where did you buy this bike, Paul?
 Where'd you get that wonderful toy?
 The bike up the street.
 What did he say?
 Wonderful what?
 Is that what you said?
 Where did you get that wonderful toy?
 This is the Joker.
 No, we get it.
 I didn't hear what you said.
 It's brilliant.
 Did you only listen to Party Man while you were out?
 Yeah, were you just driving around
 listening to the Bat Dance on that?
 Screaming this town needs an animal?
 Our jokes are so old, we're just really showing our age.
 We're doing the Batman movie from 1989.
 I thought it was a Lakers bike.
 Do you know what an L.A. Lakers is?
 Oh, Lakers.
 Yeah, I guess so.
 Yeah, that makes sense.
 You have a real gameplay trailer now?
 Okay, here we go.
 Our guys, our video team thinks they have a gameplay trailer of Zombie U.
 No?
 Don't know?
 You don't know?
 They're starting it apparently.
 Did it scare you?
 You know what's funny?
 I'm not very good at scary games anyway,
 so I got my heart pounding pretty much no matter what.
 But the scariest, most intense part was I had a shotgun,
 which is by far the best weapon in that game.
 And I ran out of shells, so I had to pull up the inventory.
 And the inventory is on the...
 Yeah, we're watching that.
 And your guy on the TV kneels down and looks into his backpack.
 And you can still work the analog sticks and look around him to see if any zombies are...
 So I'm like...
 There's a lot of things I know that they're coming in.
 I'm kind of looking to see where they're coming from,
 and I'm trying to swap out my shotgun for a cricket bat.
 Now, this looks amazing.
 You have the sniper rifle, and you bring the Wii U up to the screen,
 and it becomes the scope of the sniper rifle.
 Right, and you're really moving it,
 and it's really nice.
 I mean, that does seem...
 These seem like scenarios that I will be personally really into.
 This one is great.
 They're showing one now where you're hacking a door,
 and there's zombies coming behind you,
 and it's like the screen of the Wii U becomes the door hacking,
 the door entry keypad,
 and you're looking behind you at these guys coming your way.
 Oh, look at that.
 It does a...
 Oh, good.
 Oh, wow.
 That's pretty intense.
 No, very effective murder weapon as well.
 I don't know.
 I have to say, watch it.
 So our entire chat room is screaming
 that this is an actual game play we were watching.
 That was actual game play.
 That was CGI.
 That's actual game play.
 I mean, that might have been...
 Look, the game...
 Let me just let everybody know.
 The game doesn't look great.
 It kind of looks like an Xbox game.
 You know, like, they're like scattered debris on the floor, right?
 But it's all one flat texture, you know?
 Wait a second.
 So are they saying that's not...
 That's not the game plan, right?
 I couldn't see it.
 It's the demo from where they show...
 It's the one from the presentation
 where they showed the different things that it could do.
 That's game play.
 Is that pre-rendered?
 I don't think so.
 Yeah, that's game play.
 He's saying, the Wii U looks good.
 It's kind of Xbox 360.
 I mean, probably better than Xbox 360 graphics.
 The bigger question isn't the power of the system.
 It's the developers and how far they want to push it.
 For a launch title on a system that might not do well,
 I don't think Ubisoft's going to go crazy.
 Well, that's the thing.
 The Wii never got hardly any big budget exclusive development.
 Nintendo never even spends very much money on the games it makes for the Wii.
 I mean, like, the big game that they showed off with, like,
 new Super Mario Bros. Wii U, which looks like the Super NES Mario.
 Yeah, no, dude.
 That game looks like Mario 64 and Mario 1 had a baby.
 I feel like Nintendo's been beating a dead horse for a while with the Mario franchise.
 I know some of the games are really good.
 I feel like, you know, they did something for the 3DS that was like...
 Well, they're beating a dead horse with you.
 They did this thing.
 My niece and nephew still love Mario.
 They're like, you know who we haven't seen enough of is Luigi.
 And it's like, that's because nobody wants to see Luigi.
 It's us.
 We want to murder people.
 That's what we're doing, right?
 Can you find a more innovative way for us to murder people?
 My niece and nephew are like, oh my God, it's Luigi.
 I actually...
 Okay, now I'm being told that we have more footage or real footage of Zombie U.
 But I don't just want to murder people.
 I want to do other things, but I don't want to play Super Mario Bros.
 I guess that's true.
 But they keep making children, you know?
 More sterilization for everyone.
 Is that a problem?
 So that nobody wants to play Super Mario Bros. anymore?
 And they make a better game?
 We have footage here? What do we have?
 Okay.
 Oh, now this is gameplay.
 Oh, we have to explore Buckingham Palace.
 This looks pretty good.
 This looks like our first show next month.
 Ouch.
 No, this looks decent.
 This guy needs a look.
 That's the particular motion you're doing there.
 It looks like Xbox games look in kind of the middle generation of the series.
 I'm sorry, I think this looks pretty good.
 Look at the lighting and the fire effects there.
 I think there's some pretty decent stuff going on in this game.
 Like I said, it's not bad.
 Yeah, I will say the characters look like they're kind of like not a ton of polygons on them.
 I don't think that has to do with the power of the Wii U.
 It's in a launch title with a new IP on a new system that has new mechanics.
 It's a camera shooting a screen.
 Oh, I see.
 Yeah, that's fine.
 I mean, you can still see the...
 There's no generational loss of polygons on the camera screen.
 Yeah, the guy was made up of 100 polygons.
 When we filled it with a video camera, he only had 50.
 Anyhow, I mean, look, there's some cool water effects there on the camera.
 Yeah. I mean, this looks decent. I would play this and enjoy it.
 I wouldn't be taken out of the experience by seeing this.
 Though, you know, when the 720 and the PlayStation 4 come around and they have like...
 Watch Dogs is like pre... It's like pre those devices.
 You know, like it's better than Watch Dogs.
 This is going to look silly.
 But I feel like that's been Nintendo's thing the whole time.
 As long as we're good enough and make fun, experience-y games.
 That would have shot that guy in the ass.
 I mean, that's what they do, but it's like...
 It worked for a little while with Wii Sports.
 It's the same thing.
 My six and five-year-old nephews play just Wii bowling just for days.
 All day.
 But then for anything else, I get bored with that.
 Can I ask you a Mario Kart related question?
 Always.
 Peach is the fastest in time trials.
 I play Mario Kart with my...
 This is true.
 I play Mario Kart with my niece, who is seven.
 With the Wii.
 She is a terrible...
 She's an adorable child, but she hates losing.
 Adorkable.
 Adorkable.
 She hates losing.
 And so whenever I'm in first place, she will insist that if I stay in first place for too long,
 a giant bird will come and kill me.
 And I'm like, I don't think so.
 It's just never happened.
 She's always like, you better watch out because that bird is coming.
 She's in the house, right?
 So can anybody...
 She's just going to beat you with the controller.
 Her father probably fears that a bird will come and kill him.
 It comes like sailing down from the edge of the sofa.
 It's very like...
 I just...
 I'd be clear.
 There's no actual bird in Mario Kart.
 No, there's a shell that can hit the first place player, and that shell has wings on it.
 Oh.
 She sets to me all the time.
 You need to get her a book on what birds look like.
 They don't look like turtles with wings.
 She can pair.
 All right.
 So I think we need to wrap the E3 stuff.
 Really quickly, who won E3 this year?
 Who's the best?
 It's always a horse race.
 The correct answer this year is nobody.
 We'd all agree on that.
 I would actually pick...
 Can we get AVP up on the screen?
 I would actually say...
 I'm going to say Ubisoft.
 I think Ubisoft...
 The game company.
 You can't win if you don't play.
 Yeah.
 A third-party software publisher.
 I think they kicked off the next-gen discussion in a big way.
 I think they attracted a huge amount of mindshare doing so,
 and I think they got people really excited
 for what we're going to see here next year.
 I think they had that.
 But they also...
 Every single press conference for Microsoft, Mixing, Node, and Sony
 had a big Ubisoft presence.
 They do Assassin's Creed.
 They do, obviously, Splinter Cell, Zombie U.
 They don't all over the place.
 Just Dance.
 If you want to murder people while getting down, Ubisoft.
 Assassin's Creed with Just Dance.
 You know, they're French. French company.
 I have never heard a better definition of the French ever.
 That's good.
 All right.
 On that note, I think we should wrap up.
 Any final thoughts?
 Any final E3 thoughts?
 The Last of Us is great.
 I'm sure you guys have already talked about that.
 Yeah, we talked extensively about The Last of Us.
 By the way, which takes place partially in Pittsburgh,
 which I'm very excited about.
 And I suck.
 I have to say, at one point, I was...
 Well, we went in for the presentation.
 I actually asked the developers why Pittsburgh.
 Because I'm from Pittsburgh, and they were like,
 it's just a very beautiful city, which it is.
 I highly recommend you visit.
 But I was looking at images from still...
 I was freeze framing the intro of the game,
 trying to figure out where they were in downtown Pittsburgh.
 You spent like three hours on that the other night.
 No.
 Brian was working on the post about smart glass,
 and I was kind of chilling and talking with him about it.
 Josh was just Googling.
 I was like, street view.
 Trying to position street view to match the frame
 so I could figure out where exactly it was.
 You know, I have a lot of important stuff I need to do.
 Here's my closing thoughts.
 I saw the Square Enix Final Fantasy tech demo,
 and it's just incredibly beautiful.
 Yeah.
 My only worry is that just a lot of this next gen stuff
 is talking about graphics and not next gen game.
 Which that's why Watch Dogs sounds really interesting.
 I never got a chance to see it.
 But they're really thinking about what a next gen,
 more simulated world would be.
 Which I think that's the thing.
 You get more GPU for more graphics,
 but you're also going to get a lot more CPU.
 I'm excited about that.
 I need more RAM to load in that sort of stuff.
 I'm really excited about that.
 Are you taking a bite of Neely's head?
 Is that what you're saying?
 I went the wrong way.
 No, you went the right way.
 So, I just think it's funny because Paul can't see it.
 Also, that's on a phone.
 Paul's on a phone that looks like
 one of the free phones that old people have.
 Because it is one of those.
 It's like a jitterbug.
 Paul's on his jitterbug.
 It makes sense.
 Here's my last thought before I go and drink more coffee.
 Theverge.com slash E3.
 That's it.
 Yeah.
 Nice.
 Go to that promotion.
 Drop the mic.
 We have an E3 hub.
 All the news that's fit to publish on the internet and read.
 All right, guys.
 Well, thank you for joining us.
 Paul, are you going to stick around?
 Chris, thank you obviously for joining us.
 Paul, are you sticking around for further topics
 or are you hitting the road?
 What happened this week?
 What else do we have?
 It's on our list.
 I was thinking about renting a bike
 and then riding the LA River.
 A pad phone?
 Okay.
 We have pad phone to talk about.
 There's a bunch of crazy stuff at Computex.
 Computex.
 David, did you go to Computex?
 I'm aware that David's there because he talked one time.
 David's here.
 I didn't go to Computex.
 He didn't go.
 Sean Hollister, Sam, and Jeff went.
 Forget about Computex.
 No, I thought Nate went.
 Nate's there.
 Nate's there.
 I don't think Jeff went.
 Here's what I want to know.
 Is the Galaxy Tab Wacom thing ever happening?
 No, because they're going to redo the processor or something.
 S Pen.
 No, don't worry about it, Paul.
 Your dreams are still unfulfilled.
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 Well, I will say this.
 I've come all the way around to kind of wanting a Galaxy Note 10.1 version 2.
 If they got paper on that thing.
 I don't want a Galaxy Note.
 Oh, Galaxy Note.
 Yeah.
 The big one.
 I think this is a horrible form factor.
 I think this is a, it's too tall.
 It's too wide.
 The 16 nine Android tablet form factor is, is awful.
 And everyone I've put in my hands, I'm like, I don't want to hold it like this.
 And I don't want to hold it like this because they're both ridiculous.
 I want to put it down and get my iPad.
 Yeah.
 You know, and like this is a real, this is a real problem.
 Like they don't seem to understand that like this doesn't work that well.
 And Microsoft is doing the same thing.
 All the stuff they showed at Computex is 16 nine.
 But I'd rather have black bars and something that's comfortable to hold.
 Yeah.
 You know, sorry.
 Game over.
 D.O.A.
 No, I apologize to me.
 I'm going to take off.
 Bye.
 OK, Paul, thank you for joining us as always.
 But you'll be back next week when we when we go.
 I'm going to be in Chicago next week.
 Yeah.
 He's getting married.
 I don't know what's going on with the Virgcast next week.
 I'm going to be doing it live from the wedding, which Becky will love.
 I'm sorry, Becky.
 There are nuptials here, whatever you do to them.
 A flamethrower?
 Yeah, some sort of I don't know.
 Anyhow, but I just have to do this Virgcast.
 OK, go ahead, Paul.
 We'll we'll we'll talk to you next week.
 All right.
 Can I say that Becky just immediately I own me to say that we will not podcast.
 It would be fun.
 We all we will be there on Friday.
 It might be fun to do it from the hotel room or hotel room or something.
 Live live from the life of Hell's wedding.
 I mean, the Virgcast Chicago.
 That's ridiculous.
 All right, David, I'm just going to tell us what you're holding.
 I'm just going to relax now.
 Yeah, I'm really like I have nothing to say about the pad phone.
 I have a lot of things.
 I mean, I hate the palace.
 What it is.
 Wait, I want to know why you hate the.
 OK, so the.
 I'll tell you why.
 There's there's like I can in 30 seconds.
 It's a phone.
 The phone is OK.
 The phone.
 Yeah, it's not bad.
 Reminds me of the G2 X.
 Yeah, I can see that.
 But it's like, you know, it feels all right.
 And then there's this big tablet which does exactly nothing until you slide the phone inside.
 And then it just becomes a tablet.
 Hey, until you slide the phone, until you slide the phone.
 There's that kind of that eject situation.
 Can we get this on video, folks?
 Can we get this on video doing this?
 This is the Asus.
 This had phone.
 Yeah.
 OK, let me explain about let me explain to you in case you don't know what it is.
 OK, it is a phone and a tablet screen.
 And the phone goes inside the tablet screen and the tablet and then it becomes a tablet.
 Yeah, but the tablet is basically just the tablet doesn't do anything on its own.
 It's a bad.
 It's a bad.
 Here it is.
 Here it is.
 It runs ice cream sandwich with Asus modifications.
 Yeah, they changed the font.
 They changed the font and they changed some other stuff.
 And it's like it's like little things.
 It's just enough.
 It's just made the icons taller.
 Very useful.
 Yeah, they made a horrible notification window.
 So tell us about it.
 So it's I mean, it's it's a weird concept.
 Like I love the concept.
 I was really irrationally excited about the Motorola Atrix way back when.
 So did I.
 We all did.
 Everyone did.
 Because it's like I think I still think it's a great idea.
 I like this notification window.
 What are you talking about?
 It's too much stuff.
 No, I think it's great.
 I'm a big fan.
 Brightness right there.
 You're right.
 It's good.
 Look at that.
 But the thing is like it's and as a phone, it's not bad.
 There's nothing really exciting and it's kind of a crappy screen.
 But it's a it's a fine resolution.
 What's it?
 What's resolution?
 440.
 But you know, otherwise, it's a good phone.
 It has the S4 processor and it's super fast and works pretty well.
 But then you put it in this and I agree about the aspect ratio.
 I think it's the worst.
 And then it just it becomes like this is really heavy even without anything inside because it doesn't do anything currently.
 But it's still really heavy.
 They put a massive battery.
 It's giant.
 And then literally this thing I've charged.
 I've had this thing for like a week and a half now.
 And because I ran our battery test.
 What does watch calendar mean?
 It's that is a really terrific question.
 I mean, this is like, of course, I mean, this isn't for the US market.
 No.
 I mean, it's not.
 It might be someday.
 No, you know, probably not.
 I have a long, long rant, by the way, about how this product is like exemplifies everything that's wrong with like US carriers.
 Because I should just sell this in the US market.
 What's your reason?
 What is your reasoning behind that?
 I guarantee you AT&T is like, no, we're not selling this.
 Why not though?
 Why wouldn't AT&T be excited about it?
 This screen does feel very cramped.
 Yeah.
 Because you're totally used to HD.
 That's what this is for.
 No, right.
 When you need a bigger screen.
 So if you think like this concept is generally the future.
 So you could talk on the pen.
 Is that true?
 Yeah.
 Shut up.
 Are you kidding me?
 Yeah.
 Hello.
 This is the most ridiculous set of products ever.
 Yeah, that's cool.
 That looks great.
 This pen is ridiculous.
 How do you charge it?
 You have to plug it into a USB port.
 Yeah.
 Does it have like a thing?
 That's amazing.
 Oh my God.
 Why?
 This is so cramped.
 All right, David, the future.
 Why is it the future?
 I'm not going to lie.
 I pay Dropbox way too much money to keep all my crap everywhere I want it to be.
 And even that is kind of a weird, clunky system.
 But this is like I have everything, all my apps, all whatever I want in one place.
 And then it's like, oh, if I need a keyboard, I just pop it into a keyboard.
 And if I need a bigger screen, I just pop it into a bigger screen.
 So with the Atrix, I got all excited because I decided they're going to have these in coffee shops.
 And you just go like plop it down and work.
 Yeah, Starbucks is going to just be like, hey, Motorola.
 Yeah.
 And for some reason.
 Let's do this because everybody's going to be carrying the Atrix.
 Right.
 And I got really excited about that.
 But the Atrix didn't really work well at all.
 I thought as a phone it was pretty good.
 Yeah, it's fine.
 Early.
 Early on my experience with it was excellent.
 And then it just got worse and worse.
 Well, that was the case with all Android phones for a long time.
 And again, it works fine as a phone.
 And it's kind of a crappy tablet.
 And then luckily we don't have to actually have to be confronted with trying to buy it here in America.
 True.
 Does that come with it?
 It's just such a crazy.
 Can I see the pen?
 It's just such a crazy idea.
 The fact that it exists is wild.
 And this comes with it.
 Hello.
 I mean, just the worst.
 Are you there?
 Excuse me, I got to take a call.
 Yeah, no, I'm not just holding a pen up to my head.
 You look totally normal.
 I'm not just literally holding a Sharpie up to my head.
 Does that thing stay paired to this or is it paired to this?
 This to me is like, if I saw someone doing this, I would be like,
 I get you don't want to talk to me right now.
 You don't have to pretend to talk on a pen.
 Sorry, I'm really busy.
 I got to take this.
 Just give me one minute.
 This is a pretty important call.
 Yeah.
 Hello?
 Hello?
 I think he hung up on me.
 I don't know what's going on.
 Is this working?
 This doesn't seem to be going on with this.
 But it says it paired with the phone or the tablet.
 So it pairs automatically.
 There is no tablet.
 No, there is.
 It can't pair with the tablet.
 It pairs with the tablet.
 Well, so yeah, when you put it in, it just automatically.
 There's no radio in there.
 Yeah, well, no, so it's a software thing.
 It just knows to automatically pair as soon as you put it into the tablet.
 But you can pair these two manually.
 I'm sorry, I'm getting a call.
 You guys quiet down for a second.
 Seriously.
 Hello?
 Yes?
 No, I'm, yes.
 Oh, yeah, I can make that, no problem.
 So far from good.
 Well, I have a...
 Right, so you definitely can't hear anything that's on.
 You're not selling it.
 Excuse me, Neal.
 I'm on the phone right now, and you're interrupting this call that I'm on with this actual phone.
 And it's upsetting to me.
 I'm going to have to go.
 I got a real problem here.
 Yeah.
 Sorry.
 Goodbye.
 You hang it up, I slam it in.
 Sorry, this is great.
 So this leads right into...
 This leads right into...
 Thank you.
 Sorry.
 See?
 He's not passed out drunk.
 You really want a Galaxy Note 10.1.
 He's not passed out drunk.
 Go ahead.
 Real me-verse situation.
 Well, this is great, but it's...
 You said it was kind of a demo.
 Yeah, it's like...
 Nobody should buy it.
 So with the Atrix, it just couldn't power all the stuff it had to power.
 It almost feels like it can, but there's still some stuff that's just not totally there.
 And you want...
 Do you feel cool carrying around a dead tablet with you in case you wanted to go into tablet mode?
 Yes.
 Really?
 Not nearly as cool as I felt talking on a pen while I walked down the street.
 David, is it just...
 Just, you know, don't pussyfoot it, okay?
 Buy it or don't buy it?
 Don't buy it.
 Well, you can't buy it.
 Buy it or don't buy it?
 I don't want to hear your even-tempered...
 Is this the best iPad stylus in the market?
 I don't want to hear your even...
 Can you pair this with an iPhone and then use it as an iPad stylus?
 Ellis Hamburger said, it's pretty okay.
 David, I don't want to hear your even-keeled description of what it's like.
 This is the worst piece of crap I've ever seen in my entire life.
 I want to hear it.
 I need an opinion because opinions are real and important, okay?
 And you got to have one.
 If you have a billion dollars...
 Let me ask you something.
 Which is the best?
 Which phone should I buy?
 Tell me which one is the best, which one wins?
 iOS or Android?
 Could you tell me that information, please?
 I need a factual opinion from you.
 I hear good things about Tizen.
 Tizen's where it's at.
 Limo Foundation.
 Hey, hey, Alien Predator.
 Which one?
 Shut up.
 Don't talk about it.
 No, wait, can I just tell a really quick story?
 I will dive across this table and kill you.
 I will strangle you to death.
 I will spoil nothing.
 So I go to the movie theater.
 We're going to see it at 12.01.
 Please stop talking about Prometheus.
 We get there at like 10.15, right?
 Spoiler alert.
 Because we're nerds, we want to be first.
 Spoiler alert.
 And we show up, we sit down, 12.01 comes, we watch like five trailers,
 and then up comes Windows 97 saying,
 Windows 9 desktop has crashed.
 You've got to be kidding me.
 Swear to you I'm not lying.
 Shut up.
 It just crashed, it just broke and died.
 Are you serious?
 So we sit there and...
 Windows 97, by the way?
 Wait, that's powering the digital projector?
 I'm just a product reviewer at the Verge.
 Old Windows.
 They should put Linux on there.
 Limo Foundation.
 Tizen.
 Yeah.
 You tell me Windows crashed, you couldn't watch Prometheus?
 Windows crashed and we couldn't watch Prometheus.
 And so it comes up,
 they were dealing with this for like 20 minutes,
 and they're like, okay, we're going to play it in another theater.
 We watch all the trailers again, and it crashes again.
 Same error message, same thing.
 Did you see that on the image?
 Yes, this is what happened.
 We have the image.
 Wow.
 So I'm at this theater for four hours.
 I watched all the trailers twice.
 Oh my God.
 It's now like 2.30 in the morning, I got there at 10,
 and I still have not seen Prometheus.
 Keep going, getting closer.
 Wow.
 That was my midnight showing of Prometheus.
 No, it's really good.
 I really see the fear in Numeirah Pace's eyes.
 Yeah, it is a pre-XP version of Windows, that's all I know.
 Wow.
 I've blocked out which one.
 Windows 97.
 How did that happen?
 I have no idea.
 It was remarkable, though.
 I mean, how did that happen?
 Where's that system?
 Who invented that?
 That's the digital production system that they're all using.
 They built it in like 97?
 They're like, it's stable.
 They broke twice.
 It was the most depressing thing ever.
 Maybe it was the I love you virus.
 Or whatever it is.
 Our chat's like, they should have used Metro.
 That'd be cool.
 Swipe past it.
 You want to talk about Computex?
 Because this to me, this is what's going on at Computex, right?
 It's all of the companies who are building Windows 8.
 Ubooks.
 In Metro.
 They're building Folding.
 They're the same thing.
 It's because the operating system enables it.
 One thing's not a shell, and the other's not the brains.
 It's like, their Windows 8 is a tablet and laptop OS.
 No, but I'm saying to me, they're playing with form factors in a way that...
 Playing with fire is what they're doing.
 Yeah.
 Well, no, I mean, Asus and Acer used to play with form factor left and right.
 And they kind of stopped doing it for a while.
 It's the same thing.
 All of the Windows 8 stuff is insane.
 What's the Tai Chi?
 The screens on both sides of the lid.
 It's wild.
 It doesn't seem useful.
 I like that Acer, I think, was it?
 Or Asus, the one with the big chunky white dock looks really futuristic.
 Which one's that?
 It's either Acer or...
 The two companies that showed a lot of stuff.
 Do they have it on screen there?
 I don't know if that's it.
 It's got a big white, it's almost like...
 No, that's not it.
 This is the Tai Chi, which is definitely cool.
 But there was one that had actually a very, almost like a Prometheus-y looking,
 like very sci-fi-ish looking dock.
 It's called the Acer Wonder Dock.
 The Acer Wonder Dock?
 The Acer PC.
 Wonder Dock PC.
 The Acer Wonder Dock PC 8X.
 I'm just naming randomly naming products now.
 That's not it, that's a lady.
 I can see what they're looking at.
 Anyhow, let's take some calls.
 Did you see anything Computex, Windows 8, that you liked?
 You've read our coverage, I assume.
 Call it 888-418-4074.
 Would love to hear your thoughts.
 Frankly, you can talk about whatever you want.
 But I think it's a thrill, a feeling of excitement.
 888-418-4074.
 Call in, tell us what you're thinking about right now.
 It doesn't have to be about Computex.
 You can tell me how bad you feel that I didn't get to see Prometheus last night.
 You can talk about Prometheus?
 No.
 You cannot talk about Prometheus.
 If you say a single word about Prometheus, the call will end.
 Josh will come to your home and find you.
 And I will end you.
 I will snap you like a twig.
 And then I will use that twig for kindling.
 And then I will take the ashes from the twig.
 And I will shoot them with a laser.
 And I will take the whatever remaining from the laser.
 And I will put it in a capsule.
 And I will eject it into space, into the sun.
 Okay?
 This sounds like one of those Direct TV commercials.
 Don't you mention Prometheus to me.
 We have a caller.
 Caller, you're on the air saying nothing about Prometheus.
 What do you want to talk about?
 Computex?
 What's up?
 Who are you?
 What's your name?
 Hey guys, it's Dave here.
 Hey Dave, how are you?
 What up?
 Good, thanks.
 Hey guys.
 So yeah, the one that I saw that I'm really excited about and I can't wait to get is the ASUS running on WinRT.
 Which one is it?
 ASUS.
 But it's running WinRT.
 And there's a video floating on YouTube which is a demo of a, it's part laptop.
 It's part laptop and part tablet.
 If you've got the tablet in your...
 Do we have that, Dave?
...you dock it to a keyboard.
 Yeah, do we have that on the site?
 I think so.
 I think we must.
 And why are you excited about it?
 Well, first of all, it's armed.
 So the battery life.
 I'm not interested in Intel.
 I mean, I haven't seen CloverTill yet.
 But I haven't seen anything working in CloverTill.
 But being armed, long battery life, the fact that I can...
 Because I do use Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
 So being able to dock and use it with a mouse and keyboard, that's I think a particular feature for me.
 Are you at all concerned about the fact that you're basically starting from scratch with...
 I mean, you're not going to be using any other Windows apps essentially that you've ever used before.
 You're going to go to Office and then...
 Does it concern you that you'll basically be starting over and it's going to be all Metro stuff?
 Not really.
 I think it's going to pick up pretty fast.
 Faster than actually Windows 1.
 I think I wouldn't be too concerned about it.
 I do own another laptop and I do own an iPad.
 So I wouldn't worry too much about that.
 Right.
 And most of the things that I own, all the apps that I own on the iPad are games that I could live without.
 Right.
 I'm really picking it up and I love the new apps, the sports app, the news app, the finance apps, and all those.
 And there are a couple of games that I could play.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Well, that's very interesting.
 And do they say when that'll be...
 Well, obviously they didn't say because Windows 8 has to come out.
 But we're guessing around October, right?
 Yeah.
 Nobody's really coming up with a date.
 Do they say price point?
 Do they talk about price point for that device?
 I don't think so.
 Yeah.
 What do you think it's going to be?
 Probably it's going to be less than an Intel, yes.
 But the fact that it has a keyboard and it's stocked, I would say it's going to be in the range of about $500 to $700.
 I mean, if it's any more than $700, does it here, the Tablet 600?
 Well, if it replaces a laptop, I don't know.
 I mean, people are complaining about it.
 If it's more than $400, it's not worth it.
 I mean, it's as good as a laptop.
 It's a hard sell, though, if you're going against the iPad.
 If you're going against a laptop, totally makes sense.
 I guess the question is, the value proposition will be, look, you can get a laptop and an iPad, or you can spend ultimately less money and get the best of both worlds.
 That's kind of going to be how they're selling these things.
 Yeah, that's the pitch.
 You're going to have the tablet, and you're going to have this great laptop, traditional laptop experience.
 Right.
 I don't want to think about one device. I don't want to think about, oh, should I carry my iPad with my keyboard, or should I carry my laptop, which is pretty heavy.
 So I just want to think about one device, and that's what I'm looking forward to.
 Right.
 Let's see, it's this concept.
 All right, cool. We're moving on. Thanks so much for calling in.
 We're going to take another caller here.
 But, I mean, it seems like...
 Caller, you're on the line.
 I don't talk about my name.
 Oh, my name is...
 My name is Renal.
 It was pretty...
 I saw it on IT, and I thought it was pretty cool, but it just like, it kind of struck me like a pad phone.
 It was like, is it really going to... Is anyone really going to... That's not really going to happen.
 I mean, I'll say this.
 I'll say this.
 So I travel quite a bit, and I use my laptop on the plane, and I also bring my iPad.
 And it would be really great to be able to have a very discreet...
 I've got my iPad, essentially, and I've got this very discreet trackpad keyboard component for it that does not take up a ton of room, doesn't take up as much as a laptop, and I can be in either state if I want without having to take two different devices.
 That to me is a pretty exciting idea.
 Yeah, but the Tai Chi is like the folding two-screen...
 Right, the Tai Chi is the one that flips over.
 It's Intel.
 It doesn't...
 Like the Transformers, those seemed a lot more like... Those seemed real.
 Like I would get one of those, like if it wasn't like a billion dollars, I'd totally get one of those.
 I think that's the place where... I personally feel like the ARM devices that are the detachable, like they do basically dual duty, and they're detachable.
 You don't end up with the same, like, oh, I have to flip this or fold this or bend.
 I can have it one way or have it the other.
 That to me is actually really enticing.
 To not have to browse the internet using an iPad browser all the time, to be able to have what is essentially a full browser with a trackpad and a keyboard in a full computing environment, not like this sort of partial one.
 I could see that obviating my need for taking both things.
 Yeah, that was my epiphany.
 The thing is, okay, you can use... I can use an iPad for fun.
 I'm just like chilling, but I just can't see myself typing.
 I mean, I have a 10-page essay due today.
 I cannot see myself writing that thing on an iPad.
 That's why I really love the Transformer.
 Even the iPad keyboards that people are making, they leave a lot to be desired.
 There's some okay ones out there, but the things where you can kind of dock the iPad, and it's still like...
 Yeah, you're talking about the Logitech.
 The Logitech.
 There's a couple of other variations.
 See, here's the thing.
 Here's a question.
 I think that we're rapidly coming to a place where you have to kind of decide, do you have multiple devices that have overlapping, redundant capabilities, or do you have one thing that fulfills multiple different form factor kind of experiences?
 One true device.
 Right, and the PadTone's like really...
 You think it's one?
 I don't know.
 I think it's two.
 I think it's two for one.
 Well, I mean, not something as crazy as a PadTone, but I mean, if you have a Transformer, to me, it's not really that much different from a G2, which I think is almost as good as the G2.
 I think it's a little bit more challenging to find a new one.
 It's to me it's not really that much different from like I don't know having a laptop and you know
 Putting in an external mouse. It's kind of the same concept. It's a little bit higher level
 I mean, I I definitely get what Charles is saying about the keyword
 I mean like I have a that's why I bought like a ThinkPad x1 because the key words like
 Amazing. I can't live without a good keyboard, you know, it's
 really productive and so that's why the
 Transformers are pretty exciting
 But I mean, they don't really like I mean like they seem so clunky. I mean
 They just I don't know like the execution on like the conversion is so
 It's just terrible. Yeah, I agree. But the operating system isn't well, right? That's that's not made for that. You can't
 It's hard to get mad at it
 Companies like a serious for like not being good at like the software right because they're not software companies
 They clearly being clear. No, no, no, I actually mean the hardware
 I mean like not so much the not so much to the fact that like I like to me
 It just doesn't seem that seamless when you like, you know, transform it, you know, it
 Doesn't make it doesn't make it always is what you're saying
 If it made the noise would it seem? Yeah, I mean was like
 No, no, I mean like it just it just seems like a huge ordeal to put it in and take it out
 It's not like like okay when you have an iPad and you put on you know
 You're your little smart cover that that just to me is so seamless
 Like why can't we have something so seamless when you?
 Transform your tablet to a notebook. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean like
 You just want that like I'm not saying that like Apple needs to make some
 Phone Apple could make something
 Like the hardware was really good. Yeah, you know, maybe
 Maybe maybe we'll see something. You never know man Mondays
 Yeah, you might be switching all right, we're gonna move on thanks I hope thanks so much for calling in
 We appreciate it. You want to take some?
 WWDC prediction calls, let's do that. I think we need to wrap up pretty soon
 I don't know what time it is, but let's say okay. Okay caller. Oh, we have one more caller
 I don't know what you're calling you're on the line. Hi. Hello
 Hello, well, you might want to mute us in the background if you can turn us up
 Um, don't listen. What's your name? And what are you calling about? Hello. Hello
 Hey, how you doing? Hey, what's your name? And what are you calling about?
 My name is Sean talking about Windows 8. Yeah
 I
 Just don't see it. I
 Don't think consumers actually going to that at all. I still like you just
 Try it. If I try and do too much you think so
 I mean, you think it'll be confusing to consumers that they'll look at it and go
 Like what is this thing supposed to be?
 Exactly and
 And just looking at it. I'm all like, okay, you want to do arrow or Metro wherever to call it put on the tablet
 Right you want to do Windows put on the desktop, right? You chop all these things together
 Yeah, I'm down beyond this because some of the stupid things work at Best Buy. I know how consumers
 Take stuff how to look at things and I quote consumers are stupid. I used to work at Best Buy
 I think I think I think your point is that a lot of people go into the store and they don't know what they want
 They don't really know understand
 Well, I mean they're really dumb, but I don't know what I'm talking about, but they go in there
 just not knowing what's going on, right and
 and
 Best and you go in and try and buy these things and nobody knows what they're doing what you're talking about
 You're not gonna sell well, right? Yeah, I just like a safe worker Best Buy. I
 Quit that like two months. Nobody knew nobody in there knew what they were talking about
 Dude, don't you think that comes along but don't you think Microsoft's will go?
 Don't think Microsoft will be doing it like a ton of outreach and saying
 Look when somebody comes in the store and they're looking at the iPad you can say oh check this out
 You can get the best of the iPad like all this tablet stuff
 Plus you can have a full laptop
 Full laptop, but don't you feel like they're gonna be pushed to sell it like that? It could
 But I mean, I don't know man Microsoft ain't really all that great at
 Apportion new concepts of stuff that is true. They're a little slow to
 evolve sometimes
 They got the Xbox right? Yeah, but it took him two generations. It took him two generations
 But I think normally the people got Xbox until the halos. I mean halo helped
 Yeah, I was just I like to be beeped at the end yeah
 You're not interested in getting one when they come out you're not gonna get one
 I mean, I'm not I like to try it out first. Let's see what it does how
 You know, let me ask you
 What do you have right now?
 I got to say I have a laptop with an iPad and I got an iMac desktop. Nice. That's an interesting comment
 What kind of you have an iPhone?
 Yeah, I got the iPhone as well. So you're all Apple you have all Apple stuff?
 Well, I don't have all Apple stuff and I got a few desktops here and there
 But not like your daily
 But your daily driver is not any Microsoft product
 No, no, so do you feel like you might have a tablet?
 You're ready. Do you think you might be careful man? You think you might be predisposed to not want to get?
 Microsoft fine
 It's like you've internalized all the hate
 Mac users are going like yeah, I may switch to Windows. I think a lot actually I don't just say I think you're crazy
 I think no Mac user is going I'm gonna switch to Windows now because of Windows 8
 Oh, you think I'm kidding. I will I'm not like I want a Windows at all
 I know you want one but you're gonna switch it as your main you're asking me your main device
 It depending on how much they move
 Switch over you're not gonna fully switch over. Oh no. No, no, no, no, but like I said though
 I just say
 You know if you're if you're in the ecosystem, you don't suddenly go I'm jumping ship
 Especially in the Mac ecosystem where you're like, oh, I'm gonna switch to Windows
 But especially in the Mac ecosystem, which is you know pretty good
 The products work pretty well, right? The iPad is really a great tablet every time I plug in my iPad and iTunes opens
 I'm like, yes, I love this ecosystem
 It's my favorite you're like I'm in this I'm in the rain forest the Apple rain forest
 uh, well
 I was judging from what I saw because I was on the verge I was looking at all those stuff
 They had one where you like it's a keyboard and a laptop you can fold it make it like a laptop. I'm like
 I'm looking at some of these things like didn't Microsoft try to do this stuff before?
 Yeah, yeah, but they didn't have Windows 8 which is gonna be the real difference because it's it's made right made for a tablet
 But yeah, remember Dell made the Dell is trying this again where they make the screen that flips around
 Yeah, you know, maybe they'll get it right. I gotta say whenever Dell does the the form factor innovation gives you chills
 Why he shows all right caller. Thank you so much for calling in. We're gonna take some more calls. Thanks a lot
 There's two things we need to talk about by Sean. Yeah, that's not Sean's gone
 What we had a huge story that we have completely. Yeah, no
 I actually just looked at Twitter and I realized that my I'm being berated by people who think that we're a leftist liberal leftist rag
 Romney I wasn't there on me. I was not talking about anything we can talk about people were like so we ran a story
 Sorry, what's the other story?
 The web OS story web OS story story and the fact that HTC may or may not be denied
 Windows. Oh my god. There's so many stories. Let's let's since I brought it up with you
 I was quick
 So Joe flatly who wrote the original scam world piece which exposed the the underbelly of internet scamming
 wrote a follow-up story today and
 and
 Basically not basically literally. Yeah, this company called Prosper Inc
 Which is like one of the largest boiler rooms in America now boiler rooms are where all these high-pressure sales happen that get people into
 Like getting scammed. Um, they are holding fundraisers. They're like big. Yeah, they're huge
 They hold like five thousand dollar connection is the more specific connection is that they're all in Utah
 Well, they're all in Utah. They're all in Utah and they're tied and they're tied to the Utah political establishment, which is tied to
 Mormonism right and tied to Mitt Romney and and and if you read the article
 Which by the way a bunch of people who wrote to me on Twitter clearly didn't they're like it's not even mentioned this headlines misleading
 It's not even mentioned in the article
 It's like well your reading comprehension sucks
 If you don't see where it's mentioned the article because towards the end of the article we bring it all together to talk about how these
 You guys are basically holding five thousand dollar plate dinners
 You know the guys who run Prosper Inc are holding five thousand dollar plate dinners for Mitt Romney
 They're putting giving him money for his campaign
 Which I think is really interesting. I mean look believe me. Well, I'm sure we could dig up some dirt
 I mean if this was that we weren't going looking for it this stuff comes from
 You know the fact that it was related as it was complete surprise to us. Yeah
 And it's actually where this started was a bunch of people reached out to us after the first scam world and we're like
 I have more information. Do you guys want to hear about this?
 You know people came out of the woodwork wanting to talk about it and that's actually one of the more interesting things about doing
 Any sort of investigative piece that we do?
 Yeah
 Because we have to run around with like ideas and like dig and push and then as soon as we or any
 Journalist like shines a light you probably oh my god. I have so much to tell you about it
 I mean, here's here's that's like kind of the point. Here's a tweet that is God
 This is it. This is a that is a disgrace to journalism pathetic clickbait
 Here's another one
 Good read scam of a headline. Why is the Romney connection even mentioned?
 Why is it even mentioned? Yeah, there's no reason we want to mention that a gigantic scam organization is also funding presidential candidates
 That's not leftist lean or trolling for clicks. It's not a question. That's a statement
 Wow, that is some shady journalism I expect better from you Josh. Yeah. Yeah, you know us and it's your fault
 Shady just trying to be shady. Yeah, you did it
 But read the article. Have you seen my new slideshow?
 RTFA our TFA top ten babes with Mitt Romney. Yeah babes with me
 But anyhow, but but so that was that's watch this so many babes. What are the comments like on this? Is it a mess?
 162 I mean the first one is oh
 We didn't Joe didn't attempt to veil his agenda. Yes, that's right his agenda to take down Romney. Yes
 I'll tell you what man politics a guy with a Canadian flag icon who says he went to school in Utah
 Politics. Yeah, the most dangerous
 I this is what I would expect it from Gawker media dangerous deadliest and sexiest game
 Like I always thought Android versus iOS was scary. But like politics is it's so much worse. It's well. Yeah, I mean
 You know I mean this use Andrew. It's a different
 I've heard that kind of it's a different kind of commenter that gets riled up over politics true, I think
 Anyhow, so that's one thing we read but but hey, can I just say this I'm gonna um, oh
 Oh, no, I mean look it's an election year. There's a huge callers waiting on the line. There's a huge amount of I mean
 The government is like they're like, oh my god the internet. They know it's there this
 This will not be the last story you read on the verge about politics and we're we're gonna ramp it up as the election
 This actually the story isn't about politics
 But what I thought was most striking about this story is the how far it goes
 That that is what that is the point of the headline and that is the point of mentioning Mitt Romney in this story
 Which is Prosper Inc is a large
 entity that has ties that are very big important ties to very big important people and they're also
 part of a business that is
 Essentially illegal. I mean is essentially I mean is a crime, you know
 There's a criminal organization and what they do to people is criminal right? Not only do they make tons of money off of people
 But they like wield real influence exactly another and that's and that should scare the shit out of everybody
 Honestly when you think about it, you should be scared that it goes that far Mitt Romney shouldn't be taking money from boiler rooms
 That's what I think. Of course
 I think you know
 We should have way more reasonable campaign spending because it's completely both on Obama and Romney
 You know the amount of money they they spend and the way it's done is I think we have it all wrong in this country
 That's just one man's opinion that our chat room just explode one man one man who will be getting shot
 It's a really rough thing I mean I got you know that Citizens United verdict that said corporations can
 Confine whatever it was like change the nature of campaigning. Yeah, but you know the flip side of it is it's not a bad argument
 I mean you tell people how they can spend their money, right?
 You are telling people how they can exercise the right to free speech free speech. Sure, and I don't it's just it's a very
 It's a very tricky
 It's a very I think the way to do it is to end outside contributions to campaigns
 So to just say to say you can't state will give you the money corporations and people can't contribute to yeah
 Literally set aside money. I'd rather I would pay money in my tax dollars
 You mean there's public to say and to say set aside X amount of dollars each candidate gets this
 You know determine you obviously would be you know
 You'd look at inflation and things and figure out what seems reasonable based on past campaigns
 You know, we're getting way in the weeds here. We're getting to a dangerous. We're deep in the scary political place
 I mean right now there are people penning
 Emails to me about how I'm a socialist. It's not even funny. I just tweeted at you about it. Thank you
 But anyhow, but so then the other big story we had this week huge story
 Web inside this what you're talking about, right? Yeah, so we have callers on the line
 What do you want to do with these call? I want I want the callers to talk about WWDC
 They're in there waiting. Yeah, let's before we talk about let's let's do WWDC right now
 Sure, and then we'll do and then we'll talk about web OS and then and then we'll touch on HTC and then we'll wrap
 Yeah, which will be in five hours
 No, you're on the line. Sorry for keeping you waiting
 WWDC WWDC predictions. Yeah, is that why you're calling?
 Yeah, so what do you got I brought a blog post
 Recently looks like my top five
 wants for WWDC
 Some of them are pretty obvious, but some of them might be worth discussing. What are they? Let's hear them. Go down the list. I won't
 All right. So five I
 Presume series six is just an obvious thing. It's gonna be probably on all platforms right iPhone iPad
 I just stop my iOS six. Yeah, I
 See you guys series gonna be on the platform. Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe just be completely stable
 Yeah, I mean, I think there's been some leaks. I buy it. I think it's possible. Why not?
 and
 Four was and I remember you guys talking about this. I think a week two ago about
 Mail client for iOS since they can't really default
 You know sparrow or something like that for to do completely everything that the client does maybe they'll think about
 Making what fewer steps every time you're trying to access something on your mail app wouldn't be wonderful
 I don't just get an attachment by clicking an attachment icon and asking, you know saying which attachment do you want to put in here?
 That would be amazing. Yeah
 Okay
 You're breaking up a little hang on no you're breaking up we're all breaking up. No, I'm just kidding
 Well, I think the worst part is when I'm on like listservs or something and I have two messages from a single listserv
 I feel like I have to go through four steps just to hear what someone says
 And that drives me crazy on the mail app first of Gmail. Yeah. All right number three. What's number three?
 so
 Apple TV UI this is actually not really something I'm expecting it's kind of a question
 I raised as I was writing it
 I realized I was just asking the question
 Would they really show off the UI without any kind of hardware to unveil with it because it seems like never anything
 That might be a proof. That's never happened
 No, they might update the existing Apple TV UI, but they just did way over here. Yeah, like February. Yeah
 Yeah, sorry the guy responded to me who said that
 Said the connection was tenuous. I'm sorry. I hate to break up your
 He's in the connection was tenuous, but he agrees on the financing. I don't think it's a tenuous connect connection at all
 It's a direct connection. Anyway, I'm sorry number four number. No, no, he's on number two now. He's counting down
 Oh, you're kind of down kind down right here on number two number two in that list three is a confusing one to hear
 Wait, what was okay, right number two dose
 It's too yeah, so
 Uh number two is this might be at WWDC, but maybe it'll be something
 Related to an announcement they make that will be like a subsequent
 Presentation on the campus like they did with the iOS roadmap back in iOS
 Do I think mm-hmm or iOS 3 maybe?
 I'm just thinking maybe they'll do an OS 10 roadmap
 presentation I
 Mean because we only have two versions of OS 10 left before it becomes what?
 Yes, no, it's at another. I can just do it. I can just start calling it OS 10 again. I mean right
 No, I don't so I disagree with you
 I don't think they'll do that the reason they used to the iOS Roadmaps
 Was because they had to have developers to do the App Store
 They had to show new api's and they couldn't do that without a new phone
 They sell Mac OS separate from the devices so they can display here's the new version of iOS
 You know start developing for it. I don't think they'll do it. I think whatever they showed WWDC will just be whatever
 All right, and number one
 Number one was I really hope they do this native turn-by-turn navigation with the rumors
 Maps that they're gonna do themselves. I feel like I think they'll do I think I think if they don't do native turn-by-turn
 I'd be pretty surprised but I could see them not doing it
 I feel like they could almost bake that into Siri somehow. Oh, yeah
 You know like Siri could be the voice of the turn-by-turn and if she could somehow it could be like
 You know Siri navigate me to X and like it would just jump you into their map thing because that would be amazing
 Yeah, if you could say to Siri like navigate me to specific address and then she immediately it's one step
 You don't have to look at the phone and you're navigating
 That would be really great. I mean she already does that. Yeah, that's the best thing. I loved about Android. Yeah
 That the native turn-by-turn. I mean I was in I was in
 Android yeah, I was in LA all last week and I used it because I was driving everywhere constantly
 Yeah, everywhere I went I was using it
 All right, the best part about it is you don't have to have an address. That's right. That's right
 All right, we navigate to target in this area. Damn it. Damn it. We got to move on. Thank you so much for calling
 Really appreciate it. All right. We got one more here
 Hello WWDC predictions, what's your name? And what do you hope to see?
 I am an immigrant. My my predictions are
 That's a along with the normal stuff like iOS 6 and mountain lane. I think we're going to see Siri API
 We probably see
 Siri API could be huge. I mean if they do it the right way that could open up a whole new world of
 Functionality the question is for me the question the Siri API is
 Does it always work with the third-party apps or do you have to open the third-party app? Yeah, right
 Because then you run into a question we have maybe competing apps trying to do the same services
 So if you have the built-in, I mean that's true if you have two Twitter clients
 That is a tricky
 You've got it. You've got to know well, but you know the way they do with notifications they assign
 They say do this notification for this app, you know, maybe they that's per app. I mean that's like
 It's a lot like a Siri setting. Each app will have a keyword
 Yeah, well you think it'll be like, you know, you'll say Siri
 Twitter
 You know tweet this message or something
 We have to say that goes far away from the natural language kind of well not really
 How about tweet you could do? Okay, you could say say so maybe it'll be like, you know, Siri you press it down
 And then it's like Twitter say man. It's really hot outside
 Yeah, you know and then it's like it just hears Twitter and say and it knows that's what you want to say something on Twitter
 That to me is pretty natural
 You know, yeah it is
 It just it it adds one layer of management and Apple's typically very reticent to add that layer
 Well, I think that if you want to do it with apps, you know, you say foursquare check in here
 Yeah, that makes sense to me. But what you really want to say is check in
 Well, what you really want to say is I'm at Starbucks and it just
 Or if I just know where you are
 So to that point, maybe you'll say I'm at Starbucks and Siri will say do you want to check in on foursquare?
 That's not bad. I think you should that's actually
 That's actually not a bad idea. That's too many interactions. I think you want it
 Is it?
 Yeah, because it should know where you are
 I said where I am and then I say yes
 No, but it should you don't have to tell it where you are
 John Mavrvic wouldn't mind
 You don't have to tell it where you are
 Right because the phone knows where you are
 Geofences
 What you should really be able to say is check in you just hold the
 Alright, caller, what else?
 In ten minutes I'm taking this into the weeds
 Besides the API's what are you thinking? What else?
 I think they will open up an Apple TV SDK which will enable Bluetooth 4.0 and allow an app to be a secondary screen
 There won't be apps on the TV itself because there's only 8 gigabytes on an Apple TV but the iPad itself will be a secondary screen like a smart glass
 Interesting. Could happen
 Over Bluetooth you think?
 Well they could do it. There's no Bluetooth in the new Apple TV is there?
 There is. It's Bluetooth 4.0 and it's a standard
 It's Bluetooth 4.0 it disables
 It's disabled
 That's bizarre
 It was disabled in the iPod touch for a long time too
 You know why? Because it's basically the same SOC as the iPhone
 Do we have any leftover stuff?
 Yeah throw it in the Apple TV
 Anything else? Any other ideas?
 No, just a MacBook Air
 MacBook Pro 15 inch you'll probably get a redesign of the 13 inch
 Here's what I want. Here's what I really want
 I want black aluminum. Matte black aluminum
 Like the old MacBook from a couple years ago
 Like the old MacBook but that material
 Black aluminum
 It's a good album title
 Alright caller thank you for calling in. Really appreciate it
 Thank you
 Alright do you want to wrap up these last two stories very quickly?
 Well it's hard to wrap up WebOS quickly
 I want to see if this guy responded to me. We're having a good back and forth here
 Good, good
 The Josh Apolsky Twitter moment
 Nothing
 Twitter minute
 Somebody wants to talk about Apple ditching Google Maps and iOS 6
 They're going to do it. I mean who didn't know they were doing that?
 Here's the thing though. Don't all third party apps have hooks into Google Maps right now?
 No they have hooks into the core Maps API
 I mean Apple builds itself naturally
 No, no, no but they hook into
 They hook into Maps on iOS
 The back end of Maps is Google Maps
 Aren't they, but they're specifically using like
 Foursquare, not Foursquare because they're actually using
 Something else now aren't they?
 Yeah
 Aren't they specifically using
 Google Maps for things? Like things that Google Maps does
 But there is a Maps API in the standard
 In the OS
 So when you write an iPhone app you write
 Get a map and then the
 OS delivers you a map
 Interesting
 And you say put this stuff on this map and the OS figures it out
 But it doesn't have, but that has to have
 So all those, anything that that map app
 Map API is doing right now hooks into Google
 You're saying like they can just reassign
 They can just reassign those actions
 Yeah, and there might be some tweak, I mean obviously
 Everything about it perfectly, but that's the idea
 Right, I mean everybody will have to change their
 Everybody will have to update their app
 To work with this new
 No I think the idea is that you don't have to update the map
 No, no, but I think that
 I feel like it's going to present problems, I think there are very specific use cases
 I feel like what they'll have to do is give developers an option
 I think, sure
 But I think at the system level
 If you're just using the system Maps API
 The iOS API, it'll be seamless
 If you're going beyond that functionality and hooking into Google
 It won't be
 Do you think, so do you think that then Google will
 Release a full Google Maps app for the
 Oh yeah, without question, they had that event
 And they said this is all coming to every platform
 Do you think that Apple will allow other apps to be assigned
 To handle specific functions
 No
 On the iPhone
 I don't think they'll do that, I think they'll accept the map happily
 And say that we provide the service
 Interesting
 It's going to be very, I mean that's
 What else do you think is coming?
 So I really don't think they're going to do any TV stuff
 I think they're going to
 I actually
 I really am almost 100%
 We were just talking about this in the car over here
 I feel like they just did TVs with the iPad
 With the new iPad
 I feel like this is going to be focused on
 Well they've already shown Mountain Lion
 We already looked at it
 They're going to show it again
 They previewed it, I think they're going to have a much more advanced preview
 Without question
 And then I have to assume they're going to do iOS
 So this is going to be laptops and mobile
 And they're not even going to do like
 They're not going to show everything
 Let's say the new iPhone has a slightly larger screen
 They can't exactly go like
 Now you have room for this
 You know
 Like how could they, if that area is to be used for something
 More than just like extra real estate
 Which I assume they're not just putting it in there to make another row of icons
 Right
 They can't show what that does yet
 Nope, they'll do that with the phone
 They'll do it with the phone
 Which is crazy
 But here's my guess, I think I figured it out
 I think that that area is going to be a static widget slash notification area
 Right
 And that there won't be any interaction with
 I mean I think essentially your iPhone screen is going to stay
 Exactly the way it's always been for interaction
 Except when you go into full screen apps
 Which will do the full 16.9
 Right
 But for like
 That actually really lets them solve the problem
 Because the thing is you don't want to
 Because it lets them put out the phone and make use of the extra space
 Apps they preserve the way they are
 Yeah
 And then when the apps get updated they can take away the widget
 The question will be like can they do notifications in that manner
 Because notifications are still somewhat intrusive on iOS
 We've talked about this a bunch
 I think it makes sense like you could stick a widget there right
 You could have your weather widget up all the time when you're looking at the screen
 And you could swipe through that area to different widgets
 Right
 Or different like data or applications you may want to interact with
 The question is like would you swipe to notifications
 Maybe it's like a right swipe for one thing and a left swipe for something else
 Right
 I mean how much room are we talking about
 How many more pixels would that be up there
 Do you know the number
 It's 130 something
 I think that's right
 Our chat would know but the wifi is broken
 Is it
 Yeah
 It's a pretty good chunk of pixels
 Sorry chat I want to ask you
 I just think that I feel like
 But they're not going to show that
 Do you think
 Absolutely not
 Do you think iOS 6 will have any kind of a redesign
 It's 136 pixels
 Any kind of a redesign
 Thank you chat
 Oh good way to go chat
 Do we think iOS 6 will have any kind of a visual redesign
 I think they'll refresh a bunch of stuff they almost have to
 Will everything be stitched leather
 Yeah
 God that's the worst
 Maybe they'll introduce themes
 No like old OS 9 themes
 Yeah
 No like
 Swiggly lines
 Yeah like you could do like an all stitched leather theme
 No
 Or like a steel
 I don't think that will ever happen
 Blue steel
 I think they'll just do what they do with Mac OS 10
 They'll just keep refining it into various directions
 I mean
 Now everything is a square
 Right
 I wonder if there will be any notable
 I mean I actually we talked about this last time I think
 But I heard a lot of people in the industry they were like
 Boy I'm really tired of iOS it looks really dated to me
 Yeah
 Like a lot of people
 People who have iPhones
 Wait until everything is a square
 That's true
 I mean that's like Apple's like move like
 You think they'll take off the rounded edges on the icons
 Yeah they'll just mean that they do it with OS 10 all the time
 They could I'd be into that I would
 I actually don't think squares look that good like that personally
 I'm saying like I use Snow Leopard on this machine
 And then I've been using my iMac which has Lion on it
 And every time I come back to this one which I think is more functional
 Because I think Snow Leopard is more functional than mine
 I don't even remember what Snow Leopard is like
 I'm like wow this looks ancient but it's not
 It's just different one thing is a little less glossy
 It's Apple's move they're very good at it
 Slight tweaks
 So let's talk about webOS real quick and then maybe we can
 David you don't have any predictions about WWDC?
 I really don't
 No nothing?
 Dub dub
 You don't have anything to say about it?
 No I think Siri is the one I'm less convinced is going to be like a huge part of everything
 I don't know Tim Cook basically alluded to Siri stuff coming
 Yeah no I think there's going to be some stuff but like Siri and the iPad is the one thing I'm really curious about
 Because Siri basically becomes functionally useless when you're offline
 And the offline use case for your iPad is much higher than with your iPhone
 And so I don't think they'd want to have this like horribly broken feature on your iPad
 Well the best thing they might do is if you're offline it just says Siri is not available offline
 Right but that's kind of a crappy experience then
 Because they're promoting Siri like crazy but then 60% of the time
 There are crappy experiences all over iOS
 Yeah and Siri itself is almost always a crappy experience
 I use Siri consistently for one thing
 I'm just saying that like all modern mobile operating systems there are wonderful transcendent experiences
 And then there are ones that just seem a little bit broken
 So there may be things like the notifications which really aren't quite there
 No but with Siri in particular they already have such an air of this kind of works
 Adding on one huge piece of well this doesn't work in all these places that you use your iPad
 I mean I play this game every time
 Every time I want to make a phone call to one of the eight people on my favorites list
 I always try to use Siri and then I wait for it
 And I'm like why am I asking AT&T to figure this out
 We got to wrap up let's talk about webOS
 So we ran a huge piece this week
 It's basically a here's a screenshot pre-to-post-mortem the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS
 And this is we conducted tons of interviews
 I did, Chris did, Dieter did
 And they wrote the bulk of this I barely didn't I really didn't touch any of it
 This piece which is just basically tell us the story of what the hell happened with Palm
 What happened from before the launch of the pre from the development of webOS to where it is now
 Which is like basically dead in the water at HP the entire team is broken apart
 A lot of them went to Google a lot of them have gone elsewhere
 And they're not making any webOS based products at HP
 And they've opened webOS up as an open source piece of software
 Which I don't think has gained a ton of traction
 And it's for all intents and purposes right now is dead
 And how did they get there and it's a fascinating if you haven't read it like take 15 minutes 20 minutes out of your day
 Sit down because it really doesn't take that long to read you'd be surprised what you can get done
 In just this short few minutes sit down and read the thing it is a fascinating look
 And I think one of the best things we've ever published it's I mean I have to say again I mean it's great
 But you know the driving thing that I got out of it was American Wireless Carriers killed Palm
 I don't know they definitely did like without question you hear and by the way this is like from the horse's mouth
 Like we talked to people who really knew this isn't speculation this isn't oh you know he said she said
 So this is like people who were there at the time you know who know what happened or basically give Verizon killed the pre
 You know they use the pre as leverage to get a deal with Google like it was their choice on how many to buy on how they would sell them
 And whether the people in the retail stores knew how to sell them and you couldn't go get them anywhere else right you know going with Sprint hurt them
 They wanted to go with the Verizon originally because there's only and all that is only two because there's only two big carriers in America
 But all of and yeah and if you don't get a device if you put a device out on Sprint or T-Mobile it's not going to be a big success
 Right you're not going to have a big hit you know you need to put it on one of the two big monopolies
 And it also not only does it need to be on that care need to support it they need to sell it and advertise around it and want to support you
 It's a crazy it's crazy I mean that to me is it's like if you're it's like if you want to buy a car you know and they're only there's big warehouses where you could get cars
 They would only like push one kind of car can you imagine buying a car where like you know it had to be supported by this I mean it's just crazy that's bad analogy
 But it's just crazy cars about analogy I can't think of a you know it's a monopoly it's a monopoly that needs to be crushed
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 You're busy reading the other thing that really struck me about this was just made me remember how awesome the pre was when it came out and how excited everybody was because it kind of gets lost now
 But really I've never wanted to phone as much as I wanted to and I know you agree with that
 But I mean you don't know I mean you weren't part of our team at the time unfortunately for us
 You were just a baby you were like five years old
 You were literally three.
 Yeah.
 But you know that was an event that first off it came out of the blue we knew the Palm was doing something there it was such a surprise what they showed
 And I know that like Laura told me this story I think it was Laura that told me this story how people were like in our trailer at CES like screaming like you were there right were you in the trailer
 Yeah.
 People were like freaking out.
 That was a crazy moment they really did something impressive and they really had a product that look they made a lot of mistakes.
 And it wasn't just Verizon because there were other things that happened.
 They had internal conflict I think early on that had repercussions.
 And you know this guy Paul Mercer who talked about who had essentially like the thing that they didn't use as the basis of the OS who had been working on it at Palm.
 And at some point they decided to switch over to WebOS which was this more HTML 5 based much smarter much more forward thinking than what they had been working on previously.
 Yeah.
 Which somebody told us took in that OS it took five lines of code to center text in something.
 Wow.
 Which is really crazy.
 But you know they had to move away from this thing that they had built this that they thought they were moving towards and that caused a lot of conflict and a lot of I think trouble early on in this process.
 But seriously you got to read the story to me you just read it like you don't want to hear me talk about it.
 But it's depressing but it also ends a kind of a hopeful note a hopeful note which is 24 hour party people 24 hour party.
 Let a thousand web OS's bloom.
 And I do think like you'll see you do see now already.
 Can I just say.
 I mean I mean some of the guys went to went to Apple right there is then the notification guy go to Apple.
 No that was a jailbreak guy.
 No the other one.
 Yeah I think the notification guy guys did.
 Yeah obviously Matias went to Matias went to Google and you'll see you know all this stuff.
 They're huge.
 Already in fact in fact you see like the guy who the guy the notification do what is his name.
 I can't think of his name.
 Pretty sure he went to Apple like six months later notifications change on the iPhone and the I'm not saying it's just a one to step like this but you know Matias went to Google.
 And six months later suddenly like the UI is a lot better and a lot more beautiful.
 Here's some pictures amazing.
 Here's some of the graphics.
 We've some really some really excellent cropping around.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 James our designer spent a lot of time on this.
 And every time I see this picture of John Rubenstein just like sadly walking down the street where he's a little further down a little bit.
 The thing is such a.
 Yeah.
 So why'd you do this to me.
 HP.
 That's my.
 I mean HP really mean he blew it in one way.
 But we've been on the air for like three hours now.
 And so we wrap this up.
 Sorry I know you're enjoying this but but I have to eat.
 OK.
 And sleep.
 Yeah.
 Once in a while and I have to take down the.
 I'm just about the way I'm so I'm so tired right now.
 I came back for I don't want to complain you know it's champagne problems.
 But you know I came back from D and E3 and now I'm going back out to WWDC on Sunday.
 And then we have Google I.O. There's a big Microsoft is doing a Windows phone event this month.
 Come on guys.
 You know what there's twelve months in the year.
 Yeah.
 You don't all have to do your stuff in June.
 All right.
 That's it.
 That's the Verge cast this week.
 If you would like to get in touch with us you can email us at Verge cast at the verge dot com.
 You find us on Twitter it's at Verge or we also have Twitter accounts.
 I'm Josh with the Polsky and Eli is reckless.
 David Pierce is Pierce David which is you know the worst.
 Chris Chris.
 Chris Grant is Chris Grant I believe.
 Yeah Paul is not on the Internet so don't you.
 And it was anybody else I'm missing.
 No.
 OK.
 That's our show for this week.
 We'll be back next week with with more delicious tasty morsels of information.
 And until then I wish your family the very best and I'm sure I won't see them anytime soon.
 Just your family for you.
 Don't even care.
 And rock and roll is what I want to say.
 Polygon.
 Polygon.
 You're a punk.