 So, you know the cliche when there's a car crash, you can't not look, you can't not slow down and gawk and see what happens. You know what doesn't happen when there's a car crash? The dude in the car doesn't get out and get on a bullhorn and start shouting at traffic that everything's fine and I'm gonna be able to drive away really soon and it's gonna be awesome. We pretty much experienced that this past week in the mobile world. We'll explain why. Stay tuned for the Verge Mobile Show. Hi, I'm Dieter Bohn. I'm Chris Ziegler. I'm David Pierce. Yes, that's right, David Pierce. Oh, right. This is real. This is happening. So we were actually, we were just talking about this during rehearsal, the fact that David Pierce is going to introduce himself and then I was going to make some disparaging remarks about him, about how we tried to get literally every other person at the Verge to be on this show and everyone said no. And then finally we got to David Pierce and we're like, okay, well, we're out of people. We better ask David and he agreed to come on. But no, that's actually not true at all. He was our first choice and I'm delighted to say that he said yes. And then I asked every other podcast if I could do that one and then when they all said no, I'm here. There's another lie there. Did you just say in rehearsal? Rehearsal? Come on. Yes. We did not rehearse anything. What do you call that? What do you call the period before the show? Waiting for Chris to get out of the bathroom so we can start. That's accurate. Fair. Okay. Yeah, we can go with that. This is episode seven for the week of July 9th, 2012, if you're keeping track and I hope you are. And we ended last week on a down note and so we're going to start on that same down note this week because I'm tired of having it at the end. Can we talk about just how crazy RIM and Blackberry is right now? Nothing has changed but just the insanity of their media blitz is blowing my mind and Chris, you listened in to the entire investor meeting today, yeah? I did. I did. And it was basically a repeat of the earnings call. Torsten's speech mirrored what we heard, what was that, a week or a week and a half ago, almost word for word. And there really wasn't anything new revealed. We did get a very brief tidbit as part of the Q&A that happened after his speech about video chat coming to BBM and Blackberry 10, which we kind of knew through some leaked screenshots before that Crackberry broke last month, I believe. But we have that on the record now. And there were a couple other very minor things here and there. But by and large, it was basically the same doom and gloom that we've been hearing for a while now. Torsten said that he's not satisfied with the performance of the company, next few quarters are going to be difficult, Q1 2013 for Blackberry 10 now, so on and so forth. And I was actually surprised. I mean, there were some somewhat heated questions from shareholders during the Q&A session, but it was basically decorum. Nobody broke decorum, let's put it that way. It was pretty soft spoken, all things considered. There was one guy that came up to the mic and said, how did the legacy board members let it get so bad and let it go for so long to the point where we're at now? And one of the board members, I can't remember her name, but one of the board members said, excuse me, do you have a question? And then he just went and sat down. That was about as heated as it got. So that kind of surprised me. I thought we were going to hear some really, really tough questions thrown at the executives. But there were just some really random questions that you think this might be your only opportunity in your entire life to address the CEO of RIM one on one as a shareholder. And you go up and ask a question. The very first question was, Nortel had some problems with being infiltrated by Chinese hackers over the past few years. What can you tell us about your security? What kind of question is that? That's a plant, man. Come on. That's a ringer. That's somebody put in the audience to ask that. That's a very good point. I hadn't considered that. But one thing that I thought was really interesting that Torsten said in response to that question, I thought the question was lame. But one thing that he said in response was that RIM doesn't make phones in China over security concerns, which I'd never thought about before, because, you know, RIM is pretty well known for being one of the only major phone manufacturers not to make phones in China. And apparently that's why. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think I've touched on this before. Like I don't understand why they are being so public and have been so public in the lead up to this investor meeting. I mean, so Torsten Heinz gave a really long interview to Al Sacco at CIO. And I mean, he said some interesting stuff there. Like one thing that was neat to hear him say was that RIM just didn't understand that LTE was important and that nobody in North America cares about saving bandwidth anymore. And like they just straight up whiffed that they were focusing on the wrong thing, which, you know, totally true. Right. But that's, I think, the first time I've heard anybody from RIM sort of take a veiled swipe at Lazaridis and his engineering focus. Because that was all lousy. What I don't get is why don't they do more of that? Like why wouldn't Heinz come out and just constantly say, like, we blew it. We did a lot of things really poorly for a long time. And we got this thing wrong, but we're going to get the next thing right. And they got the last thing right and then this thing wrong. And then if they get the next thing right, they might be fine. But instead they come out and say, you know, things like we believe there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the company and on and on. And just like, why wouldn't he come out and take these swipes at the old guard and say, well, they screwed up. I'm doing my best to fix it. I'll tell you one very big reason is the fact that Lazaridis sits on the board of the company. In fact, he was just reelected today. So making those comments with Lazaridis sitting like 15 feet to your side might be a little intimidating, especially considering that Lazaridis looks like the kind of guy that could get up and come at you like full bore and not get back up. You will not get back up. Yeah, he just, he'd leave with his head too. His hair just bam right into your chest. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, I think that part of it is like, we don't know what their stock is going to bottom out at if it has. I mean, they've lost so much value and there's a whole lot of smoke around what is going to happen. Are they going to split the company? Are they going to try and spin off the hardware? Are they going to try and spin off the software? Are they going to do anything fundamentally different between now and when they launched BlackBerry 10 or are they going to just try and muscle through to the BlackBerry 10 launch? And so I think a lot of that is signaling or I think there's like backroom games or like a lot of the stuff that we're hearing them saying in the media, it's meant for us, but it's also meant for investors and the other companies that they're talking to or trying to hold off. Right. Yeah, and Heinz did mention on several occasions during the meeting today that discussions with their consulting banks are ongoing and they're still evaluating all their options, which is the same language that they've been using for two earnings calls now. So we'll see what happens with that. It's the kind of language you use right up until the day that you announce some gigantic change. Yeah. I mean, even things they're saying, they're talking about how they have no debt and all these things that don't typically matter in the sense of, I mean, and really it's about all of this is becoming financial, right? All of these discussions are about like, how are we as a company, not what innovative cool things are we doing? Yeah. And just every time he comes out and talks, it seems more like he's saying, here's why you should buy us and less here's why we're a cool company making cool products. Right. Right. And someone in my Twitter feed, I apologize, I'm not sure who it was off the top of my head, but somebody mentioned that rim rims closing stock price today puts them at a lower market cap than like just the raw value of their cash on hand plus their their assets. So I mean, wow. And they have no and they have no debt. So at this point, it's almost like it's kind of if you could if a company could come in and buy and buy rim for, you know, book value and not not pay a premium over the market cap, then it would just be like financially sound to do so based on that alone, even if you just came in and shut down the company. But but, you know, of course, it doesn't work that way. They'd have to pay a premium. There's lots of overhead involved with that. But but still, that's a really striking fact that, you know, that and very rare when you when you take a company like Facebook, which is the exact opposite of that, where they have what, like one hundred something P ratio, which is completely insane and absurd. So yeah, I mean, they're just getting pummeled in every sense of the word right now. And it's going to be a stretch. I mean, I posited the theory last week that that BlackBerry 10, at least as we know it today, will never see the light of day. It's just not going to happen. And I think that Torsten Heinz may already know that. And I just really, really, really I know that this is your your thing, but I just can't believe that they're not going to at least put it on. They've come so far. They're dropping a whole bunch of money on developers. What do you mean they've come so far? Well, it's show me one shred of evidence of that besides BlackBerry Jam. BlackBerry Jam. We got BlackBerry Jam. There was a story that they're investing, I don't know, one hundred million or something. I can't remember exactly what it was. And you know, they're developing the OS. It's probably close to ready. Well, actually not because it's not launching until 2013 now. But my opinion is that the BlackBerry developer ecosystem is still small enough so that they would not hesitate to throw the entire thing to the dogs if the right company came along and said, we're going to snap you up and do whatever with you. And I strongly believe that one thing that we've talked about, at least on a couple occasions now, is the fact that I think that a Palm One, Palm Source type of situation might be happening here, where RIM's software business would spin off as the quote unquote healthy business and the hardware business would just kind of wither up and die on the vine. I think that could happen. I don't know. I just don't see a scenario where RIM in its current state can march through the next few quarters turning in terrible results every quarter and deliver BlackBerry 10 in Q1 2013 and have it be a successful product. I just don't see that as being a viable roadmap for them. Oh, and by the way, speaking of their line on why it's a good thing that they're launching in Q1 2013, it's like, well, there's a lot of noise in the Q4. There's always chatter and there's all these companies vying for attention for the holiday quarter. If we wait and launch in Q1, then we'll have everybody's attention to ourselves and we'll have a better launch. Yeah. Okay. Nobody wants to buy phones for Christmas. And nobody ever announces anything at CES in January. Right. Exactly. Nobody. Yeah. Well, see, that's the thing. So RIM is lining itself up to maybe be at CES in a big way. Maybe they'll try and do something at CES. I mean, how weird would that be? That could be an event for them. The weird thing about RIM at trade shows, CES included, is that they always come with this huge fancy booth and don't announce anything. Yeah, that's true with CES. Certainly true with MWC where they, they, they ran out like almost an entire hall to themselves and that don't show anything. And the CTI is as well. So yeah, maybe, maybe that could be their big coming out party. I don't think, you know, I posited before that maybe we'd see something big from the fall CTIA show, which is enterprise focused and they're keynoting. I think their CIO is, is keynoting there. But at this point, because of the delay, I think that's probably a little early for them. Right. Okay. Well actually, you know, as long as we're talking about Chris's predictions, can we talk before we get into the big fight that we're going to have about the Galaxy Nexus? We talk about this rumor that Bloomberg put out about Amazon developing an Android phone, Android based phone. I want to talk about the fact that I'm an Oracle. Is that, is that what you're driving at? I have been calling this for like a year now on various podcasts, including Twits forecast, where you can go in and watch, watch the video, which is preserved for all of posterity to see. I is come on. It's pretty obvious. I mean, I can't take too much credit for this, right? Like come out with an Android based tablet. It's not as far stretch to think that you're going to come out with Android based phone as well. They have the ecosystem that they've been working on. I mean, the way I know I've talked about this a lot before, but the way they sort of set themselves up with Amazon app store ended up being really brilliant when they first announced the app store. I'm like, what are you doing? Amazon, this is stupid. Nobody's going to care about this. It turns out they, they knew exactly what they were doing and they really executed well on it. And now why not take full advantage of it? I think Amazon is one of the few companies in North America that is positioned to make a meaningful entrance into the cellular market. And that's saying something because it's probably one of the most difficult markets in the world to break into. Well, that's the question, right? Is how does, like if Amazon does decide to do this and their whole route so far has been let's do our own thing and you know, screw everybody else. We're just going to make how we want to make it and market it through amazon.com. But like phones don't really sell that way in the U S so right. Are they going to have to show up and beg at Verizon's feet and say, carry this phone, even though we have this otherwise kind of non-functioning relationship? So I think they have a, I think they have a couple of things going for them. One is they have the Amazon wireless portal, which is pretty successful. And I think they can make a go at just selling through that as a channel. And of course, amazon.com is kind of important, but right, but nobody spends $700 on a cell phone in the U S right. But so, you know, they already have these relationships built up through launching whispernet, right? So they have a legacy relationship with sprint. They have an active relationship with AT&T. Oh dude, Verizon by sprint or sprint. Oh my God. Amazon by sprint or T-Mobile. Think about that. Think about it. No, I, I'm I, Hey, I'm totally on board sprint or, or T-Mobile. They could Amazon, I think could probably relatively easily swallow either one of those companies whole. Wow. Man, that would, well, so I mean, the reason I brought it up or the idea is, you know, what is Amazon's metric for success in launching a phone, right? You know, with the Kindle, you know, they're going to make some money on the hardware at once they hit, you know, scale and get their, you know, supply chain running smoothly and they're going to make money on, you know, selling their services on, you know, the video, the music and, you know, just buying stuff on, on the thing from Amazon. That's a really good system for that actually. But you know, is Amazon hoping to get, you know, 10% market share? It's like, what is, what is their need to get into the phone business? What does it get them? What are they, what, what, why would they be screwed if they didn't? I think that because of the amount of development they've already put into the fire, the cost of entry for Amazon is a lot lower than it would be for a lot of other companies. So it, you know, even if they just look at it as an experiment, I think that there's, there really isn't a whole lot to lose. And I think they can do some very compelling things around the Kindle branding. But yeah, I mean like at the end of the day, you're absolutely right. Carriers still rule the US market and Amazon is going to have a very difficult time getting around that unless they do buy a T-Mobile or a Sprint. And I wouldn't put it past them. I really wouldn't. I know that, that DT would still like a, regardless of what they say on the record, I'm sure they would still like to sell T-Mobile if the opportunity presents itself. And Amazon is one of the few companies that's probably in a position to make that happen. Yeah. And I think the, the reason I think this is really interesting is because the whole content play they made with the Kindle Fire, right, where it's like the, it's the razor and then their content is the blades that makes them all the money. It makes so much more sense even with a phone than a tablet because it's the thing you have with you all the time and we all buy apps and we all buy content. And if they can have this thing that's in your pocket on you at all times and you're buying everything through Amazon, like that business proposition makes even more sense for them to sell a phone possibly as a loss leader than a tablet does, which is why I think it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I just think a tablet is so much better for consuming Amazon's digital content than a phone. I mean maybe not for music, but I mean, is music really a big play for Amazon? I mean, I know they've got the store, but I don't think people are desperate to buy music from Amazon's MP3 store. Desperate no, but if you have a device. If it's there. Yeah. And cloud player is good. You know, they certainly have the infrastructure in place to support all of this. You know, and it's DRM free, so you know, whatever. What are they going to call it though? That's what I want to know. Is it the Kindle Spark? Cause if it's not, I'm going to be really angry. It's gotta be the Kindle Spark. I mean, the Kindle Match. Oh, that'd be good too. Yeah. Match Head. Would be the match. Spark, they might run into some trademark problems with Chevy. Maybe they'll buy Chevy. Maybe they'll buy a phone. Maybe they'll buy Chevrolet and turn it into a phone company. That's a torch. That's Blackberry. Nevermind. Maybe they'll buy Rim. Yeah, Amazon has been associated with Rim and rumors for a solid three years now. So yeah, maybe that's still going to happen. Who knows? Man. Okay. It'll come. And it's just, you know, I'm going to tell everybody not to buy one because you could get an Android phone that's running a newer version of the OS that's fully participating in the ecosystem like the Galaxy Nexus. Like the Galaxy Nexus. This is going to get interesting. Sparks are going to fly. Yeah. You plan on defending Vlad's point of view, don't you? That's exactly what I plan on defending. But before we get into that argument, we do need to talk about the ban that was imposed and then lifted. Yes, it is now lifted and the Galaxy Nexus is now available. So it was temporarily unavailable and pulled from the Google Play website thanks to Apple winning an injunction against it for a patent and the patent in question related to searching on the phone. And supposedly Google is going to be rolling out an over the air software update to basically change its functionality and possibly remove the functionality of when you search for something on the phone. It also brings up local results like Gmail and apps and so on and so forth. I mean, I can't speak to the, you know, the legal stuff and the validity of the patent and who's going to win there. But I can say that I have been using local search on a phone since the visor phone. So there's that. Yeah. I mean, many of the patents that Apple asserts in its various lawsuits around the world are a decade or more old. Right. So this isn't necessarily an iPhone patent. It could be a Mac OS nine or Mac OS eight Pat. Right. Right. Like one of the one of the patents in the Apple Motorola case dated back to, I think, 94. So it's something to do with the notification screen in Android. So yeah, I mean, I pence is that's an entire discussion. There's actually a great piece on the site right now, which you should read, but not until this show is over, because I don't want to lose your attention. But if you go to the top of our site and look on the left side, you'll see a patent piece that is live that has been contributed to by the lovely Neelay Patel and Matt McCurry, I believe, who are they updated it with new information from the past, the time it was originally published. And all the comments from this is my next are still there. I actually went through and cleaned up a bunch of dupes and stuff and came across a comment from Richard Stallman, actually. Wow. Which seems legit. Legit. Don't they? So, I mean, I don't know the local searching. I do want to take the the opportunity to complain that like Google search on Android for searching Google, totally fine. I use it all the time. But, man, there are not a lot of phones where I find that like using typing into search locally is convenient or good at all. I know a lot of people use it on the iPhone. I find it slow and a pain like Windows Mobile, Blackberry and WebOS all did a better job and did a better job of like just start jamming on your keyboard to find stuff on your phone. And I wish that I wish Android could get there. And now who knows how it's going to work with the software updates that's supposedly coming. Right. In fact, we just talked about this a couple of weeks ago, I think. The the engineer responsible for Just Type at Palm is now back at Apple. He came from Apple, went to Palm and now he's back at Apple. So the the the nexus, no pun intended, of the universal search world is is in Cupertino right now. Wow. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. That was I'm not kidding when I say that was unintentional. I kind of agree that I wanted to use the term. I kind of agree that it doesn't really matter. This seems like a feature that nobody cares about. I don't like I see people everyone I know with an iPhone has basically forgotten the fact that you can swipe left from the home screen to get to the local search and everything. It's just like, you know, I use Siri for some of that stuff now, but not really. But it's just I don't know. I feel like it's faster to do almost anything else than try to search that for something. Yeah. And it's such a convenient thing. Yeah. It's actually done really well. I don't know how how deeply this update will go and if it's going to affect third party applications as well. But one thing that I I noticed when I was testing a jelly bean galaxy nexus is that when you're doing the voice search, you can you know, you can turn on and off different search providers. And like so, for instance, Foursquare plugs into it. So you can search Foursquare places with your voice or with text, of course. And I don't know if those are going to be affected as well. But that is is really cool. Like the fact that that companies like Yelp and Foursquare so on and so forth can plug into that that system. I need to try that. It's pretty cool. More. Yeah. OK, so the other thing about the galaxy nexus is Chris and Vlad put up a very contentious piece, a point counterpoint ping counterping. What do we call it? Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. I just want to say this happened amazingly quickly. You like you both clearly had this in the can like ready to go. And then eight minutes after somebody suggested it, you're like, oh, it's done. Here we go. Here we go. I've been writing this my whole life. So this is just Vlad being a go getter. I would like to be able to take credit for this, but it was Sunday, Sunday afternoon. And I said, hey, you know, sometime we should do this thing about the fact that the galaxy nexus sucks. That's not what I said, because the galaxy nexus, I'm praising and like 50 minutes later, Vlad emailed me an entire argument that I I responded to. And then we ended up turning into a piece. And yeah, went up Monday. So, yeah, it was basically 24 hour turnaround time. OK, so, Chris, you get you get one minute. Explain why the galaxy nexus is not the best Android smartphone. So I think I can best sum this up with my final pull quote in the piece, which is that I learned to stop worrying and love the Galaxy S3. It used to be in the Galaxy S2 days or in the HTC Rezound days that that I looked at skins as a scourge on the Android ecosystem that needed to be eliminated at all costs. And what I've now realized is that we've entered a very different phase. We talked a little bit about this last week, but we've entered a very different phase in Android's existence. Right. There is a OSP. There's the open source project which which maintains the core ultra plane, vanilla Android root. Not even nexus devices are stock Android. If you want to use a OSP as your basis, there are Google experience devices that are based on a OSP. What I'm saying is that we're getting to the point where we need to elevate the Galaxy S3, for instance, to the same parallel as a nexus device. A Galaxy S3 is running a Samsung experience that is based on Android, just as a Galaxy Nexus is running a Google experience that is based on Android. And they can both run Android binaries. But Samsung, you know, it used to be that Samsung would get laughed out of the park because their designers were so bad at making a skin, a UI. But it's gotten to the point with the GS3 where that's no longer the case. It's a good looking UX and it works very well. And I can no longer conclusively say that I prefer stock ICS to what I see on the GS3. Of course, I'd like to have Jelly Bean. I mean, of course. I've used the Android 4.1 Galaxy Nexus phone. Don't get me wrong, it's still a great phone and 4.1 is great. But it is not enough better than 4.0 for me to drop back to that lower baseline of hardware that the Galaxy Nexus provides just to get it. I need LTE. I need AT&T LTE. I like the better display. And the camera on the Galaxy Nexus is the worst camera of any flagship phone manufactured in the last two years. So there, I've said my piece. So okay, we need to break out. There's two arguments here. One argument is like the Galaxy Nexus hardware is old and tired, which is kind of hilarious because it's less than a year old still. But the camera is terrible and there's only the Verizon LTE version. And I mean, the Sprint LTE version, I suppose. But you know, LTE and Sprint doesn't matter yet. And you know, I don't think you're wrong. I think the camera is terrible. I'm tired of it. And so the question is, can we give those things a pass if the hardware, but you know, based on the quality of the software? And yeah, I think that Jelly Bean at least, and even stock ice cream sandwich feels faster and is a better skin, so to speak, for Android than what HTC and Samsung are doing. HTC, I would agree. HTC is not there yet with Sense 4. GS3, I'm less convinced. Nature UX is very good. I hate the name, but what they've put together is very good. I mean, okay, so let's say that there's a new Galaxy or a new Nexus device out tomorrow. That is Jelly Bean, better screen, better camera, LTE. Actually take a Galaxy S3 and have it running stock Jelly Bean. I mean, the question is, does the same argument apply? No, if tomorrow Google came out with a Galaxy S3 that was running stock Jelly Bean, I would absolutely take it. But the difference in quality between Nature UX, what Samsung is calling Nature UX, and stock Android is now sufficiently small so that it is possible to overcome the benefits of owning a Nexus device with the hardware alone, which is what I'm suggesting with the GS3 versus the Galaxy Nexus. If you're just talking about software, then yes, the Google experience still wins, but it's no longer a vast canyon of difference like it used to be in the GS2 days. I think the problem is though that for everyone who's not one of the three of us, you buy a phone and you don't buy another phone until your contract's up. And the problem is whatever I buy today is going to be outdated in two years. That's just how it is. The hardware isn't going to be good in two years when I'm ready to buy a new phone. But if I buy a Galaxy Nexus today, the odds of my phone running the latest software are just infinitely higher on a Nexus than they would be on the Galaxy S3. And I blame Samsung 100% for that because if Samsung would come out and say, like, we are going to ensure that you get the updates, if not first, at least in a timely manner, they'd blow everything out of the water because that's the only knock at this point. Because I agree, I think the software is, if not as good, really, really close and close enough that it's kind of a negligible difference. But if I have 4.0 now and then 4.1 is out and 4.2 might come out and 4.3 or 5.0 or whatever, and you're probably still going to be stuck on 4.0 because that's how it's always happened. So yes, you're absolutely right. But what I'm saying, and I'm going to take a lot of flack for saying this, but at some point you just need to give up and move on with reality, is that I don't even think of the GS3 as an Android 4 device. I think of it as running a Samsung operating system that's compatible with Android binaries. And the sooner you forget the notion that the GS3 is running ICS and should be running Jelly Bean, the sooner you can be happy with the GS3 as a phone. Yeah, so the thing that I've been wanting to say on the podcast and keep myself from doing it because I was going to write an editorial but I just haven't gotten around to it is we should stop calling Ice Cream Sandwich Ice Cream Sandwich when it's on non-Google devices. Ice Cream Sandwich is stock Android 4.0. Jelly Bean is stock Android 4.1. And on those other stuff like the Samsung TouchWiz stuff and HTC Sense, that's Android. So they're running Android and like Chris said, they're compatible with the binaries, but it's not the same thing as Jelly Bean. And you just sort of need to accept that they've gotten to the point where they're at least in the same ballpark experience wise as the stock Google experience. You need to stop thinking of these devices as like they took the stock Google experience and then ruined it with their crap. It's that they took the stock Android base and put their experience on it. And Google does the same thing. They just happen to give that experience away to other customers if they want it. Right. Mostly, not entirely, right? Like Gmail and Android Market and stuff like that. And I think Chrome as well. Like the Nexus 7 ships with Chrome. I think that by default, if a company grabs the AOSP trunk code, they're not getting Chrome. They're still getting the Android browser. In fact, what's interesting is that Jelly Bean does actually have enhancements to the stock browser even though the Nexus 7 isn't shipping with the stock browser. Shipping with Chrome in its place. Yeah, no, we totally wrote about that, that Chrome is not going to be part of the Android open source project. It's another Google app just like the other Google apps. And Chromium is still out there and companies are free to build their own. But if you're not approved for the Google experience and Google apps and Gmail and everything else on your Android phone, that includes Chrome. That doesn't come for free with Android. It's not part of the open source. Yeah. Yeah, so it's, if you were wound the Android ecosystem three or four years and asked Andy Rubin if he thought that things were going to go this way, I'm pretty sure he would have said no. Because the way this has ended up playing out is really weird. I can't imagine this was ever Google's intention, particularly with the Fire. But when you look at devices like the GS3, where Samsung has crafted this entire experience around AOSP and called it its own, they're just a very, very small step away from being able to break free from the Google experience entirely, which I'm sure is probably a pain point for them. Because they do need to get that sign off from Rubin and they don't have as much freedom as they would have if they were just going to AOSP alone. So I find it very difficult to believe that that was ever Rubin's intention. Well I think that Google Now is going to be a really interesting thing to see if all these other companies that are building their own ecosystems, ecosystems that compete directly with Google's ecosystems in terms of music stores and movie stores and even search Samsung's S Voice versus Google Now, will these companies, when they move up to Android 4.1 for the buttery smoothness and all the performance enhancements, will they also be including Google Now? And if they don't, then I think that we can say that there's the TouchWiz skin, the Nature UX skin, and there's the Jelly Bean quote unquote skin that includes Google stuff. The problem with that though is that in a design sense, for third party apps, they're still developing based on these new Android guidelines with the Holo themes and we've got these great swipe columns now. And that's all based on, for whatever you want to call it, the Google experience. And so now what you're getting, and this happened to me and was really jarring with the Galaxy S3, was every app I downloaded looked kind of unlike the native experience of the phone because you're getting things that are designed to look great on the Galaxy Nexus and to go well with its fonts and its colors and just don't work at all with the Nature UX. And I think to me that's a problem. Yeah. That's fair. In Android 4.1, I get the sense that, you know, Matthias Duarte is obviously at a very heavy hand in shaping the UX of the platform since he got there. But I think that that's really even more evident in 4.1 than it was in 4.0, which itself was a big jump. And the colors, there's a very methodical approach to how things are colored in 4.1. The colors are very muted and, you know, frankly pleasing. I mean, the palette works very well. And I would agree with you that Samsung has not mastered the art of a pleasing color palette. And that's made more unfortunate by the fact that Samsung has been using AMOLEDs more extensively and for longer than just about anybody else. And AMOLEDs have a tendency to do really weird things with colors, particularly like oranges and reds. So they tend to really pop. And Samsung likes a lot. But that was a bigger problem with the GS2. With the GS3, I really believe that their designers are doing the right things. I feel like Steve Kondik has had an influence. Phil Nickinson from Android Central tells me that Kondik actually is not working on Android at all at Samsung. But I don't know if... I find that very difficult to believe. What else would he do? The GS3 skin... Tyson, baby. Tyson, right. The GS3 skin looks so much like CM7. Yeah, it does. Anyway, I'm just saying. I'm back on the Galaxy Nexus, you know, since Jelly Bean. And I'm really happy with it. I miss LTE and I miss a decent camera. And those might pull me back to Galaxy S3 or HTC One X. But I don't really like those skins. The Galaxy S3 is better. And the fact that it does a proper classic ice cream sandwich multitasking menu, I'm happy with. Although I really do miss just having it be a single button, which is why... Tell me that I'm crazy to be kind of interested in the Atrix HD. It looks pretty good to me. Am I nuts? Is that okay? No, I've spent this whole morning trying to figure... Or this whole day, really, trying to figure out what's wrong with this phone. Because it's like, why on earth is it $99? It checks all of the boxes I wanted to check, including what seems to be a really scaled back skin. And again, Motorola's skin has always been really kind of overwrought and awful. But they've scaled it way back. And I've been using a Razer Max with ice cream sandwich on it, and it's a giant improvement. And then they still have the cool things like smart actions. And this comes out with LTE and the big 720p display. And I don't know, I'm into this phone. Yeah, I mean, if the processor is terrible and it's slow, and the skin turns out to be more overwrought and slow than what we're thinking, then... Well, sorry about that. Then that'll suck. But it's a good size battery. It's right in between the Razer and the Razer Max's battery. It's got a great screen. It's got a 8 megapixel camera. There's nothing on paper that makes me go, I don't want this. It might be my next phone. My biggest concern is...so there are a couple things, and actually this ties back into the Galaxy Nexus, which I'm going to continue to harp on for many podcasts. But I was surprised at how much the onscreen buttons bothered me on the Galaxy Nexus after I had been using the GS3 for a while, which really shocked me. Because I had always assumed that this was a big step in the right direction, moving to those soft buttons, but you don't realize how much screen real estate those buttons actually take. It would be one thing if the Galaxy Nexus had a longer display, like an actually physically longer display than these other devices, but it doesn't. So you just eat up, what is it, 100 pixels or something permanently devoted to these soft buttons, and Motorola is doing that as well with the Razer HD. So that's one thing to think about. I guess, I don't know that I really have that particular problem. I love the physical buttons on the GS3, and the fact that those made it to the US was the best thing about that phone, if you ask me. But I've always been a fan of the onscreen buttons. I feel like I train myself just kind of where to tap no matter what, so I don't really notice. And with the capacitive buttons or whichever, it just feels like it's kind of the same. People are saying it's this giant advantage. There were a couple of comments that were super excited about it, and I don't really get that, but I don't know, I don't think it's a huge issue. Well, I mean, I just like it because it's a more intelligent layout, right? I mean, you get the back button turned into a down button when you've got the keyboard up, the menu button appears down there where it ought to be, and it's one tap to multitasking instead of having to hold down a button. If someone were to just give us the Galaxy Nexus's basic button layout of back home multitasking, and then hold down back to get the menu to pop up, I'd be perfectly fine with physical buttons and getting that extra screen real estate. But I just I find that it works better to have that button layout and stock ICS slash jelly bean devices are the ones that give me that button layout. Actually what I would love to see, and I suspect there's already a ROM for the International GS3 that does this, and if there isn't, there should be soon because it's really obvious. But what I would like to see is the menu button functionality replaced with multitasking, one tap multitasking, and then like reprogram the ROM so that it displays the menus in the action bar like you would expect on a Galaxy Nexus, which can't be that hard. It's got to be just a flag somewhere in the operating system. Because you know, right now, that's the weird thing about the GS3 is that the phone knows not to show the menu buttons in the action bar at the top, and instead reassigns that functionality to the physical menu button, which I have mixed feelings about. I can see why Samsung did it, but I don't know how I feel about it. So if they just turned that into a multitasking button, got the operating system to display the menu button in the action bar as normal, that would be huge. I would love that. So breaking news, apparently the Sprint Galaxy S3 got a quote unquote security update that also happened to, wait for it, remove local on-device search results, according to Android Central. Wow. That was fast. Super fast. And a bummer. But like we said, that search sucks anyway. Right. But yeah, like, I mean, that could start, I mean, okay, two thoughts. One, we might start seeing it on other devices pretty soon. And two, like, you know, if you can push out an update that quickly, really, that changes the core functionality of the phone. How about some jelly bean action? How about not making us wait a year and a half for that? Well, it just goes to show you, like it proves, you know, it proves what I think everybody kind of knew already, which is that what really takes a long time with some of these ROM updates is not the fact that it actually takes that long, but the fact that there's no financial incentive for either the OEM or the carrier to rush that update when they have newer phones that they'd rather be selling. Right. Whereas this update is on a brand new phone that is at injunctive risk, presumably. Right. So, you know, that's what got them moving. But you know, rest assured, you're not going to see jelly bean updates for the GS3 a month from now. It's going to be six months if we're lucky. So what we need is like Congress to come out and say, if you haven't updated your phone in four months, you can't sell in America anymore. And then all of a sudden everybody would update. I'm running for Congress, guys. That's happening. I support your platform 100%, David. I think this is a good idea. I'm in. I mean, OK, so I mean, you know, Android 4.0 came out for the AT&T Galaxy Note today. Yeah, actually. Yeah, it's rolling out today. And I mean, we saw that leak three months ago, and it basically is unchanged since that leak three months ago. So, I mean, it's not just that, you know, there's not financial incentive, but it's also, you know, it's carrier stuff. But I think, Chris, you've got it exactly right. Like the fact that this was at risk for an injunction is totally what's going on here. Yeah. But so tell us about your experience with the Galaxy Note refresh, because you tested it, did you not? Am I crazy? Yeah. And no, I tested it. We've got a video up of it, and it's fast. And the multitasking works fine. And you know, they added a whole bunch of stuff to the test note, which is what most of what they're pushing on this update is. So you can search for from alpha and draw shapes and enter in math equations. And you know, it's cute. But I still feel like there's not a strong enough app ecosystem to support the S Pen for me to be able to justify owning a giant phone. But you know, all that said, I still have a soft spot for the Note. I mean, I use it as my main phone for a few days. And you know, as long as you're not holding it up to your head, it's fine. You've almost bought that thing like five times now. I know. I know. One of two things is going to happen to either either you're going to eventually cave and buy it or I think more likely the second the Note two comes out, you're going to own it. Well, isn't the rumor that it's going to have an even bigger screen? Yeah. Five point five inches, right? Five point five is just the beginning. Just wait till you get into the sixes. That's true. The note the note nine will just be like a table. Right. Well, actually, you know, I'll just I should just start using the Nexus seven as a phone. But there was a there was a period where if you Google did a Google image search for tablet phone, I was the number one result holding the original Galaxy Tab seven inch up to my head. Now, of course, it's you know, there's a million of these things that have come out. But there's a there's a picture of me out there going like and with a with a tablet. I remember that picture. I've seen that picture. That's yeah. The original tab was a seven inch device. It's easy. Like it's easy to kind of like consider the ten point one is the first Galaxy Tab. But no, there was that two point three a Galaxy Tab from a couple of years back. And like the thing about that, and we were talking about this before, typing on it was great typing out on the the next seven is great. That it's just really nice. It's like a landscape keyboard on a phone, but in a portrait orientation on a tablet. I really like it. And David, correct me if I'm wrong. I think there is a video floating around of you talking on a an e-pad. No, no. Excuse me, a pad phone. I can neither confirm nor deny that. No, that somehow like it was one of those it was made into a gift. Just that one scene of me just holding up the tablet to my head. And I friends of mine who don't read The Verge don't know what the pad phone is. You've never heard of technology are sending me this gift to this day being like, look at this thing I saw on the Internet. And that will be my my legend forever will be that gift of me being a hello. But you know, by the time David, by the time you die, they're going to have the technology to put like animated gifs on tombstones. And so that will actually be on your tombstone. That's I'm living until that happens. Just a matter of time. They could do one of those. I don't know what they call those. Like parallax effect things were like when you know, when you look back and forth like it moves, I guess they could turn that image into one of those. And that would be a very low tech way of walking across my tombstone. It would be me holding it up to that. Be pretty good. So I have a question more of like an e ink tombstone. That's true. I have a question related to this. This software patch and the ban. One of our commenters asked on the post we just wrote from the Android Central report and said, does this affect stuff like voice actions such as call John or navigate to Joshua Topolsky's house, which I do constantly. Does it? I actually don't know. Because that's I mean, that's a really it's the same thing, basically. Right. It's searching your contacts and the Web and your phone book and all this stuff. But it's just not text. Does it affect that? I don't know until I can actually test this out on a Sprinkles and access myself directly. Only one way to find out. It's true. It's just to try to navigate to Joshua Topolsky's house and see what I are. Our chat is filled with amazing just right now. I will I will bet you I will bet you one dollar that Samsung has submitted this patch to all for receiving all five. However many U.S. carriers are carrying the GS three right now in the next couple of weeks. And it's just a question of how quickly they they approved the patches. It was first. But I guarantee you. So it's good to be a Verizon customer right now is what you're saying, because you'll never see the patch or shop. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. This will actually be a very interesting test. Let's let's wait and see how long it takes. AT&T and Verizon, who are notoriously the slowest for for approving these firmware updates. Let's see how long it takes them to push these out. I'm really curious. Yeah. Well, speaking of carriers dragging their feet, if you haven't read Neely's editorial five years after the iPhone carriers are the biggest threat to innovation, you absolutely must. Yeah. But that's all I have to say. I mean, it's it's it's full of truth and goodness. And like we've got examples just from this week about it. Like so they rise and lock the bootloader on the Galaxy S3. Why? I mean, you know, that they're protecting, you know, their customer service reps from dealing with Android hackers, I guess, is the reasoning. But nobody else is bothering to do it. It's just Verizon. And it's you know, it's a hurdle that everybody can get over. But it's still like, why? Why are you bothering? Well, yeah. And the Droid Incredible 4G LTE is an awesome example of that, too, because like HTC made a bunch of really good phones. And you said this in your review, the HTC made a bunch of really good phones. And then it seems like Verizon called and was like, well, we want that, but not as good because we have these other phones we want to sell. So just make us kind of a crappier version. Yeah. And so the thing that drives me crazy about the Droid Incredible LTE, did we talk about it on the podcast last week? Like it could be a good phone. It's really close to being a really good phone. And like, you know, the form factor would be really nice for some people. But like sense and then some of the extra stuff on top of that just drives me crazy. And so the question is, does it make well, one of my questions is, does it make an appropriate ReSound successor? And I'm not sure it does because the ReSound is 720p and this is QHD, right? Right. It makes an appropriate Droid Incredible successor. Right. Which, you know, it's called a Droid Incredible. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, obviously you guys read Neil's piece. Have you got any additional insight or stuff you want to say about it? I know it was talked about quite a bit on the Verge cast. So we're kind of getting repetitious here. But yeah, no, it's just it. It hit home. It really hit home. And it's spot on. And I think that, you know, I wish that I had a very succinct follow on to how we can go about fixing this. And Neil and I have been talking about this the past few days. You know, how can we how can we move the industry and the discussion in the right direction, in a positive direction that doesn't make everyone want to cry? I don't have the answer yet. But you know, there are so many extremely powerful political forces at play here that prevent this industry in the US from being competitive in a way that is truly to the consumer's benefit, that it's very it's just kind of depressing. And there's don't get me wrong, there's some great people in in in high places that are are fighting for the consumer. People like Free Press and Public Knowledge are are in Washington and they're they're they're doing an excellent job. I'm on all their PR blasts and they're doing a really good job of calling out the the questionable choices that are being made by the SEC and the DOJ and the lobbying forces that are trying to work to get the wrong piece of legislation pushed through. But it's an uphill battle. And and there are many you know, the the failure of the AT&T T-Mobile deal was a very powerful pro consumer message. But actually, this is a segue that didn't intend to get to, but we kind of stumbled into it. Do it. It looks like the FCC is now going to approve Verizon's purchase of AWS Spectrum from a consortium of cable company Spectrum Co, which we've been writing about pretty extensively for the past six months. And the reason why this is such there are several reasons this is such a controversial deal. One is that there are other carriers that are better suited to get this spectrum, including T-Mobile. They were a very, very loud opponent of this deal as a result, until a deal was struck in the past couple of weeks that would end up like it's a multi-part deal. It's kind of like an NBA trade deal. There are seven there are seven different things that need to fall into place in order for this this transaction to conclude. But basically, T-Mobile would end up getting a pretty significant chunk of that AWS Spectrum if Verizon were allowed to complete the Spectrum Co deal. But the other really controversial part of it is that tied into the Spectrum acquisition, there are deals that would have Verizon cross marketing its services in Comcast and Time Warner locations, and vice versa. And the concern there is that it disincentivizes Verizon from building out Fios in locations that are currently served by Comcast or Time Warner cable. And the then result is that you end up with less competition for really important vital services like landline broadband. And so there are two different organizations that are looking at this deal. There's the FCC that is looking at the Spectrum side, then there's the DOJ that's looking at the competition implications. The DOJ looks less poised to sign off on this deal than the FCC does right now. And I think that kind of mirrors public sentiment. The Spectrum side of it isn't quite as controversial as the cross marketing deals are. So and DOJ's expected rule in August, it's a mess, as is every Spectrum policy thing in Washington. But we're kind of keeping an eye on it right now. We'll let you know how it goes. Bottom line is that it's a very scary time to be in this business. Every single deal that happens in Washington has literally 100 different implications, some of which are short term, some of which are very, very long term. And I always try to find ways to get people engaged in these policy stories when I write about them on the site. It can be very difficult because it's hard to express why this stuff matters five or 10 years down the road. But we have some big Spectrum auctions coming up. I think there are some later this year, if I'm not mistaken. And we just need to stay engaged on this stuff because the Spectrum crunch over the past couple of years, I think, has really sort of put this in the spotlight. But people still haven't made the connection between I can't get data on my iPhone and all these weird deals that are happening in Washington every single day. And yeah, the carriers have all the power. Innovation is being stifled. I totally agree with everything you said in that piece. And it's all tied into these weird policy things that are happening constantly. So it's yeah, it's not just like I can't get data on my iPhone. I've got no GBs. It's you know, I'm paying 25 cents a pop for text messages. I can't do I don't have interoperable video chat. It's I can't take my phone from T-Mobile and use it on Sprint. And like, oh, well, you know, that's because they've got an incompatible Spectrum and, you know, they're using different radio technologies. Exactly. And those are those are problems that aren't unfixable. Those are like that. You don't have to accept that baseline of a problem like, you know, phones having different incompatible radio technologies is like, oh, well, that that explains that. Well, but there's still something that made that happen. It's like when I was when I was teaching English, like, you know, I try and like explain why some, you know, short story mattered, you know, why is he on the bridge? And like, well, the author chose to put him there. Those words didn't just magically appear on the page against the author's will. The author chose to make that happen. And these incompatible radio things like when they were setting up that stuff, sure, there's there's a few things that are like unintended consequences. But by and large, the company is Verizon and AT&T especially. They're sitting with pretty much where they want to be. They want to get more Spectrum. They want to, you know, change some stuff around. But the sort of technical hassles that you experience and the pricing that you're experiencing on AT&T and Verizon, especially like they set it up that way and they want it that way. It's not like, you know, that's just, oh, that happened. I guess we had no control over that. That's the world that we live in. The world that we live in is a world that they helped set up and we could set up a different world if we wanted to. AT&T has been fighting very hard in Washington over the past two years to prevent 700 mega hertz interoperability from becoming law. And it wasn't until earlier this year that the FCC agreed to even look into the issue. So that's a perfect example, right? We could have we absolutely could have radios that can support all these 700 megahertz bands. The technology exists. But because AT&T and Verizon are such powerful lobbying forces and are pretty much able to get what they want, that issue has been that can has been kicked down the road repeatedly. And it's not that there are no technical issues, but the impetus to solve those technical issues has been significantly impeded by the fact that AT&T and Verizon see no need to solve them. And actually, we wrote about this a few weeks ago. C Spire, which is a really small carrier in the Southeast, filed a pretty damning lawsuit with some wild claims that AT&T and Qualcomm and I think Motorola and they named a bunch of companies as colluding on preventing 700 megahertz interoperability from coming to be. And it's a really interesting read. It reads like high drama. And I think it is. And I truly believe that some or all this stuff is happening behind the scenes. That's what I thought was the most interesting. In a spoke filter. Yeah, right. That was what I thought was so interesting about Neelay's piece was that he spoke to a Verizon spokesperson. And this is after he's talking about how if companies like HTC and Samsung were able to compete at the consumer level, the carriers would turn into dumb pipes. And then they'd have to compete. And that would be good for all of us and terrible for them. And then the response is not, oh, there are technical challenges. The response is from a Verizon spokesperson, there's a business model that needs to be cared for. And so it's like that's the most, I don't know, it's about as damning a thing as you could say. I think where you get to this point where it's like that's all that matters. Like we make a ton of money from making your life a lot harder and there's no reason for us to keep or for us to stop making a ton of money. So why would we? Right. Yeah. I think the most striking thing that Neelay pointed out in that piece, and this is something that we all need to remember, is that these companies don't own this spectrum. They're licensing it from the federal government and in turn it is property of the American people. So it is on us as US citizens to demand that these companies be good stewards of this spectrum, which is a national resource and a precious resource that can't be- Chris, I'm sorry. I want to pay attention to what you're saying, but I think I see some American Idol news and so I need to go. Some American Idol news? I'm just saying the problem with this whole issue is it's really hard to connect the effects on the consumer with the really boring, dry spectrum discussion. We rant about it on the show, we write about it on the site, but unless we get to a SOPA internet shutdown kind of moment with this stuff, I mean, one, we need a unified policy to promote and two, there needs to be a real visceral connection between the pain that we're feeling and what's causing it. There's three or four steps between those things where it's really easy to rationalize it away. It's just easier to pay attention to the next hot new phone that's coming out and not think about the crazy machinations that limit it and keep it on one carrier and so on. I feel like the answer is we need to just tell everybody to go to Europe for 20 minutes because they seem to have nailed it. This occurs to me every time I'm editing a review from one of the guys in the UK and they never really mention the price and they never mention a particular carrier and I'm always like, oh, you forgot those parts. And it's like, no, they didn't. It's just you just buy the phone and then you use it wherever you want to and it's just not a thing. They're totally separated from each other. David, the stock response that someone from the CEA or CTIA or any other American organization or carrier in the cellular business will tell you, the stock response is that's all well and good, but in recent years, the US has innovated far faster than Europe or even Asia in the wireless space. The rebuttal to that is yes, but it has evolved and innovated in a very bizarre and consumer hostile way. The rebuttal to that is your mom. Yes, the rebuttal to that and all other arguments is your mom. No, I mean, there are a couple, back to your point earlier about how do you get this in consumers' faces and make the connection between spectrum and real world problems, I think that we're starting to see some very real world effects that any consumer can relate to. One is in the city of Chicago, as in many other places around the country, New York City certainly, you literally cannot between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on a weekday get HSPA data in downtown Chicago. It's not just slow, it doesn't work. I mean, it literally doesn't work. This has been going on for at least a year now, and that's why I can't go back from an LTE phone. So that's one effect, right, where a consumer can say, why can't I send this email on my iPhone? Oh, let me tell you why. It's because our entire system is hosed, and you need to be paying. So that's one thing, and the other is, say, T-Mobile being unable to get the iPhone, or US Cellular being unable to carry almost any competitive device outside the GS3, which congrats to them, by the way, because that's a pretty big win for them. But yeah, I think that there are finally some very consumer-facing ways that you can relate why spectrum matters and why it's important. And I just shut the podcast down with that. No, I mean, we're going to talk about this again in three weeks, and we're still not going to have a revolution. That's fine. We'll have these small steps, and hopefully we'll get them moving in the right direction at least a couple of times. I hope so. Actually, I want to talk about good news. We're going to end on good news this week. I swear that is the goal. The first piece of good news, David, is the Optimus 4X HD from LG. The first piece of good news is that LG learned how to make cell phones. That's what you're saying. Basically, yeah. Yeah. It's not bad, right? No, it's actually great. It's been really fun because I've reviewed a bunch of different LG phones over the last six months, and they always had one thing just horribly wrong. The LG Nitro, I remember when I wrote the review, the first comment said, so basically this phone with CyanogenMod would be the best thing ever because the software was just awful. Then I reviewed the Spectrum, which was super fast and had a really great display, and you just touched it and wanted to stop touching it forever. Then they've had a couple of other phones that were underpowered or had outdated software or both or whatever. Then finally, you read the spec sheet of the Optimus 4X HD, and it's like, oh my gosh, it has all of the things that I want it to have. It has new software. It has a new processor. It has good build quality. It's big and has a nice display, all this stuff. Writing this review was almost bizarre because I got to the end of it and was like, wait, I didn't really hate anything. I kind of expected to having reviewed a bunch of these phones. I got to the end and it was like, they did all of the things that they're supposed to do. Software has gotten a lot better. Again, it's the same trend we're seeing with HTC, not as much, but Samsung and a couple of other companies kind of pulling their skins back and saying, like, Android is doing a really good job. We think we can augment it in certain places, and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong, but it's a much better approach. The hardware has gotten almost universally with high-end phones. It's just so fast at this point that Android has kind of become the limiting factor in the performance of a cell phone. As long as you have kind of the recent high-end specs, you're going to be fine there. But I really enjoyed using this phone. There are a number of cool nifty things about it. I really like the way it does NFC on some of the software, and I'm just a fan. I don't know when the phone's coming to the US. It hasn't been announced here. It's just in Europe and I believe Asia right now. But if it does, it's a real competitor for the first time. They've had big splashy launches for phones that I don't think were very good, and this one could actually be awesome. When's the last time LG had a big phone in the US? I mean, like a real like, oh wow, LG in the US, wow. G2X, I think was the last time. Yeah, okay. Ended up... Been a while then. It's like... I mean, when the G2X was announced, everyone was like, ooh, this is going to be like the hot... Because at that time, like dual-core was still like a really novel concept, and it appeared to run something close to stock, Froyo, and so that was a really big deal, and it ended up just being a complete dud of a phone. I owned one for a while and it just brings back nightmares. But LG is weird because they've always been a half step behind the big names in Android, right? Like they're half step behind Samsung, they're half step behind HTC, but not really. I mean, they were the first to the table with a dual-core device. They're right there in the quad-core race. They've been doing 720p as long as anybody too. Right. So they just need to get their act together and produce a holistically good device, and maybe this is the turning point for them. And they need a hit. I mean, LG... I mean, to your point, Dieter, I mean, they haven't had a meaningful hit in ages. Yeah. And I mean, are you sad that you're not going to be able to say that about the LG view coming out of the US? This large phone. That was a cheap shot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 4x3. I love that. No, I'm actually... I'm interested in trying the 4xHT. I would be pleased, especially now that I'm apparently with the Galaxy Nexus happy being on HSPA again. I'm really not. But I got Wi-Fi in most places. One last thing I wanted to bring up, the Windows Phone 7.5 refresh, the Tango update is coming to Lumia 900, which is fine. That's great on AT&T. But as mad as some people might be about Lumia not getting Windows Phone 8, and as unhappy as I may be with some of the core apps that I need, the fact that Nokia is coming out with a pink version before an orange version, like, I just give up. They're dead. I don't care. Pink is the new white. Pink is the new white, bro. These are also not going to be on sale ever because I'm going to buy all of them. You're buying out Nokia's entire stock of pink Lumia. Yes, no question. No, you know what's going to be next, right? They're not going to give me my orange phone. They're going to come out with a Zune Brown version. You know what's going to happen. No, but here's the thing about the Zune Brown is that it was a double shot brown underneath green acrylic, like a clear acrylic, right? So it had kind of like a cool look to it, I guess. Did it though? Did it? Cool, in air quotes. Okay, there we go. I don't know. No, I would totally use a pink Lumia and feel very good about it. I truly believe that pink is the new white. I agree with you, Dieter, if they came out with like a bright orange, I would be very happy with that as well. But I could see going with the pink. I could, but I mean, I'll just wish it was orange the whole time. So yellow. Yellow would be amazing too. Yellow would be cool. Actually, wasn't there, there was supposed to be a yellow Lumia 800. Did it disappear? I think it did. It may have disappeared. I think the yellow was one of the colors that was supposed to be glossy instead of matte, and it fell off the face of the earth and never came out maybe. Or maybe I'm making up this entire story. But I seem to recall- Well, there was something about it taking a while for it to come out. It was going to be in the second batch. I can't remember. Yeah. Yeah. I think Nokia makes these Lumias in batches of like a couple of weeks each, and they switch between colors and I don't know what happened. Yellow doesn't exist. I don't think it ever got around to the yellow, which is a bummer because that would have been awesome. Yeah. You know what phone I just pulled out this week that I love all over again and want to use full time is the N9. There are two reasons for that, and neither of them have anything to do with MeeGo. One is the size, which is actually, it's like the perfect size for that style phone. The N900, the more I use Lumia 900, the more I realize that it is actually a bit big for that style of device. And the integrated glass is missing from the N900. The N9 and N800 both have that. Two is that the cyan that they use on the N9 is a little darker than it is on the N900, and in my opinion, it actually looks a little bit better. So physically, I think that the N9 is actually the purest and best implementation of that design language. Again, neither of these have anything to do with MeeGo whatsoever, but I just want to point out that it's a physically gorgeous device. You sound like Josh. Josh just bought, I believe on eBay, a Palm Pixie and has definitely decided that he's going to use it as his phone forever. And I feel like equally bad for both of you that you- No, he gave up on it, I think, already. Did he already? I think he's already done with it. It hasn't even come yet and he's over it. No, I think he lasted about 12 hours and at six of those hours, he was asleep. I mean, they're so cheap. The Pixies are so cheap. You can get unlike GSM Pixies on Amazon for like 50 bucks, 60 bucks. So I mean, why wouldn't you own one of these? In fact, I'm going to buy one right now. As soon as this show is over, that is the first thing I'm doing is buying a Pixie. I like it. Question, though, related to MeeGo. Should I care about this Nokia staff leaving to build MeeGo phones thing? The JALA thing. Yeah. So I think this is probably going to have about as much success as the Phoenix project or whatever that webOS thing is. But JALA has one thing going for it, which is that I think, this is going to be another one of my crazy theories. I love to put out these crazy theories on the show. I believe that JALA is actually a Nokia Skunk Works, like it's a shell company and it's like their go bag. Like if everything goes to hell in a hand basket at Nokia, JALA is their ejection seat. And I think that they are starting the staff up JALA in the event that they need to throw all caution to the wind and bail out. Oh, yeah. It's totally like a clear and present danger situation. Like Elop, he's got plausible deniability on it. He sort of, those guys are gone and then someone brought him a thing and he said, I'm going to prove this thing in very vague language and I don't want to hear anything more about it. And now there's a whole bunch of lower old school Nokia people that are totally running it. I totally see it. I'm with you. Yep. I'm telling you, man. It's going to be a, I think it could be a beautiful- Harrison Ford is going to introduce it. It's going to be amazing. Nokia did some really amazing things with the user experience in the N9 that have been completely lost. And when we first talked to Nokia execs about how they're going to move some of their UX innovations from Harmattan to Windows Phone, they gave some wishy-washy answers on like, oh, well, we have a lot of say in the future of Windows Phone and how that's going to develop. We want to see some of those innovations come to Windows Phone. In Windows Phone 8, I don't really see any influence from MeeGo whatsoever. And that's a shame because they did some really cool things. So maybe they're now saving those UX innovations for Jello. But again, this is all- On that hopeful note, I'm wrapping up because we've got stuff to go to tonight, I believe. So thank you very much, David, for joining us. My pleasure. Podcast of Vlad's absence. And if people want to follow you on Twitter, I'm going to get it wrong. It's Pierce David, right? That's me. That's awesome. I'm back on Chris' ePower. We'll be back next week with another special guest. It'll be amazing. Thanks so much for watching, everybody. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys.
 So, you know the cliche when there's a car crash, you can't not look, you can't not slow
 down and gawk and see what happens.
 You know what doesn't happen when there's a car crash?
 The dude in the car doesn't get out and get on a bullhorn and start shouting at traffic
 that everything's fine and I'm gonna be able to drive away really soon and it's gonna be
 awesome.
 We pretty much experienced that this past week in the mobile world.
 We'll explain why.
 Stay tuned for the Verge Mobile Show.
 Hi, I'm Dieter Bohn.
 I'm Chris Ziegler.
 I'm David Pierce.
 Yes, that's right, David Pierce.
 Oh, right.
 This is real.
 This is happening.
 So we were actually, we were just talking about this during rehearsal, the fact that
 David Pierce is going to introduce himself and then I was going to make some disparaging
 remarks about him, about how we tried to get literally every other person at the Verge
 to be on this show and everyone said no.
 And then finally we got to David Pierce and we're like, okay, well, we're out of people.
 We better ask David and he agreed to come on.
 But no, that's actually not true at all.
 He was our first choice and I'm delighted to say that he said yes.
 And then I asked every other podcast if I could do that one and then when they all said
 no, I'm here.
 There's another lie there.
 Did you just say in rehearsal?
 Rehearsal?
 Come on.
 Yes.
 We did not rehearse anything.
 What do you call that?
 What do you call the period before the show?
 Waiting for Chris to get out of the bathroom so we can start.
 That's accurate.
 Fair.
 Okay.
 Yeah, we can go with that.
 This is episode seven for the week of July 9th, 2012, if you're keeping track and I hope
 you are.
 And we ended last week on a down note and so we're going to start on that same down
 note this week because I'm tired of having it at the end.
 Can we talk about just how crazy RIM and Blackberry is right now?
 Nothing has changed but just the insanity of their media blitz is blowing my mind and
 Chris, you listened in to the entire investor meeting today, yeah?
 I did.
 I did.
 And it was basically a repeat of the earnings call.
 Torsten's speech mirrored what we heard, what was that, a week or a week and a half ago,
 almost word for word.
 And there really wasn't anything new revealed.
 We did get a very brief tidbit as part of the Q&A that happened after his speech about
 video chat coming to BBM and Blackberry 10, which we kind of knew through some leaked
 screenshots before that Crackberry broke last month, I believe.
 But we have that on the record now.
 And there were a couple other very minor things here and there.
 But by and large, it was basically the same doom and gloom that we've been hearing for
 a while now.
 Torsten said that he's not satisfied with the performance of the company, next few quarters
 are going to be difficult, Q1 2013 for Blackberry 10 now, so on and so forth.
 And I was actually surprised.
 I mean, there were some somewhat heated questions from shareholders during the Q&A session,
 but it was basically decorum.
 Nobody broke decorum, let's put it that way.
 It was pretty soft spoken, all things considered.
 There was one guy that came up to the mic and said, how did the legacy board members
 let it get so bad and let it go for so long to the point where we're at now?
 And one of the board members, I can't remember her name, but one of the board members said,
 excuse me, do you have a question?
 And then he just went and sat down.
 That was about as heated as it got.
 So that kind of surprised me.
 I thought we were going to hear some really, really tough questions thrown at the executives.
 But there were just some really random questions that you think this might be your only opportunity
 in your entire life to address the CEO of RIM one on one as a shareholder.
 And you go up and ask a question.
 The very first question was, Nortel had some problems with being infiltrated by Chinese
 hackers over the past few years.
 What can you tell us about your security?
 What kind of question is that?
 That's a plant, man.
 Come on.
 That's a ringer.
 That's somebody put in the audience to ask that.
 That's a very good point.
 I hadn't considered that.
 But one thing that I thought was really interesting that Torsten said in response to that question,
 I thought the question was lame.
 But one thing that he said in response was that RIM doesn't make phones in China over
 security concerns, which I'd never thought about before, because, you know, RIM is pretty
 well known for being one of the only major phone manufacturers not to make phones in
 China.
 And apparently that's why.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I don't know.
 I think I've touched on this before.
 Like I don't understand why they are being so public and have been so public in the lead
 up to this investor meeting.
 I mean, so Torsten Heinz gave a really long interview to Al Sacco at CIO.
 And I mean, he said some interesting stuff there.
 Like one thing that was neat to hear him say was that RIM just didn't understand that LTE
 was important and that nobody in North America cares about saving bandwidth anymore.
 And like they just straight up whiffed that they were focusing on the wrong thing, which,
 you know, totally true.
 Right.
 But that's, I think, the first time I've heard anybody from RIM sort of take a veiled swipe
 at Lazaridis and his engineering focus.
 Because that was all lousy.
 What I don't get is why don't they do more of that?
 Like why wouldn't Heinz come out and just constantly say, like, we blew it.
 We did a lot of things really poorly for a long time.
 And we got this thing wrong, but we're going to get the next thing right.
 And they got the last thing right and then this thing wrong.
 And then if they get the next thing right, they might be fine.
 But instead they come out and say, you know, things like we believe there's nothing fundamentally
 wrong with the company and on and on.
 And just like, why wouldn't he come out and take these swipes at the old guard and say,
 well, they screwed up.
 I'm doing my best to fix it.
 I'll tell you one very big reason is the fact that Lazaridis sits on the board of the company.
 In fact, he was just reelected today.
 So making those comments with Lazaridis sitting like 15 feet to your side might be a little
 intimidating, especially considering that Lazaridis looks like the kind of guy that
 could get up and come at you like full bore and not get back up.
 You will not get back up.
 Yeah, he just, he'd leave with his head too.
 His hair just bam right into your chest.
 Yeah, absolutely.
 No, I mean, I think that part of it is like, we don't know what their stock is going to
 bottom out at if it has.
 I mean, they've lost so much value and there's a whole lot of smoke around what is going
 to happen.
 Are they going to split the company?
 Are they going to try and spin off the hardware?
 Are they going to try and spin off the software?
 Are they going to do anything fundamentally different between now and when they launched
 BlackBerry 10 or are they going to just try and muscle through to the BlackBerry 10 launch?
 And so I think a lot of that is signaling or I think there's like backroom games or
 like a lot of the stuff that we're hearing them saying in the media, it's meant for us,
 but it's also meant for investors and the other companies that they're talking to or
 trying to hold off.
 Right.
 Yeah, and Heinz did mention on several occasions during the meeting today that discussions
 with their consulting banks are ongoing and they're still evaluating all their options,
 which is the same language that they've been using for two earnings calls now.
 So we'll see what happens with that.
 It's the kind of language you use right up until the day that you announce some gigantic
 change.
 Yeah.
 I mean, even things they're saying, they're talking about how they have no debt and all
 these things that don't typically matter in the sense of, I mean, and really it's about
 all of this is becoming financial, right?
 All of these discussions are about like, how are we as a company, not what innovative cool
 things are we doing?
 Yeah.
 And just every time he comes out and talks, it seems more like he's saying, here's why
 you should buy us and less here's why we're a cool company making cool products.
 Right.
 Right.
 And someone in my Twitter feed, I apologize, I'm not sure who it was off the top of my
 head, but somebody mentioned that rim rims closing stock price today puts them at a lower
 market cap than like just the raw value of their cash on hand plus their their assets.
 So I mean, wow.
 And they have no and they have no debt.
 So at this point, it's almost like it's kind of if you could if a company could come in
 and buy and buy rim for, you know, book value and not not pay a premium over the market
 cap, then it would just be like financially sound to do so based on that alone, even if
 you just came in and shut down the company.
 But but, you know, of course, it doesn't work that way.
 They'd have to pay a premium.
 There's lots of overhead involved with that.
 But but still, that's a really striking fact that, you know, that and very rare when you
 when you take a company like Facebook, which is the exact opposite of that, where they
 have what, like one hundred something P ratio, which is completely insane and absurd.
 So yeah, I mean, they're just getting pummeled in every sense of the word right now.
 And it's going to be a stretch.
 I mean, I posited the theory last week that that BlackBerry 10, at least as we know it
 today, will never see the light of day.
 It's just not going to happen.
 And I think that Torsten Heinz may already know that.
 And I just really, really, really I know that this is your your thing, but I just can't
 believe that they're not going to at least put it on.
 They've come so far.
 They're dropping a whole bunch of money on developers.
 What do you mean they've come so far?
 Well, it's show me one shred of evidence of that besides BlackBerry Jam.
 BlackBerry Jam.
 We got BlackBerry Jam.
 There was a story that they're investing, I don't know, one hundred million or something.
 I can't remember exactly what it was.
 And you know, they're developing the OS.
 It's probably close to ready.
 Well, actually not because it's not launching until 2013 now.
 But my opinion is that the BlackBerry developer ecosystem is still small enough so that they
 would not hesitate to throw the entire thing to the dogs if the right company came along
 and said, we're going to snap you up and do whatever with you.
 And I strongly believe that one thing that we've talked about, at least on a couple occasions
 now, is the fact that I think that a Palm One, Palm Source type of situation might be
 happening here, where RIM's software business would spin off as the quote unquote healthy
 business and the hardware business would just kind of wither up and die on the vine.
 I think that could happen.
 I don't know.
 I just don't see a scenario where RIM in its current state can march through the next few
 quarters turning in terrible results every quarter and deliver BlackBerry 10 in Q1 2013
 and have it be a successful product.
 I just don't see that as being a viable roadmap for them.
 Oh, and by the way, speaking of their line on why it's a good thing that they're launching
 in Q1 2013, it's like, well, there's a lot of noise in the Q4.
 There's always chatter and there's all these companies vying for attention for the holiday
 quarter.
 If we wait and launch in Q1, then we'll have everybody's attention to ourselves and we'll
 have a better launch.
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 Nobody wants to buy phones for Christmas.
 And nobody ever announces anything at CES in January.
 Right.
 Exactly.
 Nobody.
 Yeah.
 Well, see, that's the thing.
 So RIM is lining itself up to maybe be at CES in a big way.
 Maybe they'll try and do something at CES.
 I mean, how weird would that be?
 That could be an event for them.
 The weird thing about RIM at trade shows, CES included, is that they always come with
 this huge fancy booth and don't announce anything.
 Yeah, that's true with CES.
 Certainly true with MWC where they, they, they ran out like almost an entire hall to
 themselves and that don't show anything.
 And the CTI is as well.
 So yeah, maybe, maybe that could be their big coming out party.
 I don't think, you know, I posited before that maybe we'd see something big from the
 fall CTIA show, which is enterprise focused and they're keynoting.
 I think their CIO is, is keynoting there.
 But at this point, because of the delay, I think that's probably a little early for them.
 Right.
 Okay.
 Well actually, you know, as long as we're talking about Chris's predictions, can we
 talk before we get into the big fight that we're going to have about the Galaxy Nexus?
 We talk about this rumor that Bloomberg put out about Amazon developing an Android phone,
 Android based phone.
 I want to talk about the fact that I'm an Oracle.
 Is that, is that what you're driving at?
 I have been calling this for like a year now on various podcasts, including Twits forecast,
 where you can go in and watch, watch the video, which is preserved for all of posterity to
 see.
 I is come on.
 It's pretty obvious.
 I mean, I can't take too much credit for this, right?
 Like come out with an Android based tablet.
 It's not as far stretch to think that you're going to come out with Android based phone
 as well.
 They have the ecosystem that they've been working on.
 I mean, the way I know I've talked about this a lot before, but the way they sort of set
 themselves up with Amazon app store ended up being really brilliant when they first
 announced the app store.
 I'm like, what are you doing?
 Amazon, this is stupid.
 Nobody's going to care about this.
 It turns out they, they knew exactly what they were doing and they really executed well
 on it.
 And now why not take full advantage of it?
 I think Amazon is one of the few companies in North America that is positioned to make
 a meaningful entrance into the cellular market.
 And that's saying something because it's probably one of the most difficult markets in the world
 to break into.
 Well, that's the question, right?
 Is how does, like if Amazon does decide to do this and their whole route so far has been
 let's do our own thing and you know, screw everybody else.
 We're just going to make how we want to make it and market it through amazon.com.
 But like phones don't really sell that way in the U S so right.
 Are they going to have to show up and beg at Verizon's feet and say, carry this phone,
 even though we have this otherwise kind of non-functioning relationship?
 So I think they have a, I think they have a couple of things going for them.
 One is they have the Amazon wireless portal, which is pretty successful.
 And I think they can make a go at just selling through that as a channel.
 And of course, amazon.com is kind of important, but right, but nobody spends $700 on a cell
 phone in the U S right.
 But so, you know, they already have these relationships built up through launching whispernet,
 right?
 So they have a legacy relationship with sprint.
 They have an active relationship with AT&T.
 Oh dude, Verizon by sprint or sprint.
 Oh my God.
 Amazon by sprint or T-Mobile.
 Think about that.
 Think about it.
 No, I, I'm I, Hey, I'm totally on board sprint or, or T-Mobile.
 They could Amazon, I think could probably relatively easily swallow either one of those
 companies whole.
 Wow.
 Man, that would, well, so I mean, the reason I brought it up or the idea is, you know,
 what is Amazon's metric for success in launching a phone, right?
 You know, with the Kindle, you know, they're going to make some money on the hardware at
 once they hit, you know, scale and get their, you know, supply chain running smoothly and
 they're going to make money on, you know, selling their services on, you know, the video,
 the music and, you know, just buying stuff on, on the thing from Amazon.
 That's a really good system for that actually.
 But you know, is Amazon hoping to get, you know, 10% market share?
 It's like, what is, what is their need to get into the phone business?
 What does it get them?
 What are they, what, what, why would they be screwed if they didn't?
 I think that because of the amount of development they've already put into the fire, the cost
 of entry for Amazon is a lot lower than it would be for a lot of other companies.
 So it, you know, even if they just look at it as an experiment, I think that there's,
 there really isn't a whole lot to lose.
 And I think they can do some very compelling things around the Kindle branding.
 But yeah, I mean like at the end of the day, you're absolutely right.
 Carriers still rule the US market and Amazon is going to have a very difficult time getting
 around that unless they do buy a T-Mobile or a Sprint.
 And I wouldn't put it past them.
 I really wouldn't.
 I know that, that DT would still like a, regardless of what they say on the record, I'm sure they
 would still like to sell T-Mobile if the opportunity presents itself.
 And Amazon is one of the few companies that's probably in a position to make that happen.
 Yeah.
 And I think the, the reason I think this is really interesting is because the whole content
 play they made with the Kindle Fire, right, where it's like the, it's the razor and then
 their content is the blades that makes them all the money.
 It makes so much more sense even with a phone than a tablet because it's the thing you have
 with you all the time and we all buy apps and we all buy content.
 And if they can have this thing that's in your pocket on you at all times and you're
 buying everything through Amazon, like that business proposition makes even more sense
 for them to sell a phone possibly as a loss leader than a tablet does, which is why I
 think it makes a lot of sense.
 Yeah.
 I just think a tablet is so much better for consuming Amazon's digital content than a
 phone.
 I mean maybe not for music, but I mean, is music really a big play for Amazon?
 I mean, I know they've got the store, but I don't think people are desperate to buy
 music from Amazon's MP3 store.
 Desperate no, but if you have a device.
 If it's there.
 Yeah.
 And cloud player is good.
 You know, they certainly have the infrastructure in place to support all of this.
 You know, and it's DRM free, so you know, whatever.
 What are they going to call it though?
 That's what I want to know.
 Is it the Kindle Spark?
 Cause if it's not, I'm going to be really angry.
 It's gotta be the Kindle Spark.
 I mean, the Kindle Match.
 Oh, that'd be good too.
 Yeah.
 Match Head.
 Would be the match.
 Spark, they might run into some trademark problems with Chevy.
 Maybe they'll buy Chevy.
 Maybe they'll buy a phone.
 Maybe they'll buy Chevrolet and turn it into a phone company.
 That's a torch.
 That's Blackberry.
 Nevermind.
 Maybe they'll buy Rim.
 Yeah, Amazon has been associated with Rim and rumors for a solid three years now.
 So yeah, maybe that's still going to happen.
 Who knows?
 Man.
 Okay.
 It'll come.
 And it's just, you know, I'm going to tell everybody not to buy one because you could
 get an Android phone that's running a newer version of the OS that's fully participating
 in the ecosystem like the Galaxy Nexus.
 Like the Galaxy Nexus.
 This is going to get interesting.
 Sparks are going to fly.
 Yeah.
 You plan on defending Vlad's point of view, don't you?
 That's exactly what I plan on defending.
 But before we get into that argument, we do need to talk about the ban that was imposed
 and then lifted.
 Yes, it is now lifted and the Galaxy Nexus is now available.
 So it was temporarily unavailable and pulled from the Google Play website thanks to Apple
 winning an injunction against it for a patent and the patent in question related to searching
 on the phone.
 And supposedly Google is going to be rolling out an over the air software update to basically
 change its functionality and possibly remove the functionality of when you search for something
 on the phone.
 It also brings up local results like Gmail and apps and so on and so forth.
 I mean, I can't speak to the, you know, the legal stuff and the validity of the patent
 and who's going to win there.
 But I can say that I have been using local search on a phone since the visor phone.
 So there's that.
 Yeah.
 I mean, many of the patents that Apple asserts in its various lawsuits around the world are
 a decade or more old.
 Right.
 So this isn't necessarily an iPhone patent.
 It could be a Mac OS nine or Mac OS eight Pat.
 Right.
 Right.
 Like one of the one of the patents in the Apple Motorola case dated back to, I think,
 94.
 So it's something to do with the notification screen in Android.
 So yeah, I mean, I pence is that's an entire discussion.
 There's actually a great piece on the site right now, which you should read, but not
 until this show is over, because I don't want to lose your attention.
 But if you go to the top of our site and look on the left side, you'll see a patent piece
 that is live that has been contributed to by the lovely Neelay Patel and Matt McCurry,
 I believe, who are they updated it with new information from the past, the time it was
 originally published.
 And all the comments from this is my next are still there.
 I actually went through and cleaned up a bunch of dupes and stuff and came across a comment
 from Richard Stallman, actually.
 Wow.
 Which seems legit.
 Legit.
 Don't they?
 So, I mean, I don't know the local searching.
 I do want to take the the opportunity to complain that like Google search on Android for searching
 Google, totally fine.
 I use it all the time.
 But, man, there are not a lot of phones where I find that like using typing into search
 locally is convenient or good at all.
 I know a lot of people use it on the iPhone.
 I find it slow and a pain like Windows Mobile, Blackberry and WebOS all did a better job
 and did a better job of like just start jamming on your keyboard to find stuff on your phone.
 And I wish that I wish Android could get there.
 And now who knows how it's going to work with the software updates that's supposedly coming.
 Right.
 In fact, we just talked about this a couple of weeks ago, I think.
 The the engineer responsible for Just Type at Palm is now back at Apple.
 He came from Apple, went to Palm and now he's back at Apple.
 So the the the nexus, no pun intended, of the universal search world is is in Cupertino
 right now.
 Wow.
 I'm sorry.
 I didn't mean to do that.
 That was I'm not kidding when I say that was unintentional.
 I kind of agree that I wanted to use the term.
 I kind of agree that it doesn't really matter.
 This seems like a feature that nobody cares about.
 I don't like I see people everyone I know with an iPhone has basically forgotten the
 fact that you can swipe left from the home screen to get to the local search and everything.
 It's just like, you know, I use Siri for some of that stuff now, but not really.
 But it's just I don't know.
 I feel like it's faster to do almost anything else than try to search that for something.
 Yeah.
 And it's such a convenient thing.
 Yeah.
 It's actually done really well.
 I don't know how how deeply this update will go and if it's going to affect third party
 applications as well.
 But one thing that I I noticed when I was testing a jelly bean galaxy nexus is that
 when you're doing the voice search, you can you know, you can turn on and off different
 search providers.
 And like so, for instance, Foursquare plugs into it.
 So you can search Foursquare places with your voice or with text, of course.
 And I don't know if those are going to be affected as well.
 But that is is really cool.
 Like the fact that that companies like Yelp and Foursquare so on and so forth can plug
 into that that system.
 I need to try that.
 It's pretty cool.
 More.
 Yeah.
 OK, so the other thing about the galaxy nexus is Chris and Vlad put up a very contentious
 piece, a point counterpoint ping counterping.
 What do we call it?
 Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.
 I just want to say this happened amazingly quickly.
 You like you both clearly had this in the can like ready to go.
 And then eight minutes after somebody suggested it, you're like, oh, it's done.
 Here we go.
 Here we go.
 I've been writing this my whole life.
 So this is just Vlad being a go getter.
 I would like to be able to take credit for this, but it was Sunday, Sunday afternoon.
 And I said, hey, you know, sometime we should do this thing about the fact that the galaxy
 nexus sucks.
 That's not what I said, because the galaxy nexus, I'm praising and like 50 minutes later,
 Vlad emailed me an entire argument that I I responded to.
 And then we ended up turning into a piece.
 And yeah, went up Monday.
 So, yeah, it was basically 24 hour turnaround time.
 OK, so, Chris, you get you get one minute.
 Explain why the galaxy nexus is not the best Android smartphone.
 So I think I can best sum this up with my final pull quote in the piece, which is that
 I learned to stop worrying and love the Galaxy S3.
 It used to be in the Galaxy S2 days or in the HTC Rezound days that that I looked at
 skins as a scourge on the Android ecosystem that needed to be eliminated at all costs.
 And what I've now realized is that we've entered a very different phase.
 We talked a little bit about this last week, but we've entered a very different phase in
 Android's existence.
 Right.
 There is a OSP.
 There's the open source project which which maintains the core ultra plane, vanilla Android
 root.
 Not even nexus devices are stock Android.
 If you want to use a OSP as your basis, there are Google experience devices that are based
 on a OSP.
 What I'm saying is that we're getting to the point where we need to elevate the Galaxy
 S3, for instance, to the same parallel as a nexus device.
 A Galaxy S3 is running a Samsung experience that is based on Android, just as a Galaxy
 Nexus is running a Google experience that is based on Android.
 And they can both run Android binaries.
 But Samsung, you know, it used to be that Samsung would get laughed out of the park
 because their designers were so bad at making a skin, a UI.
 But it's gotten to the point with the GS3 where that's no longer the case.
 It's a good looking UX and it works very well.
 And I can no longer conclusively say that I prefer stock ICS to what I see on the GS3.
 Of course, I'd like to have Jelly Bean.
 I mean, of course.
 I've used the Android 4.1 Galaxy Nexus phone.
 Don't get me wrong, it's still a great phone and 4.1 is great.
 But it is not enough better than 4.0 for me to drop back to that lower baseline of hardware
 that the Galaxy Nexus provides just to get it.
 I need LTE.
 I need AT&T LTE.
 I like the better display.
 And the camera on the Galaxy Nexus is the worst camera of any flagship phone manufactured
 in the last two years.
 So there, I've said my piece.
 So okay, we need to break out.
 There's two arguments here.
 One argument is like the Galaxy Nexus hardware is old and tired, which is kind of hilarious
 because it's less than a year old still.
 But the camera is terrible and there's only the Verizon LTE version.
 And I mean, the Sprint LTE version, I suppose.
 But you know, LTE and Sprint doesn't matter yet.
 And you know, I don't think you're wrong.
 I think the camera is terrible.
 I'm tired of it.
 And so the question is, can we give those things a pass if the hardware, but you know,
 based on the quality of the software?
 And yeah, I think that Jelly Bean at least, and even stock ice cream sandwich feels faster
 and is a better skin, so to speak, for Android than what HTC and Samsung are doing.
 HTC, I would agree.
 HTC is not there yet with Sense 4.
 GS3, I'm less convinced.
 Nature UX is very good.
 I hate the name, but what they've put together is very good.
 I mean, okay, so let's say that there's a new Galaxy or a new Nexus device out tomorrow.
 That is Jelly Bean, better screen, better camera, LTE.
 Actually take a Galaxy S3 and have it running stock Jelly Bean.
 I mean, the question is, does the same argument apply?
 No, if tomorrow Google came out with a Galaxy S3 that was running stock Jelly Bean, I would
 absolutely take it.
 But the difference in quality between Nature UX, what Samsung is calling Nature UX, and
 stock Android is now sufficiently small so that it is possible to overcome the benefits
 of owning a Nexus device with the hardware alone, which is what I'm suggesting with the
 GS3 versus the Galaxy Nexus.
 If you're just talking about software, then yes, the Google experience still wins, but
 it's no longer a vast canyon of difference like it used to be in the GS2 days.
 I think the problem is though that for everyone who's not one of the three of us, you buy
 a phone and you don't buy another phone until your contract's up.
 And the problem is whatever I buy today is going to be outdated in two years.
 That's just how it is.
 The hardware isn't going to be good in two years when I'm ready to buy a new phone.
 But if I buy a Galaxy Nexus today, the odds of my phone running the latest software are
 just infinitely higher on a Nexus than they would be on the Galaxy S3.
 And I blame Samsung 100% for that because if Samsung would come out and say, like, we
 are going to ensure that you get the updates, if not first, at least in a timely manner,
 they'd blow everything out of the water because that's the only knock at this point.
 Because I agree, I think the software is, if not as good, really, really close and close
 enough that it's kind of a negligible difference.
 But if I have 4.0 now and then 4.1 is out and 4.2 might come out and 4.3 or 5.0 or whatever,
 and you're probably still going to be stuck on 4.0 because that's how it's always happened.
 So yes, you're absolutely right.
 But what I'm saying, and I'm going to take a lot of flack for saying this, but at some
 point you just need to give up and move on with reality, is that I don't even think of
 the GS3 as an Android 4 device.
 I think of it as running a Samsung operating system that's compatible with Android binaries.
 And the sooner you forget the notion that the GS3 is running ICS and should be running
 Jelly Bean, the sooner you can be happy with the GS3 as a phone.
 Yeah, so the thing that I've been wanting to say on the podcast and keep myself from
 doing it because I was going to write an editorial but I just haven't gotten around to it is
 we should stop calling Ice Cream Sandwich Ice Cream Sandwich when it's on non-Google devices.
 Ice Cream Sandwich is stock Android 4.0.
 Jelly Bean is stock Android 4.1.
 And on those other stuff like the Samsung TouchWiz stuff and HTC Sense, that's Android.
 So they're running Android and like Chris said, they're compatible with the binaries,
 but it's not the same thing as Jelly Bean.
 And you just sort of need to accept that they've gotten to the point where they're at least
 in the same ballpark experience wise as the stock Google experience.
 You need to stop thinking of these devices as like they took the stock Google experience
 and then ruined it with their crap.
 It's that they took the stock Android base and put their experience on it.
 And Google does the same thing.
 They just happen to give that experience away to other customers if they want it.
 Right.
 Mostly, not entirely, right?
 Like Gmail and Android Market and stuff like that.
 And I think Chrome as well.
 Like the Nexus 7 ships with Chrome.
 I think that by default, if a company grabs the AOSP trunk code, they're not getting Chrome.
 They're still getting the Android browser.
 In fact, what's interesting is that Jelly Bean does actually have enhancements to the
 stock browser even though the Nexus 7 isn't shipping with the stock browser.
 Shipping with Chrome in its place.
 Yeah, no, we totally wrote about that, that Chrome is not going to be part of the Android
 open source project.
 It's another Google app just like the other Google apps.
 And Chromium is still out there and companies are free to build their own.
 But if you're not approved for the Google experience and Google apps and Gmail and everything
 else on your Android phone, that includes Chrome.
 That doesn't come for free with Android.
 It's not part of the open source.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, so it's, if you were wound the Android ecosystem three or four years and asked Andy
 Rubin if he thought that things were going to go this way, I'm pretty sure he would have
 said no.
 Because the way this has ended up playing out is really weird.
 I can't imagine this was ever Google's intention, particularly with the Fire.
 But when you look at devices like the GS3, where Samsung has crafted this entire experience
 around AOSP and called it its own, they're just a very, very small step away from being
 able to break free from the Google experience entirely, which I'm sure is probably a pain
 point for them.
 Because they do need to get that sign off from Rubin and they don't have as much freedom
 as they would have if they were just going to AOSP alone.
 So I find it very difficult to believe that that was ever Rubin's intention.
 Well I think that Google Now is going to be a really interesting thing to see if all these
 other companies that are building their own ecosystems, ecosystems that compete directly
 with Google's ecosystems in terms of music stores and movie stores and even search Samsung's
 S Voice versus Google Now, will these companies, when they move up to Android 4.1 for the buttery
 smoothness and all the performance enhancements, will they also be including Google Now?
 And if they don't, then I think that we can say that there's the TouchWiz skin, the Nature
 UX skin, and there's the Jelly Bean quote unquote skin that includes Google stuff.
 The problem with that though is that in a design sense, for third party apps, they're
 still developing based on these new Android guidelines with the Holo themes and we've
 got these great swipe columns now.
 And that's all based on, for whatever you want to call it, the Google experience.
 And so now what you're getting, and this happened to me and was really jarring with the Galaxy
 S3, was every app I downloaded looked kind of unlike the native experience of the phone
 because you're getting things that are designed to look great on the Galaxy Nexus and to go
 well with its fonts and its colors and just don't work at all with the Nature UX.
 And I think to me that's a problem.
 Yeah.
 That's fair.
 In Android 4.1, I get the sense that, you know, Matthias Duarte is obviously at a very
 heavy hand in shaping the UX of the platform since he got there.
 But I think that that's really even more evident in 4.1 than it was in 4.0, which itself was
 a big jump.
 And the colors, there's a very methodical approach to how things are colored in 4.1.
 The colors are very muted and, you know, frankly pleasing.
 I mean, the palette works very well.
 And I would agree with you that Samsung has not mastered the art of a pleasing color palette.
 And that's made more unfortunate by the fact that Samsung has been using AMOLEDs more extensively
 and for longer than just about anybody else.
 And AMOLEDs have a tendency to do really weird things with colors, particularly like oranges
 and reds.
 So they tend to really pop.
 And Samsung likes a lot.
 But that was a bigger problem with the GS2.
 With the GS3, I really believe that their designers are doing the right things.
 I feel like Steve Kondik has had an influence.
 Phil Nickinson from Android Central tells me that Kondik actually is not working on
 Android at all at Samsung.
 But I don't know if...
 I find that very difficult to believe.
 What else would he do?
 The GS3 skin...
 Tyson, baby.
 Tyson, right.
 The GS3 skin looks so much like CM7.
 Yeah, it does.
 Anyway, I'm just saying.
 I'm back on the Galaxy Nexus, you know, since Jelly Bean.
 And I'm really happy with it.
 I miss LTE and I miss a decent camera.
 And those might pull me back to Galaxy S3 or HTC One X.
 But I don't really like those skins.
 The Galaxy S3 is better.
 And the fact that it does a proper classic ice cream sandwich multitasking menu, I'm
 happy with.
 Although I really do miss just having it be a single button, which is why...
 Tell me that I'm crazy to be kind of interested in the Atrix HD.
 It looks pretty good to me.
 Am I nuts?
 Is that okay?
 No, I've spent this whole morning trying to figure...
 Or this whole day, really, trying to figure out what's wrong with this phone.
 Because it's like, why on earth is it $99?
 It checks all of the boxes I wanted to check, including what seems to be a really scaled
 back skin.
 And again, Motorola's skin has always been really kind of overwrought and awful.
 But they've scaled it way back.
 And I've been using a Razer Max with ice cream sandwich on it, and it's a giant improvement.
 And then they still have the cool things like smart actions.
 And this comes out with LTE and the big 720p display.
 And I don't know, I'm into this phone.
 Yeah, I mean, if the processor is terrible and it's slow, and the skin turns out to be
 more overwrought and slow than what we're thinking, then...
 Well, sorry about that.
 Then that'll suck.
 But it's a good size battery.
 It's right in between the Razer and the Razer Max's battery.
 It's got a great screen.
 It's got a 8 megapixel camera.
 There's nothing on paper that makes me go, I don't want this.
 It might be my next phone.
 My biggest concern is...so there are a couple things, and actually this ties back into the
 Galaxy Nexus, which I'm going to continue to harp on for many podcasts.
 But I was surprised at how much the onscreen buttons bothered me on the Galaxy Nexus after
 I had been using the GS3 for a while, which really shocked me.
 Because I had always assumed that this was a big step in the right direction, moving
 to those soft buttons, but you don't realize how much screen real estate those buttons
 actually take.
 It would be one thing if the Galaxy Nexus had a longer display, like an actually physically
 longer display than these other devices, but it doesn't.
 So you just eat up, what is it, 100 pixels or something permanently devoted to these
 soft buttons, and Motorola is doing that as well with the Razer HD.
 So that's one thing to think about.
 I guess, I don't know that I really have that particular problem.
 I love the physical buttons on the GS3, and the fact that those made it to the US was
 the best thing about that phone, if you ask me.
 But I've always been a fan of the onscreen buttons.
 I feel like I train myself just kind of where to tap no matter what, so I don't really notice.
 And with the capacitive buttons or whichever, it just feels like it's kind of the same.
 People are saying it's this giant advantage.
 There were a couple of comments that were super excited about it, and I don't really
 get that, but I don't know, I don't think it's a huge issue.
 Well, I mean, I just like it because it's a more intelligent layout, right?
 I mean, you get the back button turned into a down button when you've got the keyboard
 up, the menu button appears down there where it ought to be, and it's one tap to multitasking
 instead of having to hold down a button.
 If someone were to just give us the Galaxy Nexus's basic button layout of back home multitasking,
 and then hold down back to get the menu to pop up, I'd be perfectly fine with physical
 buttons and getting that extra screen real estate.
 But I just I find that it works better to have that button layout and stock ICS slash
 jelly bean devices are the ones that give me that button layout.
 Actually what I would love to see, and I suspect there's already a ROM for the International
 GS3 that does this, and if there isn't, there should be soon because it's really obvious.
 But what I would like to see is the menu button functionality replaced with multitasking,
 one tap multitasking, and then like reprogram the ROM so that it displays the menus in the
 action bar like you would expect on a Galaxy Nexus, which can't be that hard.
 It's got to be just a flag somewhere in the operating system.
 Because you know, right now, that's the weird thing about the GS3 is that the phone knows
 not to show the menu buttons in the action bar at the top, and instead reassigns that
 functionality to the physical menu button, which I have mixed feelings about.
 I can see why Samsung did it, but I don't know how I feel about it.
 So if they just turned that into a multitasking button, got the operating system to display
 the menu button in the action bar as normal, that would be huge.
 I would love that.
 So breaking news, apparently the Sprint Galaxy S3 got a quote unquote security update that
 also happened to, wait for it, remove local on-device search results, according to Android
 Central.
 Wow.
 That was fast.
 Super fast.
 And a bummer.
 But like we said, that search sucks anyway.
 Right.
 But yeah, like, I mean, that could start, I mean, okay, two thoughts.
 One, we might start seeing it on other devices pretty soon.
 And two, like, you know, if you can push out an update that quickly, really, that changes
 the core functionality of the phone.
 How about some jelly bean action?
 How about not making us wait a year and a half for that?
 Well, it just goes to show you, like it proves, you know, it proves what I think everybody
 kind of knew already, which is that what really takes a long time with some of these ROM updates
 is not the fact that it actually takes that long, but the fact that there's no financial
 incentive for either the OEM or the carrier to rush that update when they have newer phones
 that they'd rather be selling.
 Right.
 Whereas this update is on a brand new phone that is at injunctive risk, presumably.
 Right.
 So, you know, that's what got them moving.
 But you know, rest assured, you're not going to see jelly bean updates for the GS3 a month
 from now.
 It's going to be six months if we're lucky.
 So what we need is like Congress to come out and say, if you haven't updated your phone
 in four months, you can't sell in America anymore.
 And then all of a sudden everybody would update.
 I'm running for Congress, guys.
 That's happening.
 I support your platform 100%, David.
 I think this is a good idea.
 I'm in.
 I mean, OK, so I mean, you know, Android 4.0 came out for the AT&T Galaxy Note today.
 Yeah, actually.
 Yeah, it's rolling out today.
 And I mean, we saw that leak three months ago, and it basically is unchanged since that
 leak three months ago.
 So, I mean, it's not just that, you know, there's not financial incentive, but it's
 also, you know, it's carrier stuff.
 But I think, Chris, you've got it exactly right.
 Like the fact that this was at risk for an injunction is totally what's going on here.
 Yeah.
 But so tell us about your experience with the Galaxy Note refresh, because you tested
 it, did you not?
 Am I crazy?
 Yeah.
 And no, I tested it.
 We've got a video up of it, and it's fast.
 And the multitasking works fine.
 And you know, they added a whole bunch of stuff to the test note, which is what most
 of what they're pushing on this update is.
 So you can search for from alpha and draw shapes and enter in math equations.
 And you know, it's cute.
 But I still feel like there's not a strong enough app ecosystem to support the S Pen
 for me to be able to justify owning a giant phone.
 But you know, all that said, I still have a soft spot for the Note.
 I mean, I use it as my main phone for a few days.
 And you know, as long as you're not holding it up to your head, it's fine.
 You've almost bought that thing like five times now.
 I know.
 I know.
 One of two things is going to happen to either either you're going to eventually cave and
 buy it or I think more likely the second the Note two comes out, you're going to own it.
 Well, isn't the rumor that it's going to have an even bigger screen?
 Yeah.
 Five point five inches, right?
 Five point five is just the beginning.
 Just wait till you get into the sixes.
 That's true.
 The note the note nine will just be like a table.
 Right.
 Well, actually, you know, I'll just I should just start using the Nexus seven as a phone.
 But there was a there was a period where if you Google did a Google image search for tablet
 phone, I was the number one result holding the original Galaxy Tab seven inch up to my
 head.
 Now, of course, it's you know, there's a million of these things that have come out.
 But there's a there's a picture of me out there going like and with a with a tablet.
 I remember that picture.
 I've seen that picture.
 That's yeah.
 The original tab was a seven inch device.
 It's easy.
 Like it's easy to kind of like consider the ten point one is the first Galaxy Tab.
 But no, there was that two point three a Galaxy Tab from a couple of years back.
 And like the thing about that, and we were talking about this before, typing on it was
 great typing out on the the next seven is great.
 That it's just really nice.
 It's like a landscape keyboard on a phone, but in a portrait orientation on a tablet.
 I really like it.
 And David, correct me if I'm wrong.
 I think there is a video floating around of you talking on a an e-pad.
 No, no.
 Excuse me, a pad phone.
 I can neither confirm nor deny that.
 No, that somehow like it was one of those it was made into a gift.
 Just that one scene of me just holding up the tablet to my head.
 And I friends of mine who don't read The Verge don't know what the pad phone is.
 You've never heard of technology are sending me this gift to this day being like, look
 at this thing I saw on the Internet.
 And that will be my my legend forever will be that gift of me being a hello.
 But you know, by the time David, by the time you die, they're going to have the technology
 to put like animated gifs on tombstones.
 And so that will actually be on your tombstone.
 That's I'm living until that happens.
 Just a matter of time.
 They could do one of those.
 I don't know what they call those.
 Like parallax effect things were like when you know, when you look back and forth like
 it moves, I guess they could turn that image into one of those.
 And that would be a very low tech way of walking across my tombstone.
 It would be me holding it up to that.
 Be pretty good.
 So I have a question more of like an e ink tombstone.
 That's true.
 I have a question related to this.
 This software patch and the ban.
 One of our commenters asked on the post we just wrote from the Android Central report
 and said, does this affect stuff like voice actions such as call John or navigate to Joshua
 Topolsky's house, which I do constantly.
 Does it?
 I actually don't know.
 Because that's I mean, that's a really it's the same thing, basically.
 Right.
 It's searching your contacts and the Web and your phone book and all this stuff.
 But it's just not text.
 Does it affect that?
 I don't know until I can actually test this out on a Sprinkles and access myself directly.
 Only one way to find out.
 It's true.
 It's just to try to navigate to Joshua Topolsky's house and see what I are.
 Our chat is filled with amazing just right now.
 I will I will bet you I will bet you one dollar that Samsung has submitted this patch to all
 for receiving all five.
 However many U.S. carriers are carrying the GS three right now in the next couple of weeks.
 And it's just a question of how quickly they they approved the patches.
 It was first.
 But I guarantee you.
 So it's good to be a Verizon customer right now is what you're saying, because you'll
 never see the patch or shop.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 No, no.
 This will actually be a very interesting test.
 Let's let's wait and see how long it takes.
 AT&T and Verizon, who are notoriously the slowest for for approving these firmware updates.
 Let's see how long it takes them to push these out.
 I'm really curious.
 Yeah.
 Well, speaking of carriers dragging their feet, if you haven't read Neely's editorial
 five years after the iPhone carriers are the biggest threat to innovation, you absolutely
 must.
 Yeah.
 But that's all I have to say.
 I mean, it's it's it's full of truth and goodness.
 And like we've got examples just from this week about it.
 Like so they rise and lock the bootloader on the Galaxy S3.
 Why?
 I mean, you know, that they're protecting, you know, their customer service reps from
 dealing with Android hackers, I guess, is the reasoning.
 But nobody else is bothering to do it.
 It's just Verizon.
 And it's you know, it's a hurdle that everybody can get over.
 But it's still like, why?
 Why are you bothering?
 Well, yeah.
 And the Droid Incredible 4G LTE is an awesome example of that, too, because like HTC made
 a bunch of really good phones.
 And you said this in your review, the HTC made a bunch of really good phones.
 And then it seems like Verizon called and was like, well, we want that, but not as good
 because we have these other phones we want to sell.
 So just make us kind of a crappier version.
 Yeah.
 And so the thing that drives me crazy about the Droid Incredible LTE, did we talk about
 it on the podcast last week?
 Like it could be a good phone.
 It's really close to being a really good phone.
 And like, you know, the form factor would be really nice for some people.
 But like sense and then some of the extra stuff on top of that just drives me crazy.
 And so the question is, does it make well, one of my questions is, does it make an appropriate
 ReSound successor?
 And I'm not sure it does because the ReSound is 720p and this is QHD, right?
 Right.
 It makes an appropriate Droid Incredible successor.
 Right.
 Which, you know, it's called a Droid Incredible.
 So there you go.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I don't know.
 I mean, obviously you guys read Neil's piece.
 Have you got any additional insight or stuff you want to say about it?
 I know it was talked about quite a bit on the Verge cast.
 So we're kind of getting repetitious here.
 But yeah, no, it's just it.
 It hit home.
 It really hit home.
 And it's spot on.
 And I think that, you know, I wish that I had a very succinct follow on to how we can
 go about fixing this.
 And Neil and I have been talking about this the past few days.
 You know, how can we how can we move the industry and the discussion in the right direction,
 in a positive direction that doesn't make everyone want to cry?
 I don't have the answer yet.
 But you know, there are so many extremely powerful political forces at play here that
 prevent this industry in the US from being competitive in a way that is truly to the
 consumer's benefit, that it's very it's just kind of depressing.
 And there's don't get me wrong, there's some great people in in in high places that are
 are fighting for the consumer.
 People like Free Press and Public Knowledge are are in Washington and they're they're
 they're doing an excellent job.
 I'm on all their PR blasts and they're doing a really good job of calling out the the questionable
 choices that are being made by the SEC and the DOJ and the lobbying forces that are trying
 to work to get the wrong piece of legislation pushed through.
 But it's an uphill battle.
 And and there are many you know, the the failure of the AT&T T-Mobile deal was a very powerful
 pro consumer message.
 But actually, this is a segue that didn't intend to get to, but we kind of stumbled
 into it.
 Do it.
 It looks like the FCC is now going to approve Verizon's purchase of AWS Spectrum from a
 consortium of cable company Spectrum Co, which we've been writing about pretty extensively
 for the past six months.
 And the reason why this is such there are several reasons this is such a controversial
 deal.
 One is that there are other carriers that are better suited to get this spectrum, including
 T-Mobile.
 They were a very, very loud opponent of this deal as a result, until a deal was struck
 in the past couple of weeks that would end up like it's a multi-part deal.
 It's kind of like an NBA trade deal.
 There are seven there are seven different things that need to fall into place in order
 for this this transaction to conclude.
 But basically, T-Mobile would end up getting a pretty significant chunk of that AWS Spectrum
 if Verizon were allowed to complete the Spectrum Co deal.
 But the other really controversial part of it is that tied into the Spectrum acquisition,
 there are deals that would have Verizon cross marketing its services in Comcast and Time
 Warner locations, and vice versa.
 And the concern there is that it disincentivizes Verizon from building out Fios in locations
 that are currently served by Comcast or Time Warner cable.
 And the then result is that you end up with less competition for really important vital
 services like landline broadband.
 And so there are two different organizations that are looking at this deal.
 There's the FCC that is looking at the Spectrum side, then there's the DOJ that's looking
 at the competition implications.
 The DOJ looks less poised to sign off on this deal than the FCC does right now.
 And I think that kind of mirrors public sentiment.
 The Spectrum side of it isn't quite as controversial as the cross marketing deals are.
 So and DOJ's expected rule in August, it's a mess, as is every Spectrum policy thing
 in Washington.
 But we're kind of keeping an eye on it right now.
 We'll let you know how it goes.
 Bottom line is that it's a very scary time to be in this business.
 Every single deal that happens in Washington has literally 100 different implications,
 some of which are short term, some of which are very, very long term.
 And I always try to find ways to get people engaged in these policy stories when I write
 about them on the site.
 It can be very difficult because it's hard to express why this stuff matters five or
 10 years down the road.
 But we have some big Spectrum auctions coming up.
 I think there are some later this year, if I'm not mistaken.
 And we just need to stay engaged on this stuff because the Spectrum crunch over the past
 couple of years, I think, has really sort of put this in the spotlight.
 But people still haven't made the connection between I can't get data on my iPhone and
 all these weird deals that are happening in Washington every single day.
 And yeah, the carriers have all the power.
 Innovation is being stifled.
 I totally agree with everything you said in that piece.
 And it's all tied into these weird policy things that are happening constantly.
 So it's yeah, it's not just like I can't get data on my iPhone.
 I've got no GBs.
 It's you know, I'm paying 25 cents a pop for text messages.
 I can't do I don't have interoperable video chat.
 It's I can't take my phone from T-Mobile and use it on Sprint.
 And like, oh, well, you know, that's because they've got an incompatible Spectrum and,
 you know, they're using different radio technologies.
 Exactly.
 And those are those are problems that aren't unfixable.
 Those are like that.
 You don't have to accept that baseline of a problem like, you know, phones having different
 incompatible radio technologies is like, oh, well, that that explains that.
 Well, but there's still something that made that happen.
 It's like when I was when I was teaching English, like, you know, I try and like explain why
 some, you know, short story mattered, you know, why is he on the bridge?
 And like, well, the author chose to put him there.
 Those words didn't just magically appear on the page against the author's will.
 The author chose to make that happen.
 And these incompatible radio things like when they were setting up that stuff, sure, there's
 there's a few things that are like unintended consequences.
 But by and large, the company is Verizon and AT&T especially.
 They're sitting with pretty much where they want to be.
 They want to get more Spectrum.
 They want to, you know, change some stuff around.
 But the sort of technical hassles that you experience and the pricing that you're experiencing
 on AT&T and Verizon, especially like they set it up that way and they want it that way.
 It's not like, you know, that's just, oh, that happened.
 I guess we had no control over that.
 That's the world that we live in.
 The world that we live in is a world that they helped set up and we could set up a different
 world if we wanted to.
 AT&T has been fighting very hard in Washington over the past two years to prevent 700 mega
 hertz interoperability from becoming law.
 And it wasn't until earlier this year that the FCC agreed to even look into the issue.
 So that's a perfect example, right?
 We could have we absolutely could have radios that can support all these 700 megahertz bands.
 The technology exists.
 But because AT&T and Verizon are such powerful lobbying forces and are pretty much able to
 get what they want, that issue has been that can has been kicked down the road repeatedly.
 And it's not that there are no technical issues, but the impetus to solve those technical issues
 has been significantly impeded by the fact that AT&T and Verizon see no need to solve
 them.
 And actually, we wrote about this a few weeks ago.
 C Spire, which is a really small carrier in the Southeast, filed a pretty damning lawsuit
 with some wild claims that AT&T and Qualcomm and I think Motorola and they named a bunch
 of companies as colluding on preventing 700 megahertz interoperability from coming to
 be.
 And it's a really interesting read.
 It reads like high drama.
 And I think it is.
 And I truly believe that some or all this stuff is happening behind the scenes.
 That's what I thought was the most interesting.
 In a spoke filter.
 Yeah, right.
 That was what I thought was so interesting about Neelay's piece was that he spoke to
 a Verizon spokesperson.
 And this is after he's talking about how if companies like HTC and Samsung were able to
 compete at the consumer level, the carriers would turn into dumb pipes.
 And then they'd have to compete.
 And that would be good for all of us and terrible for them.
 And then the response is not, oh, there are technical challenges.
 The response is from a Verizon spokesperson, there's a business model that needs to be
 cared for.
 And so it's like that's the most, I don't know, it's about as damning a thing as you
 could say.
 I think where you get to this point where it's like that's all that matters.
 Like we make a ton of money from making your life a lot harder and there's no reason for
 us to keep or for us to stop making a ton of money.
 So why would we?
 Right.
 Yeah.
 I think the most striking thing that Neelay pointed out in that piece, and this is something
 that we all need to remember, is that these companies don't own this spectrum.
 They're licensing it from the federal government and in turn it is property of the American
 people.
 So it is on us as US citizens to demand that these companies be good stewards of this spectrum,
 which is a national resource and a precious resource that can't be-
 Chris, I'm sorry.
 I want to pay attention to what you're saying, but I think I see some American Idol news
 and so I need to go.
 Some American Idol news?
 I'm just saying the problem with this whole issue is it's really hard to connect the effects
 on the consumer with the really boring, dry spectrum discussion.
 We rant about it on the show, we write about it on the site, but unless we get to a SOPA
 internet shutdown kind of moment with this stuff, I mean, one, we need a unified policy
 to promote and two, there needs to be a real visceral connection between the pain that
 we're feeling and what's causing it.
 There's three or four steps between those things where it's really easy to rationalize
 it away.
 It's just easier to pay attention to the next hot new phone that's coming out and not think
 about the crazy machinations that limit it and keep it on one carrier and so on.
 I feel like the answer is we need to just tell everybody to go to Europe for 20 minutes
 because they seem to have nailed it.
 This occurs to me every time I'm editing a review from one of the guys in the UK and
 they never really mention the price and they never mention a particular carrier and I'm
 always like, oh, you forgot those parts.
 And it's like, no, they didn't.
 It's just you just buy the phone and then you use it wherever you want to and it's just
 not a thing.
 They're totally separated from each other.
 David, the stock response that someone from the CEA or CTIA or any other American organization
 or carrier in the cellular business will tell you, the stock response is that's all well
 and good, but in recent years, the US has innovated far faster than Europe or even Asia
 in the wireless space.
 The rebuttal to that is yes, but it has evolved and innovated in a very bizarre and consumer
 hostile way.
 The rebuttal to that is your mom.
 Yes, the rebuttal to that and all other arguments is your mom.
 No, I mean, there are a couple, back to your point earlier about how do you get this in
 consumers' faces and make the connection between spectrum and real world problems, I think
 that we're starting to see some very real world effects that any consumer can relate
 to.
 One is in the city of Chicago, as in many other places around the country, New York
 City certainly, you literally cannot between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on a weekday
 get HSPA data in downtown Chicago.
 It's not just slow, it doesn't work.
 I mean, it literally doesn't work.
 This has been going on for at least a year now, and that's why I can't go back from an
 LTE phone.
 So that's one effect, right, where a consumer can say, why can't I send this email on my
 iPhone?
 Oh, let me tell you why.
 It's because our entire system is hosed, and you need to be paying.
 So that's one thing, and the other is, say, T-Mobile being unable to get the iPhone, or
 US Cellular being unable to carry almost any competitive device outside the GS3, which
 congrats to them, by the way, because that's a pretty big win for them.
 But yeah, I think that there are finally some very consumer-facing ways that you can relate
 why spectrum matters and why it's important.
 And I just shut the podcast down with that.
 No, I mean, we're going to talk about this again in three weeks, and we're still not
 going to have a revolution.
 That's fine.
 We'll have these small steps, and hopefully we'll get them moving in the right direction
 at least a couple of times.
 I hope so.
 Actually, I want to talk about good news.
 We're going to end on good news this week.
 I swear that is the goal.
 The first piece of good news, David, is the Optimus 4X HD from LG.
 The first piece of good news is that LG learned how to make cell phones.
 That's what you're saying.
 Basically, yeah.
 Yeah.
 It's not bad, right?
 No, it's actually great.
 It's been really fun because I've reviewed a bunch of different LG phones over the last
 six months, and they always had one thing just horribly wrong.
 The LG Nitro, I remember when I wrote the review, the first comment said, so basically
 this phone with CyanogenMod would be the best thing ever because the software was just awful.
 Then I reviewed the Spectrum, which was super fast and had a really great display, and you
 just touched it and wanted to stop touching it forever.
 Then they've had a couple of other phones that were underpowered or had outdated software
 or both or whatever.
 Then finally, you read the spec sheet of the Optimus 4X HD, and it's like, oh my gosh,
 it has all of the things that I want it to have.
 It has new software.
 It has a new processor.
 It has good build quality.
 It's big and has a nice display, all this stuff.
 Writing this review was almost bizarre because I got to the end of it and was like, wait,
 I didn't really hate anything.
 I kind of expected to having reviewed a bunch of these phones.
 I got to the end and it was like, they did all of the things that they're supposed to
 do.
 Software has gotten a lot better.
 Again, it's the same trend we're seeing with HTC, not as much, but Samsung and a couple
 of other companies kind of pulling their skins back and saying, like, Android is doing a
 really good job.
 We think we can augment it in certain places, and sometimes they're right and sometimes
 they're wrong, but it's a much better approach.
 The hardware has gotten almost universally with high-end phones.
 It's just so fast at this point that Android has kind of become the limiting factor in
 the performance of a cell phone.
 As long as you have kind of the recent high-end specs, you're going to be fine there.
 But I really enjoyed using this phone.
 There are a number of cool nifty things about it.
 I really like the way it does NFC on some of the software, and I'm just a fan.
 I don't know when the phone's coming to the US.
 It hasn't been announced here.
 It's just in Europe and I believe Asia right now.
 But if it does, it's a real competitor for the first time.
 They've had big splashy launches for phones that I don't think were very good, and this
 one could actually be awesome.
 When's the last time LG had a big phone in the US?
 I mean, like a real like, oh wow, LG in the US, wow.
 G2X, I think was the last time.
 Yeah, okay.
 Ended up...
 Been a while then.
 It's like...
 I mean, when the G2X was announced, everyone was like, ooh, this is going to be like the
 hot...
 Because at that time, like dual-core was still like a really novel concept, and it appeared
 to run something close to stock, Froyo, and so that was a really big deal, and it ended
 up just being a complete dud of a phone.
 I owned one for a while and it just brings back nightmares.
 But LG is weird because they've always been a half step behind the big names in Android,
 right?
 Like they're half step behind Samsung, they're half step behind HTC, but not really.
 I mean, they were the first to the table with a dual-core device.
 They're right there in the quad-core race.
 They've been doing 720p as long as anybody too.
 Right.
 So they just need to get their act together and produce a holistically good device, and
 maybe this is the turning point for them.
 And they need a hit.
 I mean, LG...
 I mean, to your point, Dieter, I mean, they haven't had a meaningful hit in ages.
 Yeah.
 And I mean, are you sad that you're not going to be able to say that about the LG view coming
 out of the US?
 This large phone.
 That was a cheap shot.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 4x3.
 I love that.
 No, I'm actually...
 I'm interested in trying the 4xHT.
 I would be pleased, especially now that I'm apparently with the Galaxy Nexus happy being
 on HSPA again.
 I'm really not.
 But I got Wi-Fi in most places.
 One last thing I wanted to bring up, the Windows Phone 7.5 refresh, the Tango update is coming
 to Lumia 900, which is fine.
 That's great on AT&T.
 But as mad as some people might be about Lumia not getting Windows Phone 8, and as unhappy
 as I may be with some of the core apps that I need, the fact that Nokia is coming out
 with a pink version before an orange version, like, I just give up.
 They're dead.
 I don't care.
 Pink is the new white.
 Pink is the new white, bro.
 These are also not going to be on sale ever because I'm going to buy all of them.
 You're buying out Nokia's entire stock of pink Lumia.
 Yes, no question.
 No, you know what's going to be next, right?
 They're not going to give me my orange phone.
 They're going to come out with a Zune Brown version.
 You know what's going to happen.
 No, but here's the thing about the Zune Brown is that it was a double shot brown underneath
 green acrylic, like a clear acrylic, right?
 So it had kind of like a cool look to it, I guess.
 Did it though?
 Did it?
 Cool, in air quotes.
 Okay, there we go.
 I don't know.
 No, I would totally use a pink Lumia and feel very good about it.
 I truly believe that pink is the new white.
 I agree with you, Dieter, if they came out with like a bright orange, I would be very
 happy with that as well.
 But I could see going with the pink.
 I could, but I mean, I'll just wish it was orange the whole time.
 So yellow.
 Yellow would be amazing too.
 Yellow would be cool.
 Actually, wasn't there, there was supposed to be a yellow Lumia 800.
 Did it disappear?
 I think it did.
 It may have disappeared.
 I think the yellow was one of the colors that was supposed to be glossy instead of matte,
 and it fell off the face of the earth and never came out maybe.
 Or maybe I'm making up this entire story.
 But I seem to recall-
 Well, there was something about it taking a while for it to come out.
 It was going to be in the second batch.
 I can't remember.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 I think Nokia makes these Lumias in batches of like a couple of weeks each, and they switch
 between colors and I don't know what happened.
 Yellow doesn't exist.
 I don't think it ever got around to the yellow, which is a bummer because that would have
 been awesome.
 Yeah.
 You know what phone I just pulled out this week that I love all over again and want to
 use full time is the N9.
 There are two reasons for that, and neither of them have anything to do with MeeGo.
 One is the size, which is actually, it's like the perfect size for that style phone.
 The N900, the more I use Lumia 900, the more I realize that it is actually a bit big for
 that style of device.
 And the integrated glass is missing from the N900.
 The N9 and N800 both have that.
 Two is that the cyan that they use on the N9 is a little darker than it is on the N900,
 and in my opinion, it actually looks a little bit better.
 So physically, I think that the N9 is actually the purest and best implementation of that
 design language.
 Again, neither of these have anything to do with MeeGo whatsoever, but I just want to
 point out that it's a physically gorgeous device.
 You sound like Josh.
 Josh just bought, I believe on eBay, a Palm Pixie and has definitely decided that he's
 going to use it as his phone forever.
 And I feel like equally bad for both of you that you-
 No, he gave up on it, I think, already.
 Did he already?
 I think he's already done with it.
 It hasn't even come yet and he's over it.
 No, I think he lasted about 12 hours and at six of those hours, he was asleep.
 I mean, they're so cheap.
 The Pixies are so cheap.
 You can get unlike GSM Pixies on Amazon for like 50 bucks, 60 bucks.
 So I mean, why wouldn't you own one of these?
 In fact, I'm going to buy one right now.
 As soon as this show is over, that is the first thing I'm doing is buying a Pixie.
 I like it.
 Question, though, related to MeeGo.
 Should I care about this Nokia staff leaving to build MeeGo phones thing?
 The JALA thing.
 Yeah.
 So I think this is probably going to have about as much success as the Phoenix project
 or whatever that webOS thing is.
 But JALA has one thing going for it, which is that I think, this is going to be another
 one of my crazy theories.
 I love to put out these crazy theories on the show.
 I believe that JALA is actually a Nokia Skunk Works, like it's a shell company and it's
 like their go bag.
 Like if everything goes to hell in a hand basket at Nokia, JALA is their ejection seat.
 And I think that they are starting the staff up JALA in the event that they need to throw
 all caution to the wind and bail out.
 Oh, yeah.
 It's totally like a clear and present danger situation.
 Like Elop, he's got plausible deniability on it.
 He sort of, those guys are gone and then someone brought him a thing and he said, I'm going
 to prove this thing in very vague language and I don't want to hear anything more about
 it.
 And now there's a whole bunch of lower old school Nokia people that are totally running
 it.
 I totally see it.
 I'm with you.
 Yep.
 I'm telling you, man.
 It's going to be a, I think it could be a beautiful-
 Harrison Ford is going to introduce it.
 It's going to be amazing.
 Nokia did some really amazing things with the user experience in the N9 that have been
 completely lost.
 And when we first talked to Nokia execs about how they're going to move some of their UX
 innovations from Harmattan to Windows Phone, they gave some wishy-washy answers on like,
 oh, well, we have a lot of say in the future of Windows Phone and how that's going to develop.
 We want to see some of those innovations come to Windows Phone.
 In Windows Phone 8, I don't really see any influence from MeeGo whatsoever.
 And that's a shame because they did some really cool things.
 So maybe they're now saving those UX innovations for Jello.
 But again, this is all-
 On that hopeful note, I'm wrapping up because we've got stuff to go to tonight, I believe.
 So thank you very much, David, for joining us.
 My pleasure.
 Podcast of Vlad's absence.
 And if people want to follow you on Twitter, I'm going to get it wrong.
 It's Pierce David, right?
 That's me.
 That's awesome.
 I'm back on Chris' ePower.
 We'll be back next week with another special guest.
 It'll be amazing.
 Thanks so much for watching, everybody.
 Thanks, guys.
 Thanks, guys.