 Do anyone want to actually look at the site and see? We're live. Vlad, welcome. That was amazing. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show where we talk about mobile technology, mobile industry, and the colors of smartphones. This is episode 25 for the week of November 12th and I am Dieter Bohn. I'm Vlad Savo. Oh my god. And I'm perfectly in sync with Dan Seyfert. Yeah, and we're a little bit of a train wreck. Yeah, I've disrupted everything. I'm leaving. I'm gone. You are, yeah. We're having some awesome pixelation on your video, but that's okay. Oh, dude. I'm just looking at it now. It's kind of going up and down. It's like I'm the anonymous member of the podcast. Yeah I can't read your lower third right now, but we know who you are and where you are. Yeah I'm the anonymized for his own safety. Yeah I'm the representative internet troll in today's podcast taking the place of Chris Ziegler, who I usually nominate as a troll. Yeah. He was in absentee today in protest. So the most important mobile news of the week is that in Skyfall, James Bond thankfully only used his Sony Xperia TL phone for like four seconds. Great. Yeah. Spoiler alert. I mean come on man. I haven't seen it yet. What? Oh man, there's so much I want to talk about with this movie. I purposely did not read your forum post on it because... Yeah there is a very long rant that I posted in the forums about the movie and I recommend you go read it. Yeah I think it's the Xperia TX. Is it the TX? Is that what it is? I got that wrong. I think you guys have the TL in the United States. Yeah the TL is the AT&T model. Right so there's three different names which are almost identical for a phone that is pretty much identical. Yeah. Four differences. Anyway. It's terrible. I don't want to talk about it. It's identically disappointing. Yeah that's a good way to put it. But actually on the topic of the biggest news, I was looking at a topics list and I was taking this... Yeah you were trolling me hard on me with this. I just put it together in an order that made a little bit of sense but I'm not making a huge judgement call here. We can start wherever you want Vlad. You want to start talking about BBM? You can start talking about BBM. Oh yeah dude, revolution. Well it actually is kind of a thing. I mean I feel like I should not be the one ranting about this because I feel like Dieter you should rant about this. But what the heck man. Blackberry Messenger, it's for Blackberry 7. Yeah they have to. So if you don't know what we're talking about is rumors announced that there's a new version of Blackberry Messenger that will offer free voice calls over Wi-Fi. It doesn't look like there needs to be any carrier involvement because it's over Wi-Fi. And you know it's an interesting and useful feature. And they're making it available on Blackberry 7 devices, earlier devices not so much and they haven't said anything I don't think about Blackberry 10. I mean if it's not on there that's ridiculous. And yeah I mean that's kind of cool. So maybe I shouldn't share this but I'm going to. We were like okay well we should test this thing out. Who on the Verge staff has a Blackberry that we can, we need at least two people with Blackberries on the Verge staff with active BBM accounts and active data to test this. And it was like crickets. Apparently the minimum of two people was two more than we actually have at our disposal. The other thing is RIM announced that they're going to launch Blackberry, they're going to have a launch event for Blackberry 10 on January 30th and presumably they'll actually be releasing it in different areas of the world shortly thereafter although they won't say what. I just hope it's not another one of these we're launching and it doesn't mean anything kind of events like we've seen with Windows phones so often. Which it pretty much is guaranteed to be. We'll see. I don't know. The one thing I don't expect to see is January 30th comes, Torsten Heinz takes the stage and he's like here's a Blackberry 10 device, all touch, here's our Blackberry 10 device, physical keyboard. He'll show both of them, that's fine. But he's not going to say pre-order today, shipping next week. He's not going to do the Apple way of launching a product which is the thing he should be doing. But anyway, seriously. I think I trolled myself by calling it BBM revolution. Because the thing that I was saying isn't the biggest news story which a lot of people might consider it to be the biggest news story. Is Apple and HTC settling their patent disputes? But I am sick and tired of all this legal stuff. We'll come to it. I mean it's significant, it's important but it's not the most fascinating news. It's not the thing that everybody's been talking about. The thing that everybody has been talking about is the Nexus 4 going on sale. Yes, and what a mess that is. Oh my, what a mess that was. I mean I wasn't all that fascinated by it. I wasn't one of those guys who was chomping at the bit to buy one. But it was such a fascinating experience for me to witness the guys who were. Specifically one of them is on today's podcast, Mr. Seaford. So let me tell you about my position with the Nexus 4. So I was really eager to see it go on sale and I was thinking maybe I'll buy one, maybe I won't. But I hadn't really committed to it. And then you know, at noon yesterday when it went on sale in the US and the whole Play Store went down, I was actually tied up at an event. So I had like no way that I could realistically try to purchase this thing. And of course the store goes down and people aren't able to purchase and supposedly it sells out so quickly. So you know, I'm back in our office a couple hours later and people in our office are saying well we're just able to refresh the store page like 40 times in a row and suddenly I'm able to buy it. So I see two of our other staffers buy them successfully and then I pretty much made it a rule that if I'm able to make it show up in the Play Store, I pretty much have to buy it. So I refreshed the Play Store like 50, 60 times in a row until I got the add to cart button and I quickly added to cart and submitted my purchase and now I'm $400 poorer. So basically their strategy, you know I was all set to go on a rant about how ridiculous is it that Google can't just get a simple Play Store up and running that says out of stock order and we'll let you know when stock comes in. Like you know, that's insane that they just don't let you buy it if you just need to sit there and refresh it. But maybe they're secretly geniuses and you wouldn't have bought it if it was just there but since it's like gambling, you just got to keep trying. That totally worked for me because if it was just like I signed on, it's like oh there it is, it's for sale, should I buy it? Maybe I wouldn't buy it but because it was like you know, maybe I could get this. Oh yeah, I won! Congratulations, you just lost $400. Yeah! Woo! But this was the fascinating aspect to me because it was kind of a psychological behavioral experiment. It's like we've got this thing, we've got it priced at a level where people are really going to be eager to buy it anyway and then we'll just introduce scarcity into the equation. Like severe and random scarcity, that's the other thing. Exactly as Dan says, it's a jackpot. It's like yes, I got into this and now I'm pressured. I mean, I don't know, it's like a really well executed strategy that you might get from an estate agent. Like dude, we've got people coming in next so either you pony up all your money right now or it's gone. You have to deal with it. Which is interesting but also I mean, the thing to say is Dan was saying Play Store was crashing and coming down lunchtime in the US. Play Store was up and down all over the world since the middle of the night since Australia and the jokes on Twitter were like, it's called Nexus 4 because they made four units per continent. Stuff like that. Obviously there were limited quantities, fewer than, well I guess Google and LG just underestimated how much demand there would be for this phone. I don't know, were there any actual server issues preventing people just getting their orders through or was it a shortage of devices? There was a bunch of weirdness. I think people, especially in the UK I heard that people would have it in their cart and then they'd go to check out and it would disappear from their cart. So there was definitely some odd things happening there aside from the whole hammering the refresh thing that we had going on over here. I'm just going to say one more joke that I picked up on Twitter. I'm a complete plagiarist today but somebody will say, you know, this would be totally embarrassing if Google actually ran cloud services. I think I saw that, yeah. It's a shame it's not a giant company that runs massive cloud internet services. Right, because then it would be totally embarrassing what's happening right now. So it was a bit of a sham, but the Nexus 4 is out now, the Nexus 10 is out now. You know what it is, they're running their Google Play servers to sell the device off of an HSPA network instead of an LTE. That must be a problem. Yeah, and it's 4G man. So to follow up yesterday's insanity with the online orders, today here in the US T-Mobile stores in select locations in small quantities started selling the device at store. And how do we know that then? Well we know this, well A, because T-Mobile said it would happen, but we know that it was for a fact that they were there because a certain Mr. Chris Ziegler who decided not to be on the show today went over to a store and laid down some serious cash for a Nexus 4 despite the fact that he's hated on it pretty much ever since it's been announced. He said he's going to break my kneecaps if I brought this up during the show, so I'll be prepared to be in a cast next week. I'm home strong. I was going to say, the psychology of what Dan did makes perfect sense to me. The psychology of what Chris did? No idea. I can't even begin to explain that. Was the Nexus 4 in cyan? Is that what the story was? You know I knew this was going to happen with Chris because the exact same thing happened with the iPhone 5, right? He literally was like not going to buy one and then at 4.45 in the afternoon the day it was he was like, guys I'm going to walk over to the AT&T store and he walked over to the AT&T store and bought one and came back with one. So I'm not shocked at the least bit. And then he bought a Lumia 920. Yeah, and he's using a Lumia 920 now that he just bought. Can I just digress on the iPhone 5 for a minute? Like a quick minute? Sure. Thank you. I don't think we're really going to stop you, so. Yeah, I mean thanks for the permission. I appreciate it. I just want to say I've been using the iPhone 5 for about a week, not because I actually prefer it or want to. I'm being forced to for completely professional reasons, you understand. But I'm on board. I like this phone and the other thing is I haven't used iOS, I've used it on the iPad for a while, but I haven't used it on the phone for a while and it's so kind of cozy and comforting to know that every single thing in my life has an app. I'm talking my supermarket has an app, my supermarket's loyalty scheme has an app, EasyJet has an app. That's kind of okay. British Airways has an app. It kind of sucks. But it's like every single thing that I can think of. Dictionary.com has an app. And they're not all great. They're not all perfect. Is the broccoli app any good? What about the... Dude, I've got to tell you the deficit of like raw vegetable search engines. I've got to know Vlad, is there like a social network app where you share your raw carrots with other fans of raw carrots? No, do you see my relationship with carrots I think has been way over. That's called Grindr. Carrot gram. Seriously, carrots have quite a bit of sugar in them, so I'm controlling my intake of carrots. Okay, all right, I just want that on the record that Vlad is controlling his intake of carrots not because it's big enough or because of the taste, but because there's a little too much sugar in carrots. Yeah, I mean I have to like for example yesterday I ate a pomegranate. That's really sugary, but it's amazing. So it's like my sugar intake. And this digression really is not comfortable. So we'll just move right along. All I'm saying is with the iPhone, the distinction to me is a qualitative one where Android has a really fully fleshed out ecosystem and it feels robust, right? You get apps for pretty much everything you need. But with Apple there's this extra step with iOS where you just know it's going to happen. And the other thing is Skype just this week got updated to support the iPhone 5 and we're kind of like, whoa, it's about time. And the iPhone 5 just came out. And it's like this is the pace at which change gets, or rather developers work to adapt to change in the Apple ecosystem. It's just so rapid. So it's like iPhone 5 comes out, it's a new size, new resolution, but you know that within a month or two everybody just knows how important that app is to them and they update. They do that. And they're just a really comforting and reassuring thing for consumers. And this is part of the reason why we keep hopping on about this ecosystem action with Windows Phone. I'm starting to hate the word ecosystem now because it's starting to lose its meaning, but this is what it means to me and I wanted to share that with you guys. And now we can talk about the Droid DNA. Oh, you want to talk about the Droid DNA? We can talk about Windows. No, let's talk about the Droid DNA. No, we should. Droid DNA, Dan, you have held it in, oh my god. Can you get an actual picture on there? Like an image instead of a sense4? Because sense4 is taking me sad. No, I think sense4 is what you want. You're putting me on the spot. Sense4 is never what I want. Get the thing in the camera. Why are you looking down at it? I'm trying to. Let me do one of these. It's like I've never used one before. All I have are screenshots on here, so it's actually pretty lame. But let's do... If you're listening to the audio version of the podcast, you're missing... Here's the Droid DNA. It's really thin for what it's size, but obviously the star of the show is the 5-inch 1080p display. It's like 440 ppi. I don't know if this will actually focus that close, but you really can't see the pixels. There's no pixels, and the viewing angles are insane. It's Super LCD 3. It looks like the image is literally floating on the surface there. That is nice. We've been raving all year about the One X display, and it's Super LCD 2 with 720p, and how it's the best mobile display that we've ever seen. Even though newer stuff has come out, like the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S3, the One X is still the best, but this is better. The other thing is, it's 5 inches. It's pretty big, as you can see, but it's not as big as you might expect from a 5-inch phone. I compared it side by side with the One X yesterday, and it's a little bit taller than the One X, but it's about the same width. Really? Yeah, it's about the same, because it's... I don't know, it's just so tall and narrow. How big is the battery then? The battery is 2020 milliamp hours, so it's actually kind of small. It's insane to say that a 2000 milliamp hour battery is small these days, but that's the fact. But yeah, for the screen size and the high resolution... Yeah I've got to do some more tests on it, but battery isn't my concern. It's super thin though, you can see it's got these tapered edges that make it... Let's also mention, and this I think is a big credit for HTC, is that they built the wireless charging right into the phone, while it's that thin. Yeah. Yeah, because you can't access the battery of course. The battery door does not come off, so you can't access that. So it is nice, but I'm going to hate on this right now. If you see this, the bottoms is where the micro USB port is, and look what I have to do to access it, because it's a door. I can't recall the last phone I tested that had a door on the battery. That's really terrible. And so it's actually really hard to get out, and it's really hard to put back in as far as inconvenience. That's why you have wireless charging and wireless syncing, right? Yeah, I guess that's what they're trying to push. The other thing that I'm super annoyed about is the placement of the power button, which is at the top in the middle, which is the worst place to put on a five inch device. Well, we discussed this last week. You just need to bang it on your forehead. The other thing that's really cool, I'm totally giving away all of the stuff that's going to be in my review in a couple days, but if you see this flashing, it's got a notification light on the back of the phone. Oh, that is awesome. So there's one on the front, you can see it flash, and then on the back. Right there. Like, that's one of the coolest things I've seen. That's amazing. Yeah, so it's kind of... I mean, how would you characterize the build quality? I mean, I've got a Note 2 back here, and I still feel like it's typical Samsung. It's good and fine, but it has that vague feeling of being plasticky. Well, this doesn't feel too plasticky. It's all soft touch on the back. The back is really slate and flat, but it's all soft touch materials. It's got this kind of funky, I don't know if you can see it there, grill on the side. That's on both sides. And you know, it's pretty typical HTC build quality. It's not a unibody though, like the One X. So it doesn't feel like a unibody, but... I mean, it's actually really light too. It's 138 grams, which for a phone of this size is lighter than I would expect. It's lighter than the 920. Dude, you beat me to it. It's lighter. So for those of you who don't know, the 920 is really heavy, but I'm sure if you're listening to this, you do know that. But around the verge, we've begun to call that the tank. So we just refer to like, you know, oh, I'm checking out the tank, or I'm holding the tank, or I'm using the tank today. To be fair, the Lumia 820 isn't that much lighter. I think it's 160 grams. So both of them are really nice, hefty phones. And this is why I'm saying credit to HTC, because they're building wireless charging right into this device, which is very thin, and the Windows Phone 8X, which again is very thin and even smaller. It's a 4.3 inch phone. So you know, Nokia's excuse that we've packed the most advanced yada yada into this phone, therefore we made it the size and weight of a tank, is a bit flaky when you compare it to what HTC is achieving. I can't find, there's an infographic that's floating around about the weight of the 920. And I can't find it, but they quote me, they quote it's a tank, and they quote like, where is somebody else? And then they have like, oh, you're just being a baby, here's why it's okay. And then the first comparison is an iPhone 5 and like two slices of bologna, and that equals the weight of the 920, so fuck up. Yeah, it was two slices of turkey. Two slices of turkey. The iPhone 5. It's got to be some pretty thick slices of turkey, if you ask me. That's what I said. So this thing is running a Tegra processor, right? No, no, this is a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro. Don't spoil any more of the... We're just talking about specs. We know the specs. Yeah, I mean that spec is very nice and sexy and attractive to me, because we all know the Snapdragon S4 is eminently more efficient than the Tegra option. It doesn't... We think the... No, we know. We know. Well, this is the S4 Pro. It's a quad core. Yeah, I know, but at the same time, it doesn't come with a gimmicky companion core. It actually can crank itself down. It doesn't have a little buddy coming along for the ride. LG on their Optimus G put like an Eco mode thing, and I got an email asking me to talk about how Eco mode affects battery life and I don't know, not much. They've got a whole bunch of widgets for messing around with the processor, which made me worried that maybe it wouldn't be that battery friendly, but I don't have the Optimus G on me anymore, but in my time with them, I found the processor to be super fast and it didn't seem like it was problematic on battery life. This thing has got a huge screen, so who knows? It's a screen and it's the high resolution. It's pushing around a lot bigger, more pixels. We know that like with when the iPad 3 wasn't revealed, that had a really high-res screen and Apple added like almost double the battery over the iPad 2 to get the same battery life. That could make a difference. Obviously, I'm not going to, don't know just yet because I still got to run a few tests on it, but that could make it. If I can bring it back to the Optimus G, that's a great point that Dita raises. I also have zero idea what that Eco mode does on that phone, but I enabled it and it actually had endurance which was like, it was significant enough for me to notice that it's longer than most phones in that size class, and it was without battery. I was like, why is this happening? What's so special about it? Now that you mentioned the Eco mode and the Core Core S4, that makes perfect sense to me, which all in all actually makes the Droid DNA a really compelling option for a whole heap of people apart from the whole sense situation. Let me quickly mention, the price in the US of 199, and it should be launching this time, ProYoters are available now, but it should be launching this time next week, the 21st. It's kind of amazing. It's really impressive. All of us thought it would be higher than that, didn't we? I would have expected it, yeah, for the first 1080p phone in the US to be priced at 199 is pretty significant. If we go back a year, HTC was the first company in the US to bring a 720p phone with the resound, and that was priced at 299. It's offering a lot of specs for the price, that's definitely for sure. We just all accepted that phones can be this big and that's okay. We're not complaining about phablets. We're not complaining about, oh god, this screen is so big, I hate this. Why are they forcing these huge phones on us? We just sort of, that's how big phones are now. That's how it goes. Then people are just going to be like, am I watching a rerun of episode 12 or episode 24 or episode 27? We're echoing ourselves. You register your complaint once. We already know we have HTC. You register your complaint, nobody listens, and then you carry on. Hey dude, we already know we have HTC in our audience. I'm sure they're slaving away on that 4.1 inch super phone that all of us want. With a 720p screen or whatever it is, 300 dpi, whatever resolution that is. Yeah, seriously, pixel density isn't that important anymore. I still want to see and experience that 1080p phone naturally, obviously. Once you get past 340 dpi, the 720p resolution of 4.1 inch screen, then it just gets silly. You didn't need to say that you can't see the pixels on this thing, Dan. I know it's basically lit up paper. Because it's that Super LCD, you can see the viewing angles are really great too. Looking forward to the review, sir. And then you send it over my way. Where it won't work. Doesn't matter, man. No, it will work. I don't need it to be a phone. What is this outdated idea of using a phone as an actual phone? If I needed that, I would get BBM with those awesome voice calls, man. And then I would plug it into the Nexus 7 with 3G data. Oh, yes. Should we review the Nexus 7 with 3G data just this week? We don't normally talk about tablets here. I ordered the iPad mini with LTE. Should be arriving on Friday. Are you seriously doing what you're doing right now, Dieter? This is really compelling for audio. You can probably hear him jumping up and down. I'm not excited about going back from right now, but I mean, whatever. I'm excited to have a tablet with LTE in it. Because my Nexus 7 doesn't. I definitely agree with you there, Dieter. I like my Nexus 7 at home, but it rarely leaves the house with me just because it's a pain to get connected. Should we talk about Jelly Bean? It's rolled out to, there was the downloads you could get, and I'm pretty sure they're rolling out an OTA slowly to some devices, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7. I got my OTA today, actually. Did you get your OTA? Congratulations. For my Nexus 7. Nexus S and Moto Zoom not getting it. So this is kind of insane, if you ask me. Because both of those devices are on 4.1, actually 4.1.2 now. And I don't know the reason why they wouldn't be updated to 4.2. Yeah, I don't either. It's actually kind of aggravating. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe those lock screen widgets just take up so much resources. Or if it's a space issue, maybe? But then, you know, lighten your OS up, Google. Shrim some fat. I don't know if it's a space issue. I mean, the thing that's funny is because when you go from 4.0 to 4.1, there's much more of a jump, I think, than 4.1 to 4.2. There's much more of a performance increase. There's a lot of under the hood stuff that happened. So I could almost see them saying this isn't going from 4.0 to 4.1. From 4.1 to 4.2 is a little bit more of a disappointment. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, I actually really like the new clock on the lock screen. It's just really clean and clear and readable. Not that the stock Google lock screens have ever been particularly terrible, but the new one is really nice to look at in 4.2. And it will be available in 0.5% of Android devices, I'm sure. We'll look at those Android stats at the beginning of next month and it will be like that. This is the frustrating thing, you know, and the recurring thing. But if you have an older phone and you want to get to a newer version of Android, CyanogenMod 10, they've gone to a stable release. So it's not technically 4.2, but they're working to integrate 4.2 stuff into CyanogenMod 10. This is what I'm running on my HTC One X on AT&T and I endorse CyanogenMod. I think it's really good and really awesome and I'm really happy with it. Apparently there's some drama today, like the person who owns CyanogenMod.com is like not giving it back to them and was like being a jerk. So now they've moved over to CyanogenMod.org instead. Yeah, they got a problem. I guess there's a little domain fight there. Someone got a little bit tiffy. I'm pretty happy with the CM10 on the One X. This is the reason I'm not buying a Nexus 4 is I can keep my LTE and have something relatively close to the stock experience. I like what CyanogenMod does on top of Android 4.1 instead of just offering a straight stock AOSP ROM. And there's still some bugs, whatever, they're still working on it. It's really awesome and I'm not going to buy a Nexus 4. Not gonna do it. It wouldn't be prudent. Vlad, why do you have no interest in the Nexus 4? If I may ask. Because the LTE thing I think is much less of an issue for you in the UK than it is for us here in the US. I just want to say with respect to what Dieter is talking right now, it's like I'm not gonna think about the big pink elephant. I'm not gonna think about the giant pink elephant. And the only thing in his mind is like, man there's a pink elephant in my imagination. So yeah Dieter, I'm sure you're not gonna buy a Nexus 4. I totally buy that. I'll just buy the Nexus 4 bumper. How about that? How ridiculous is it that they're selling a bumper? Dude, seriously, I don't think I've got enough credit. I don't think enough people have written about my foresight when I was bitching about the glass back. Like, as soon as the Nexus 4 was announced, I was first to jump on that bandwagon and say this glass back is trouble. And then the garage company reviewed it. Yeah, and I mean that's just one of them. The future is laden with cracked glass backs on Nexus 4s and people cursing their luck and thinking this could have been some sort of high end plastic and I would have been happy and probably just kind of cringed at LG's random patterns and stylings. But I mean, okay, let's answer Dan's question, why I'm not so psyched about Nexus 4. I think I also kind of addressed it when I was enthusing about the Windows Phone 8X. And I mean this also kind of speaks to the fact that as mobile reviewers, we're not regular people. We're different, worse in a lot of ways. I don't know if I agree with you. I think Chris is the prototypical mobile phone buyer and Chris is the perfect example. Okay, but then again, I don't think that I am. Because like the fact of the matter is you run for all these Android phones. You get to use them for a week, two weeks, a month, whatever. And then you get kind of bored with them and then you move on, etc. Whereas most people have to make these choices for months and months at an end. Again, if you're Chris Ziegler, he's dope because he freaking buys things on impulse. He's like, he feels the wind in his beard and then he's bought a new phone. It's like that. I don't know what to say about it. But okay, this point is meandering. What I'm really trying to say is I've just grown bored of Android to some extent. What I've really grown bored of is non-stock Android and basically Sense is my nemesis at this point. And it's the thing that drives me nuts because the Droid DNA would be so much more of a fascinating and captivating device to me if it was running 4.2 stock, which again, the Nexus 4 runs, but I've also had time with the Optimus G, which is essentially the Nexus 4. And it's like, am I going to be thrilled and excited about the Optimus G with stock Android? To some extent. I mean, obviously I prefer it, but it's just an experience that I've had already. This is why I'm psyched to see Windows Phone develop and grow and do some more interesting things because that is a chance to look at something that's truly new. This is why I had a digression about the iPhone 5 because I've been away from iOS for a while, which again marks me out as being particularly different since everybody's freaking using that. And it's probably why I'm going to be fascinated by the new BlackBerry devices when they release in February 2014. You go first and we're rooting for you. Yeah, no, I see your argument, Vlad. And it's, you know, we've been teasing Chris today, but I kind of wish he was here to talk about his using the Lumia 920 because yesterday he called himself a Windows Phone 8 convert because he's like, you know, perfectly happy with the Lumia 920 right now. But yeah, I mean, it's a different experience, I guess, and, you know, it's not the same old Android and iOS run of the mill type of thing that we've seen for a couple years now. Yeah. But, okay, let's actually get to the topic that was on top of our topic list, which is Apple and HTC, because that was not the week, but the weekend's absolute biggest news. Yeah. I was on the phone with Sanofsky. Sanofsky is the biggest news. Really? Yeah. Well, in our mobile world, Apple and HTC are the biggest news. So for the mobile show, Apple and HTC. So Saturday night I'm at a wedding, at the reception for this wedding, and my phone just starts blowing up because Apple and HTC decide to announce that they've reached a 10-year licensing agreement and settled all of their patent litigation. Around the world? Yeah. Around the world, and they had to, of course, announce it at, you know, whatever it was. Our post went up at 10 after 9, so they must have announced it just around 9 PM. So it's... Thanks. Thanks, guys. But it's a pretty monumental thing, it's one of the first agreements that we've seen between Apple and an Android manufacturer, and the fact that it's for so long, it also means that HTC will be able to use some of Apple's patented things in its devices, those things that Samsung's not allowed to use, like slide to unlock and bounce scrolling. I'm not sure bounce scrolling was covered, but I know slide to unlock was definitely licensed to HTC. So that makes for a very interesting competitive future between HTC and the other Android manufacturers. Yeah. I think I spotted a report today from Samsung, one of the Samsung higher-ups, saying that Samsung doesn't intend to follow in HTC's footsteps and agree a licensing deal with Apple. I think that was based on a relatively aggressive translation. And so it's... Yeah. That's what I had... what we had determined, I think. But even if... whether legit or not, it's like the most unsurprising thing ever. Yeah, I mean, they fought in court because they wouldn't license. Yeah. I mean, it's like, oh, it's like Samsung was just waiting for HTC to set the market, and now it's like, yeah, okay, we'll go ahead and do a deal. That's why I'm glad. It's a billion-dollar lawsuit, whatever. Yeah, they were just biding our time. We're just waiting for you guys to do it, and now we'll do a deal. I mean, obviously, they won't. But I think this is really significant because it does actually set the tone for the others. Again, Samsung is growing into Android's exception. And because of its size and because of its vertical integration and all those things, Samsung is kind of a unique company. But LG isn't in Samsung's position, for example. Sony certainly isn't in Samsung's position. And those companies are the ones that stand to be next in Apple's firing line. I don't think that Apple is suing them yet, but I'm sure even Apple has a limited number of lawyers. So now that they're freed up from HTC, who's to say they won't be nudging and poking? Those companies... and that's what Microsoft did. For a long time, Microsoft was suing guys like HTC and Motorola and demanding royalty payments for certain Microsoft patents. And now Microsoft has a full freaking portfolio. Pretty much every Android manufacturer is paying some royalty fees. And the thing that people have been saying is Android is free as far as Google is concerned. You get the source code from Google, but then you actually end up having to pay a whole bunch of licenses fees to Microsoft and now to Apple. Yeah. But I mean, this is how it should work, right? There'll be a little bit of fighting in the courts and then you just say, you know what? How about we spend our time not arguing about this? And HTC in particular, they actually had some of their devices held up. They couldn't sell... what was it? It was the Evo 4G LTE. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, it's in there. Just get this behind them and I'm really happy. Now what will be really interesting, Vlad, you mentioned LG. I think that if we see license deals that cover Nexus devices, like the Galaxy Nexus or the Nexus 4, that would be very interesting because that would sort of be... stock Android is not cool with Apple's patents. Yeah, it implicates Android itself, yes. Yeah. Rather than the skins. Yeah. I mean, just because, for example, okay, if LG decides, okay, we'll pay a licensing fee and that will cover the Nexus 4, for example, that just means LG thinks it's in danger of losing a court case, let's say, where it needs to prove those things. But that doesn't necessarily prove that Android itself infringes. Does Apple have a suit against LG right now? I don't think it does. I don't think it does either. I think Motorola is the only one that's left that Apple has an active suit against, and that's very interesting. Well, yeah. I think the question might be, does Apple even know if it has a suit against LG? If you... Okay, assuming Apple's press relations people actually spoke to anybody and responded to email and you reached out to them, do you think they would actually know off the top of their head who they're suing and who they're not suing? Or if you said, hey, guys, do you have a lawsuit against Sony? They'd be like, yeah, let me just get to legal and find out. Maybe they have a post-it on their IMAX of who is currently in legal litigation with them right now. Yeah, it's like, dude, we need to take care of ASUS first of all. We're going to have a medical order here before we get to LG and all of that. I really do think this is kind of like the dark and unpleasant side of our business because the whole patent stuff is just so tiresome. I say this as somebody who studied law for a long time. I know there are actually fascinating areas of law. You might not believe it, but it's true. Patent law isn't one of them. The intellectual property should be. When I first went into law and started studying it, I was like, oh, dude, IP law must be the greatest. You get to talk about technology, telecoms, media, all of these glamorous and interesting things. You're on the cutting edge, yada, yada, yada. Then look at the things we're stuck talking about. It's like Apple got a patent on the rounded rectangle. It happened. It literally happened. It happened, and I'm reading a headline, and I'm rubbing my eyes and not believing it. I'm like, wait, Neil, I wrote this, so it's not a joke. That's it. I've got nothing else to contribute to that. As far as the lawsuits that are left, there is definitely the lawsuit with Motorola, which is immensely interesting because of Motorola's very close ties to Google itself now. We still don't really know what's going to happen with that. I'm not sure what that was, Dieter, but I'm just going to... I'm channeling Josh Topolsky here. I've got some problem with my hair, so I'm just checking to make sure that it doesn't look completely ridiculous, only partially. I would check as well, but my video feed looks completely gelatinated at the moment. Yeah. Vlad, I could tell that you have hair. Yeah. Which is a change. Well, yes. You've been growing that out. It looks very nice. I've made a complete recovery from my haircut. We don't really know what's going to happen yet with Motorola and Apple, but I think that will be... As Vlad just said how uninteresting all of this is, I think if anything, it will be interesting to watch to see what happens with those two. That's true. The drama and the soap opera that we also like to create around these things is going to sustain the story anyway. But speaking of soap operas, let us actually talk about Steven Sidovsky and his departure because Dieter says that is still a major, major thing that happened over the weekend. Yeah. So he's out. He left on the 12th, pretty much effective immediately, although he's going to hang around and help if needed. He's pulling a fourth stall. That's actually exactly right. People inside the company tell us that one of the big reasons that he's leaving is he just doesn't play well with others. He likes his silo control things and doesn't like to collaborate. That's what Microsoft needs to do now. They need Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 and SkyDrive and Windows Live or whatever they're calling it these days and Xbox and I don't even know what else. They all need those things to talk to each other and interoperate and share stuff more so than they do now. If he's not the person to help make that happen, then I guess he's got to go. Julie Larson Green is taking over for Windows and what's really interesting for us on the mobile side is Andy Lees who has sort of unceremoniously been taken off of the Windows Phone team to work on a generic cross Windows Phone 8 Windows project that was never very well defined is now back and his new job is what now? I think Windows corporate development and strategy. So he's sort of back in the mix as a player at Microsoft. I just want to say corporate development and strategy is perfectly defined and everybody from my grandmother to my niece, my five-year-old niece perfectly understands and grasps the width and breadth of that position. Jesus. Also, titles like – You have totally eaten your Wheaties this morning. You're just an angry, angry man. No, dude, if I eat Wheaties, I would be jogging all day. I'm afraid of carbs. If you have an acre in for like cereal like working fiber chunks or Wheaties or whatever, do you ever crave carbs? Is there like a non-carb food? No, but that's the point. Carbs make you crave carbs. Vegetarians eating soy and pretending it's a burger, do you do anything like that? You pretend that something is wheat? No, I never pretend. I keep it real. He keeps it real. He keeps it raw. Why are we talking about Vlad's diet again? Because Vlad tweeted this afternoon a picture of cauliflower and broccoli and said, this is as yummy as glazed donuts to me. No, it really is. It really is. If your palate adjusts to not be completely destroyed by eating sugar and donuts or whatever, you taste flavors that other people don't taste. Regular food is oversaturated with sugar. Wait, I was going to talk about Andilead. All I wanted to say was I was really happy that Vlad is passionate and angry about things today and then we started talking about cauliflower. That's a good point. Job titles like senior vice president and then another noun after that, like senior vice president something something operations. That is so grammatically busted and horrible. It makes me feel dirty if I ever have to write it in full. Set all that aside. The first thing to say is that Steven Sinofsky was the guy in charge of Windows 8. He got it done. Windows 8 is a product of Steven Sinofsky's work. Let's give the guy credit. He might be a complete and epic asshole to the people he worked with, but the final product of what he produced had a cohesive vision. We don't really know. How can you really assess something as holistic as a desktop OS over a few days or a couple of weeks even? You need to sit down and spend time with it. So we'll see how Windows 8 develops over the long run. To me, I totally agree on the point about Microsoft needing to unite the various strands of its ecosystem and Sinofsky's strong personality and strong need to control things getting in the way of that. He was the man in charge of Windows 8 and Windows 8 was like his baby and it was like a ball and he's clutching it tightly. Whereas what Microsoft is trying to do is take these balls, let's get back to the food metaphors, they're like three balls of mince and you try to splice them and make one giant epic ball of awesomeness. If he's clutching it too tightly and he can't work with the other guys, guys like Joe Belfi are in charge of Windows Phone and whoever's in charge of Xbox Live and those services, that's where the friction comes in. The first things that Steve Ballmer actually remarked about his successor are to me the most instructive pieces of information because he said looking at the technical and the professional requirements for the job, I think she has exactly the qualities that we need. The first quality that he identified was good communication skills and the second was collaborate effectively. The things that he's highlighting as positives in her, like somebody who just broken up with one girlfriend and moved you on to a new one and saying that the new one has these really great qualities, that usually tends to be the things that your girlfriend, which in this case is Steven Sadovsky, was lacking. That's enough analogies for me. The thing is what I would expect to be next for Windows Phone, how would this affect Windows Phone? They did it. They got it on the Windows 8 core. You can't directly take a Windows 8 app and just throw it on to Windows Phone 8. Maybe they'll fix that and move in that direction, but it's actually relatively close based on what they were talking about a build and what I've seen. Even if you can't just directly release it on both platforms at the same time, the skills that you need to make one app now directly translate to the skills to make the other app and you can share assets and it's actually very easy to do one or the other. I'm not sure what this executive shakeup means directly for the future Windows Phone that they haven't already accomplished under Sadovsky's leadership. I just want to say that Andy Lees was the guy who was the head of Kin. Yeah. Oh dude, come on. Don't hold that against him. As somebody who has a massive enormous printer background. Didn't Lees come late to Kin though? Didn't he inherit Kin? I can't remember the timeline. I just want to point out. Dan has an enormous printer in the background on his video feed. Enormous and apparently he uses it every day which makes him a completely evil person. I wouldn't say every day, but it gets used every week. So what I'm saying Dan is you can't hold bad decisions against people. I don't hold that against you too much. So you can't hold that against Andy Lees. Okay, Kin failed. So you move on, it doesn't mean that the guy himself is a complete failure. Well and like you were saying with his extremely nebulous title, we don't really even know how close he'll be to Windows Phone 8 anyways. But yeah, it will be very interesting to see how Windows Phone 8, like you were saying Dieter, how it would have developed parallel with Windows Phone or Windows 8 and if it will become even closer than they are now. The one thing that with Sanofsky is I guess a lot of people really thought him to be Steve Ballmer's successor as CEO. That's not the case. That's pretty interesting. It will be interesting to see who in Microsoft kind of bubbles to the top as maybe possibly the successor to Ballmer. Or maybe Ballmer will just continue to be for eternity. We should, it's funny, we haven't pointed it out, like Windows Phone 8 has launched. We should bring that up. Like the 920, the 8X are on AT&T, what's Verizon got the, I forget what's on every carrier. So the 822 and the 8X, those are going to be in stores on the 15th Verizon, clarify that today. And then also on T-Mobile, the 810. Sprint is going to have phones next year. That's available today actually from T-Mobile. Verizon is going to have a free Windows Phone 8 device by the end of the year, which is fine. Yeah, I mean I guess you know the Verizon has the $100 price point and the $200 price point so the free price point is kind of like the low end cover. So Verizon has definitely got a full Windows Phone 8 spread covering all of the price points that it would expect to cover to match against its Android offerings and of course against the iPhone models that it offers. So how excited are we about this? Chris was very excited. He went out to an AT&T store and bought a Lumia 920. A cyan one. Oh yeah, of course. I will answer that question glad as we get closer to the holiday season and we start to see how the marketing push goes and how sales go as a result of that marketing push. Ah, so you're going to be like a sports commentator. I noticed that. Well no, no, no, no, but no listen. You know, we consistently... Well dude, you're just saying no when you don't even know what I mean. What are you... Okay, go ahead. Let me get my energy out. I was watching the NFL over the weekend and the thing that I was consistently noticing is that... The Vikings are awesome and totally pants the Lions. That's what I noticed over the weekend. Yeah dude, Adrian Peterson man. Amazing. But the thing I was also noticing is that sports commentators love to wait until a decision's consequences are fully apparent and then they give their expert opinion on it. So they wait until... This is what I thought you were going to say and let me tell you why you're wrong. Go ahead. Because our consistent complaint about Windows Phone 8 is that the app ecosystem isn't there either in terms of breadth but especially in terms of depth and apps feeling on par with what's available on the other platforms. And Microsoft is doing everything they can to solve that problem but the thing that will actually solve that problem are sales numbers, are devices in people's hands and people demanding from these app developers to make better and more apps for Windows Phone 8. And the only way those sales numbers are going to go up is if we see real engineering marketing push. So we've got a chicken and egg problem here but it's a classic ecosystem conundrum. But one of the ways that we have seen that ecosystem conundrum get solved is Verizon, our AT&T carriers and the manufacturers or in this case Microsoft working together on a unified awesome powerful and huge holiday marketing push to actually sell devices. And if that happens then by the end of the holiday season we will see more devices, more market share and that will drive more apps. So am I excited? I'll be excited if it's able to lead to a more robust ecosystem. And I think it could. I think they're doing everything they can. We'll just have to wait and see what the marketing looks like. And I had another point and I lost it but that's because I was thinking about sports again. Let me just say your first point was so damn good that I have no comeback. So to follow up with Dieter's point, yesterday at the D&A launch event I had a little bit of time to chat with Verizon's CMO and I asked her, you know Verizon's marketing push in the holidays is always very large and it can be the type of thing that either makes it a device succeed or makes a device fail. And I asked you know what's it going to be like for Windows Phone 8 and Verizon hasn't really started its marketing campaign yet but she did say that starting when they're available in stores, so I guess tomorrow they're going to be available in stores so we should be seeing some Windows Phone 8 ads from Verizon. And we'll have to see if it's as big of a campaign as obviously the Droid has been and obviously what Verizon's done with Apple ads. I mean Microsoft is promising a big campaign too but like rolling thunder, that was not much. Well that was Nokia right? Yeah I know but what I'm saying is like big promises don't necessarily yield big results. And you know I mean here's the thing, this is a new platform again and I know that apps from Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 carry over and I know it's been around for a couple of years but in terms of what apps are actually able to do with native code now and like games able to get ported to it or even launching on it originally much more quickly, it's a whole new platform that has new possibilities that haven't been exploited on Windows Phone at all because they just weren't there. And I want to see you know I want to see apps, I want an IRC app that can persist in the background. I want you know killer games that appear on Windows Phone the same day they appear on iOS or Windows even. I just want a Starbucks app so I can buy coffee without having to trust a third party sketchy app. So I mean they've built everything they need to do, now they just need to sell the phones and get the virtual cycle and ecosystem going. I can't believe just the sheer dependency that Dan has built up on his smartphone. This guy doesn't have a Starbucks app, I can't get coffee anymore. You don't understand Vlad. I don't know how to exist anymore, can somebody help me? If I don't use my Starbucks app I don't earn my rewards points and then I don't get my free drink. So it's a cycle they've got me sucked in. Dude you know it's not a free drink. I'm totally sucked in. What's that? You know it's not a free drink. Let me have my dream okay. If you actually came to negotiate with people like Starbucks or people like your supermarket and they asked you how much do you want for your data, how much do you want for your shopping habits and you were going to sell them. You could get so much more than freaking a few cents on every purchase so then eventually it adds up to a free drink in quotation marks. You're being ripped off with all these loyalty cards. I mean think about it, it's a loyalty card. You're the loyal one. It's a convenience factor and the stupid rewards are whatever. The truth is that Dan will only get coffee from Starbucks. He hates local businesses, he hates entrepreneurs, he hates the local coffee shop, some mom and pop place. He wants corporations to win. Dan you and I are socialists but he is a hardcore capitalist. He's one percent. On the one percent they have a Starbucks app on their phone. They just deserve it right? It's sitting on his iPhone right next to his FogRye app just right there. I don't even need to open the app. The Passbook opens it for me. Think about that. I walk into the Starbucks and Passbook opens my app for me and it's like go spend this money on sugary loaded over roasted coffee that doesn't really taste that good. How are you not horrified by the stuff you're just saying right now? It's like oh hey it's the apocalypse. It's coming. Let's all laugh at it. Maybe that's the realistic part. The other thing we found out this week is that apparently Arabica coffee is going to go extinct because of global warming within the next 80 years. This is a crisis. This is a for real crisis. Arabica isn't the only type of coffee but it's the higher quality. It's the one that matters. Nobody wants to drink Robusta. Come on. Oh dude I can't believe how much reaction we wrote about this. First of all I'm like wait we write about coffee now? This is within our remit? I would have been very mad if we did not cover this story. People have picked it up on Facebook and on Twitter and there's hundreds and hundreds of comments and everybody is alarmed about it and all of these things. Whereas if we do an article about landfill in Southeast Asia you'll get like six comments and five other people will be like well that sucks. Is Detroit DNA coming out again? Before we wrap up I do want to talk about FaceTime on AT&T. I just want to point out that SweetBrit in the chat, was that who it was? Yeah SweetBrit in the chat wanted to say that Dan's so Republican he installed the latest Romney on his phone. That makes me happy. I love a bat pun man. So AT&T has backtracked just the tiniest amount. I wish we had Chris here to rant about this because he wrote a really good article about how AT&T's flip flop on FaceTime over cellular should scare you. They're allowing iPhones not on Mobile Share to do FaceTime over cellular but it's still twitchy. It's not every single plan. They just stepped it back just a little bit. In response to not direct regulatory pressure but the threat of a possibility of it, it shows that us complaining about FaceTime on the mobile podcast doesn't actually fix anything. It's insane how arbitrary these restrictions are because before it was you had to be on a mobile share plan. It didn't matter which device you owned. If it was FaceTime compatible and was on a mobile share plan you could use it over cellular. Now it's like well only if you have an LTE device but you don't have to be on LTE to use it, you can still be on an HSPA plus network or connection and use it but it's got to be an LTE device. So it's like sorry 4S users who are not on mobile share and sorry for iPhone users who are on grandfathered unlimited plans because if you're on an unlimited plan you're just not allowed. Well I'm assuming that arbitrary restriction is because they're still afraid that their network is going to fall down because there's just flat out more iPhone 4S users out there than there are iPhone 5 users. So it's not about LTE, it's about just limiting the numbers. Although I must admit as well as Dan explained everything I am completely at a loss of what the hell is going on over there. I have no idea. I would just like to note that how many carriers offer the iPhone across the world and there's one carrier that has a problem with it and it's AT&T and no other carrier is having a problem with FaceTime. Go America! Yeah. Okay, nobody enjoyed that. But actually I just wanted to squeeze in a couple of observations from the UK before Dieter wraps this up in his expert style. First of all on the subject of Passbook which Dan brought up with the Starbucks application and that's cool that it happens for you automatically Dan. I'm really happy for you and I'm going to let you finish buying that coffee. But actually Passbook in the UK is one of the saddest things you'll ever see. There is like four compatible things and I use zero of them. I want to say that it's pretty damn sad in the US too because I use it for Starbucks and when we reviewed iOS 6 at the time the only thing that was available for Passbook was a Walgreens app and so I have that installed as well. But yeah, it's pretty pathetic. Yeah, I mean it's barren at the moment. It's just atypical of Apple but then so is Maps so whatever. Hey man, Nokia Maps coming to iOS. We did not add that to our list, did we? So they rebranded it here, they bought here.com. They're doing crowdsourcing for their Maps data which seems like amazing but Google's been doing that forever and Waze is doing that and there's OpenStreetMaps and everybody's doing that. But yeah, no then it's coming to iOS is potentially really great because Nokia's mappings is really good. I just hope they get it released in relatively short order. So actually we've been doing this series, this mind-blowing series of living with things which is right now focused around home theater stuff so like Xbox 360, the PS3, Amazon devices, etc. and I'm thinking we need to do one with living with Nokia Maps because I actually, I've tried it. I've always tried it occasionally and given it a shot during reviews and whatever but I've never sat down and actually used it extensively the way that I've used Google Maps and had to rely on it on a daily basis. I'm sure the same would be fascinating to do with respect to iOS 6. Now that this is like a pitch meeting for future features but I do feel like sometimes we kind of, you know, you kind of need to spend some extensive time to really appreciate these things because all I ever hear about Nokia Maps is yes, it's good and it's been reliable enough when I've used it on occasion but I'm still kind of wary. Like I wouldn't buy a phone and think this is as good as Google Maps. Would you guys say that's the case? I think we're so used to Google Maps. In my testing in terms of accuracy and directions and everything else, Nokia Maps has been as good as Google Maps. I've had no problems there. I've had some unfamiliarity with the UI and I kind of don't love it and there's a problem specifically on the Lumia 920 where like the old Bing Maps was still there in a weird way. Anyway, so I think if you were to live with Nokia Maps for a month, I think you would probably find that you would get used to the UI, you'd feel pretty good about it and you may get really into stuff like the local Scouts of Windows 8 thing but I forget what Nokia's local, like they've got their augmented reality app. City Lens. City Lens, yeah. I doubt you would find it as good as, I don't know, say Yelp in certain areas. No, Yelp is garbage. Yelp can't even find carrots. Yelp is garbage everywhere except for San Francisco. Yelp is amazing in San Francisco. Yelp can't find carrots. I'm not even going to try looking for Watermelon. Forget Yelp, man. Is the Watermelon too sweet? Yelp would be a done. I mean, Watermelon must have way too much sugar, man. No, it doesn't. That's the thing. It's really, really sweet but it's actually very low in calories and sugar. It's amazing. Watermelon is utterly amazing. What do you do with the seeds? It's so nutritious. Eat them. Yeah? All right. Aren't you afraid of a Watermelon growing in your belly? Man up, man. Eat the seeds. So I just want to say that it's going to be a very amusing day when I download and install a Nokia Maps app on my iPhone. I just find that very... Just to clarify, is it now just called here or is it Nokia here? I don't recall. I think it's just here. I mean, you know, it's from Nokia so it's Nokia here. Chris put it yesterday. I was saying that and he's like, well, just think of it as the NAB tech app. Yeah, but I mean, I've used a whole bunch of different third party map solutions on iOS and they're all pretty terrible. Yeah. So far. Right. And so if they can, you know, make this feel... I think it's just called here Maps. Oh, I don't know if it's called here Maps. Why have the here at all if you just still call it Maps? I mean, are you really that worried about what is... Yes, damn it. I've said I'm going to rant about everything today so I'm worried. Okay. But the other thing I was just going to throw in quickly is something I could have commented on a couple of weeks back and I was missing from last week's podcast which was LTE in London here in the UK. Because I managed to get an LTE, you know, do a little round the city journey and test it out and see how it works. What LTE handset did you get? You broke up there for a second. Yeah, I broke up for a second. I broke up with a good friend from EE. It was a Galaxy S3 but, you know, they support the iPhone 5, the Lumia 920, etc. And they have the HTC One XL, honestly. The One X, One XL, One X Plus, Xperia T, Xperia TL, Nokia A20, Lumia A22, these guys are like... Yeah, I have no words left to describe them. But anyway, seriously. LTE in London is good, bordering on glorious, depending on where you are. And completely irrelevant, again, depending on where you are. So if you are where I live, in a perfectly civilized, lovely, leafy area of North London, this is just nothing. I mean, the best I can get is 3G Plus, whatever the heck that is. To actually do a bit of commuting, move around. But okay, so I'm in Mosel Hill, but as soon as I start approaching Highgate, I get reception and then it jumps from like 3 and 4 megabit, which is actually kind of low compared to the 3 network. I jump from that, from 3 to 4 megabit, to like 19 down and 17 up. And speed test starts flying. I mean, just literally flying. And I'm like, wow. That's when it starts becoming fun to just run the speed test. Yeah, I'm not kidding. It's like, usually I run a speed test and I go and do and think about something else. It's like making tea. That's how it is. Whereas with this thing, it's like you tap on speed test and you look outside and you look down and it's already done. And as you move into particularly areas of good coverage in the city, the highest speeds I got were like 36, 38 megabits down and something like 20 up, which is just crazy on a phone. And I'm really starting to appreciate why you guys are so nuts about LTE. And I can tell you that two weeks ago, I was saying people here in the UK, we're going to be okay with the fact that it doesn't have LTE. And the vast majority of people here are going to be perfectly fine with it because EE's price plans are not great. Its coverage is not great. Its bandwidth or rather the frequency at which it operates isn't great for penetration into buildings. So you won't be covered everywhere you go outside and some buildings you go inside the office and you lose your super fast connectivity. So there's a whole heap of things standing in the way. But when you do get that little boost of LTE, man, it's like primordial man tasting his first refined sugar. It's nuts. It's just a rush. Which Vlad will not eat. That's right. But you know, it's good. There are just a whole bunch of caveats at the moment. It will be interesting to see how the network in the UK will handle load as more people get on it. Because those speeds that you're saying, we see them from time to time in the US. But most of the time if you're on Verizon's LTE network, which is pretty broad and fairly well loaded at this point, you don't usually see 20 up and 20 down. But you see more like 13 down and 7 or 8 or 9 up, which is still pretty good. By the way, come on. Yeah, I mean compare that to what you experience in Avdo or HSPA. It's like shhh. Oh yeah, when it hands off down to 3G, I just pretty much want to just put my phone away and give up because Verizon CDMA service is so slow. And just one other addendum I wanted to throw in. And I was listening to this on the BBC, which is actually that apparently development in Africa with mobile telephones, first of all, sales of phones in Africa are like going off the chain. I mean I'm sure they're like 2G really basic simple phones, but everybody needs a phone nowadays because of mobile payments and things like that. They facilitate things which aren't possible and connectivity and all of these things, which isn't that fascinating. But the thing that I picked up from this BBC report was actually that quite a few carriers in Africa might completely skip 3G and just start building out 4G. And this is something I found cute about Bulgaria's broadband rollout because we never bothered with dial-up and DSL and all of these things. We just jump straight to like fiber optic connections and big fat pipes and all of these things, which is why I have 50 megabit at home in the most rural part of Bulgaria. And this is, I don't know, I just really enjoy the idea of people in Africa going from like 2G where everything is like text-based. Like I'll send you a payment text, I'll send you a Facebook message text, and all of a sudden like 4G droid DNA is dropping out of the fucking sky. I'm sorry for swearing. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Get that technology. On that beautiful note, I am going to wrap up the Verge mobile show for this week. If you want to follow us on Twitter where we do occasionally swear, you can. I'm at backlandblatt. Vlad is at VladSavov. Dan is at DC. Sefer is spelled with an E-I. Chris is not here is at ZPower, and if you want to tell him that you missed him on the show you can, but I recommend that you do so with a photo of a cyan colored phone. We'll be back. week which day who knows we'll see how we feel we're not beholden anybody we're boldly you are viewers but whatever okay goodbye thanks for watching makes cuts now
 Do anyone want to actually look at the site and see?
 We're live.
 Vlad, welcome.
 That was amazing.
 Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show where we talk about mobile technology, mobile industry,
 and the colors of smartphones.
 This is episode 25 for the week of November 12th and I am Dieter Bohn.
 I'm Vlad Savo.
 Oh my god.
 And I'm perfectly in sync with Dan Seyfert.
 Yeah, and we're a little bit of a train wreck.
 Yeah, I've disrupted everything.
 I'm leaving.
 I'm gone.
 You are, yeah.
 We're having some awesome pixelation on your video, but that's okay.
 Oh, dude.
 I'm just looking at it now.
 It's kind of going up and down.
 It's like I'm the anonymous member of the podcast.
 Yeah I can't read your lower third right now, but we know who you are and where you are.
 Yeah I'm the anonymized for his own safety.
 Yeah I'm the representative internet troll in today's podcast taking the place of Chris
 Ziegler, who I usually nominate as a troll.
 Yeah.
 He was in absentee today in protest.
 So the most important mobile news of the week is that in Skyfall, James Bond thankfully
 only used his Sony Xperia TL phone for like four seconds.
 Great.
 Yeah.
 Spoiler alert.
 I mean come on man.
 I haven't seen it yet.
 What?
 Oh man, there's so much I want to talk about with this movie.
 I purposely did not read your forum post on it because...
 Yeah there is a very long rant that I posted in the forums about the movie and I recommend
 you go read it.
 Yeah I think it's the Xperia TX.
 Is it the TX?
 Is that what it is?
 I got that wrong.
 I think you guys have the TL in the United States.
 Yeah the TL is the AT&T model.
 Right so there's three different names which are almost identical for a phone that is pretty
 much identical.
 Yeah.
 Four differences.
 Anyway.
 It's terrible.
 I don't want to talk about it.
 It's identically disappointing.
 Yeah that's a good way to put it.
 But actually on the topic of the biggest news, I was looking at a topics list and I was taking
 this...
 Yeah you were trolling me hard on me with this.
 I just put it together in an order that made a little bit of sense but I'm not making a
 huge judgement call here.
 We can start wherever you want Vlad.
 You want to start talking about BBM?
 You can start talking about BBM.
 Oh yeah dude, revolution.
 Well it actually is kind of a thing.
 I mean I feel like I should not be the one ranting about this because I feel like Dieter
 you should rant about this.
 But what the heck man.
 Blackberry Messenger, it's for Blackberry 7.
 Yeah they have to.
 So if you don't know what we're talking about is rumors announced that there's a new version
 of Blackberry Messenger that will offer free voice calls over Wi-Fi.
 It doesn't look like there needs to be any carrier involvement because it's over Wi-Fi.
 And you know it's an interesting and useful feature.
 And they're making it available on Blackberry 7 devices, earlier devices not so much and
 they haven't said anything I don't think about Blackberry 10.
 I mean if it's not on there that's ridiculous.
 And yeah I mean that's kind of cool.
 So maybe I shouldn't share this but I'm going to.
 We were like okay well we should test this thing out.
 Who on the Verge staff has a Blackberry that we can, we need at least two people with Blackberries
 on the Verge staff with active BBM accounts and active data to test this.
 And it was like crickets.
 Apparently the minimum of two people was two more than we actually have at our disposal.
 The other thing is RIM announced that they're going to launch Blackberry, they're going
 to have a launch event for Blackberry 10 on January 30th and presumably they'll actually
 be releasing it in different areas of the world shortly thereafter although they won't
 say what.
 I just hope it's not another one of these we're launching and it doesn't mean anything
 kind of events like we've seen with Windows phones so often.
 Which it pretty much is guaranteed to be.
 We'll see.
 I don't know.
 The one thing I don't expect to see is January 30th comes, Torsten Heinz takes the stage
 and he's like here's a Blackberry 10 device, all touch, here's our Blackberry 10 device,
 physical keyboard.
 He'll show both of them, that's fine.
 But he's not going to say pre-order today, shipping next week.
 He's not going to do the Apple way of launching a product which is the thing he should be
 doing.
 But anyway, seriously.
 I think I trolled myself by calling it BBM revolution.
 Because the thing that I was saying isn't the biggest news story which a lot of people
 might consider it to be the biggest news story.
 Is Apple and HTC settling their patent disputes?
 But I am sick and tired of all this legal stuff.
 We'll come to it.
 I mean it's significant, it's important but it's not the most fascinating news.
 It's not the thing that everybody's been talking about.
 The thing that everybody has been talking about is the Nexus 4 going on sale.
 Yes, and what a mess that is.
 Oh my, what a mess that was.
 I mean I wasn't all that fascinated by it.
 I wasn't one of those guys who was chomping at the bit to buy one.
 But it was such a fascinating experience for me to witness the guys who were.
 Specifically one of them is on today's podcast, Mr. Seaford.
 So let me tell you about my position with the Nexus 4.
 So I was really eager to see it go on sale and I was thinking maybe I'll buy one, maybe
 I won't.
 But I hadn't really committed to it.
 And then you know, at noon yesterday when it went on sale in the US and the whole Play
 Store went down, I was actually tied up at an event.
 So I had like no way that I could realistically try to purchase this thing.
 And of course the store goes down and people aren't able to purchase and supposedly it
 sells out so quickly.
 So you know, I'm back in our office a couple hours later and people in our office are saying
 well we're just able to refresh the store page like 40 times in a row and suddenly I'm
 able to buy it.
 So I see two of our other staffers buy them successfully and then I pretty much made it
 a rule that if I'm able to make it show up in the Play Store, I pretty much have to buy
 it.
 So I refreshed the Play Store like 50, 60 times in a row until I got the add to cart
 button and I quickly added to cart and submitted my purchase and now I'm $400 poorer.
 So basically their strategy, you know I was all set to go on a rant about how ridiculous
 is it that Google can't just get a simple Play Store up and running that says out of
 stock order and we'll let you know when stock comes in.
 Like you know, that's insane that they just don't let you buy it if you just need to sit
 there and refresh it.
 But maybe they're secretly geniuses and you wouldn't have bought it if it was just there
 but since it's like gambling, you just got to keep trying.
 That totally worked for me because if it was just like I signed on, it's like oh there
 it is, it's for sale, should I buy it?
 Maybe I wouldn't buy it but because it was like you know, maybe I could get this.
 Oh yeah, I won!
 Congratulations, you just lost $400.
 Yeah!
 Woo!
 But this was the fascinating aspect to me because it was kind of a psychological behavioral
 experiment.
 It's like we've got this thing, we've got it priced at a level where people are really
 going to be eager to buy it anyway and then we'll just introduce scarcity into the equation.
 Like severe and random scarcity, that's the other thing.
 Exactly as Dan says, it's a jackpot.
 It's like yes, I got into this and now I'm pressured.
 I mean, I don't know, it's like a really well executed strategy that you might get from
 an estate agent.
 Like dude, we've got people coming in next so either you pony up all your money right
 now or it's gone.
 You have to deal with it.
 Which is interesting but also I mean, the thing to say is Dan was saying Play Store
 was crashing and coming down lunchtime in the US.
 Play Store was up and down all over the world since the middle of the night since Australia
 and the jokes on Twitter were like, it's called Nexus 4 because they made four units per continent.
 Stuff like that.
 Obviously there were limited quantities, fewer than, well I guess Google and LG just underestimated
 how much demand there would be for this phone.
 I don't know, were there any actual server issues preventing people just getting their
 orders through or was it a shortage of devices?
 There was a bunch of weirdness.
 I think people, especially in the UK I heard that people would have it in their cart and
 then they'd go to check out and it would disappear from their cart.
 So there was definitely some odd things happening there aside from the whole hammering the refresh
 thing that we had going on over here.
 I'm just going to say one more joke that I picked up on Twitter.
 I'm a complete plagiarist today but somebody will say, you know, this would be totally
 embarrassing if Google actually ran cloud services.
 I think I saw that, yeah.
 It's a shame it's not a giant company that runs massive cloud internet services.
 Right, because then it would be totally embarrassing what's happening right now.
 So it was a bit of a sham, but the Nexus 4 is out now, the Nexus 10 is out now.
 You know what it is, they're running their Google Play servers to sell the device off
 of an HSPA network instead of an LTE.
 That must be a problem.
 Yeah, and it's 4G man.
 So to follow up yesterday's insanity with the online orders, today here in the US T-Mobile
 stores in select locations in small quantities started selling the device at store.
 And how do we know that then?
 Well we know this, well A, because T-Mobile said it would happen, but we know that it
 was for a fact that they were there because a certain Mr. Chris Ziegler who decided not
 to be on the show today went over to a store and laid down some serious cash for a Nexus
 4 despite the fact that he's hated on it pretty much ever since it's been announced.
 He said he's going to break my kneecaps if I brought this up during the show, so I'll
 be prepared to be in a cast next week.
 I'm home strong.
 I was going to say, the psychology of what Dan did makes perfect sense to me.
 The psychology of what Chris did?
 No idea.
 I can't even begin to explain that.
 Was the Nexus 4 in cyan?
 Is that what the story was?
 You know I knew this was going to happen with Chris because the exact same thing happened
 with the iPhone 5, right?
 He literally was like not going to buy one and then at 4.45 in the afternoon the day
 it was he was like, guys I'm going to walk over to the AT&T store and he walked over
 to the AT&T store and bought one and came back with one.
 So I'm not shocked at the least bit.
 And then he bought a Lumia 920.
 Yeah, and he's using a Lumia 920 now that he just bought.
 Can I just digress on the iPhone 5 for a minute?
 Like a quick minute?
 Sure.
 Thank you.
 I don't think we're really going to stop you, so.
 Yeah, I mean thanks for the permission.
 I appreciate it.
 I just want to say I've been using the iPhone 5 for about a week, not because I actually
 prefer it or want to.
 I'm being forced to for completely professional reasons, you understand.
 But I'm on board.
 I like this phone and the other thing is I haven't used iOS, I've used it on the iPad
 for a while, but I haven't used it on the phone for a while and it's so kind of cozy
 and comforting to know that every single thing in my life has an app.
 I'm talking my supermarket has an app, my supermarket's loyalty scheme has an app, EasyJet
 has an app.
 That's kind of okay.
 British Airways has an app.
 It kind of sucks.
 But it's like every single thing that I can think of.
 Dictionary.com has an app.
 And they're not all great.
 They're not all perfect.
 Is the broccoli app any good?
 What about the...
 Dude, I've got to tell you the deficit of like raw vegetable search engines.
 I've got to know Vlad, is there like a social network app where you share your raw carrots
 with other fans of raw carrots?
 No, do you see my relationship with carrots I think has been way over.
 That's called Grindr.
 Carrot gram.
 Seriously, carrots have quite a bit of sugar in them, so I'm controlling my intake of carrots.
 Okay, all right, I just want that on the record that Vlad is controlling his intake of carrots
 not because it's big enough or because of the taste, but because there's a little too
 much sugar in carrots.
 Yeah, I mean I have to like for example yesterday I ate a pomegranate.
 That's really sugary, but it's amazing.
 So it's like my sugar intake.
 And this digression really is not comfortable.
 So we'll just move right along.
 All I'm saying is with the iPhone, the distinction to me is a qualitative one where Android has
 a really fully fleshed out ecosystem and it feels robust, right?
 You get apps for pretty much everything you need.
 But with Apple there's this extra step with iOS where you just know it's going to happen.
 And the other thing is Skype just this week got updated to support the iPhone 5 and we're
 kind of like, whoa, it's about time.
 And the iPhone 5 just came out.
 And it's like this is the pace at which change gets, or rather developers work to adapt to
 change in the Apple ecosystem.
 It's just so rapid.
 So it's like iPhone 5 comes out, it's a new size, new resolution, but you know that within
 a month or two everybody just knows how important that app is to them and they update.
 They do that.
 And they're just a really comforting and reassuring thing for consumers.
 And this is part of the reason why we keep hopping on about this ecosystem action with
 Windows Phone.
 I'm starting to hate the word ecosystem now because it's starting to lose its meaning,
 but this is what it means to me and I wanted to share that with you guys.
 And now we can talk about the Droid DNA.
 Oh, you want to talk about the Droid DNA?
 We can talk about Windows.
 No, let's talk about the Droid DNA.
 No, we should.
 Droid DNA, Dan, you have held it in, oh my god.
 Can you get an actual picture on there?
 Like an image instead of a sense4?
 Because sense4 is taking me sad.
 No, I think sense4 is what you want.
 You're putting me on the spot.
 Sense4 is never what I want.
 Get the thing in the camera.
 Why are you looking down at it?
 I'm trying to.
 Let me do one of these.
 It's like I've never used one before.
 All I have are screenshots on here, so it's actually pretty lame.
 But let's do...
 If you're listening to the audio version of the podcast, you're missing...
 Here's the Droid DNA.
 It's really thin for what it's size, but obviously the star of the show is the 5-inch 1080p display.
 It's like 440 ppi.
 I don't know if this will actually focus that close, but you really can't see the pixels.
 There's no pixels, and the viewing angles are insane.
 It's Super LCD 3.
 It looks like the image is literally floating on the surface there.
 That is nice.
 We've been raving all year about the One X display, and it's Super LCD 2 with 720p, and
 how it's the best mobile display that we've ever seen.
 Even though newer stuff has come out, like the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S3, the One X
 is still the best, but this is better.
 The other thing is, it's 5 inches.
 It's pretty big, as you can see, but it's not as big as you might expect from a 5-inch
 phone.
 I compared it side by side with the One X yesterday, and it's a little bit taller than
 the One X, but it's about the same width.
 Really?
 Yeah, it's about the same, because it's...
 I don't know, it's just so tall and narrow.
 How big is the battery then?
 The battery is 2020 milliamp hours, so it's actually kind of small.
 It's insane to say that a 2000 milliamp hour battery is small these days, but that's the
 fact.
 But yeah, for the screen size and the high resolution...
 Yeah I've got to do some more tests on it, but battery isn't my concern.
 It's super thin though, you can see it's got these tapered edges that make it...
 Let's also mention, and this I think is a big credit for HTC, is that they built the
 wireless charging right into the phone, while it's that thin.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, because you can't access the battery of course.
 The battery door does not come off, so you can't access that.
 So it is nice, but I'm going to hate on this right now.
 If you see this, the bottoms is where the micro USB port is, and look what I have to
 do to access it, because it's a door.
 I can't recall the last phone I tested that had a door on the battery.
 That's really terrible.
 And so it's actually really hard to get out, and it's really hard to put back in as far
 as inconvenience.
 That's why you have wireless charging and wireless syncing, right?
 Yeah, I guess that's what they're trying to push.
 The other thing that I'm super annoyed about is the placement of the power button, which
 is at the top in the middle, which is the worst place to put on a five inch device.
 Well, we discussed this last week.
 You just need to bang it on your forehead.
 The other thing that's really cool, I'm totally giving away all of the stuff that's going
 to be in my review in a couple days, but if you see this flashing, it's got a notification
 light on the back of the phone.
 Oh, that is awesome.
 So there's one on the front, you can see it flash, and then on the back.
 Right there.
 Like, that's one of the coolest things I've seen.
 That's amazing.
 Yeah, so it's kind of...
 I mean, how would you characterize the build quality?
 I mean, I've got a Note 2 back here, and I still feel like it's typical Samsung.
 It's good and fine, but it has that vague feeling of being plasticky.
 Well, this doesn't feel too plasticky.
 It's all soft touch on the back.
 The back is really slate and flat, but it's all soft touch materials.
 It's got this kind of funky, I don't know if you can see it there, grill on the side.
 That's on both sides.
 And you know, it's pretty typical HTC build quality.
 It's not a unibody though, like the One X.
 So it doesn't feel like a unibody, but...
 I mean, it's actually really light too.
 It's 138 grams, which for a phone of this size is lighter than I would expect.
 It's lighter than the 920.
 Dude, you beat me to it.
 It's lighter.
 So for those of you who don't know, the 920 is really heavy, but I'm sure if you're listening
 to this, you do know that.
 But around the verge, we've begun to call that the tank.
 So we just refer to like, you know, oh, I'm checking out the tank, or I'm holding the
 tank, or I'm using the tank today.
 To be fair, the Lumia 820 isn't that much lighter.
 I think it's 160 grams.
 So both of them are really nice, hefty phones.
 And this is why I'm saying credit to HTC, because they're building wireless charging
 right into this device, which is very thin, and the Windows Phone 8X, which again is very
 thin and even smaller.
 It's a 4.3 inch phone.
 So you know, Nokia's excuse that we've packed the most advanced yada yada into this phone,
 therefore we made it the size and weight of a tank, is a bit flaky when you compare it
 to what HTC is achieving.
 I can't find, there's an infographic that's floating around about the weight of the 920.
 And I can't find it, but they quote me, they quote it's a tank, and they quote like, where
 is somebody else?
 And then they have like, oh, you're just being a baby, here's why it's okay.
 And then the first comparison is an iPhone 5 and like two slices of bologna, and that
 equals the weight of the 920, so fuck up.
 Yeah, it was two slices of turkey.
 Two slices of turkey.
 The iPhone 5.
 It's got to be some pretty thick slices of turkey, if you ask me.
 That's what I said.
 So this thing is running a Tegra processor, right?
 No, no, this is a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro.
 Don't spoil any more of the...
 We're just talking about specs.
 We know the specs.
 Yeah, I mean that spec is very nice and sexy and attractive to me, because we all know
 the Snapdragon S4 is eminently more efficient than the Tegra option.
 It doesn't...
 We think the...
 No, we know.
 We know.
 Well, this is the S4 Pro.
 It's a quad core.
 Yeah, I know, but at the same time, it doesn't come with a gimmicky companion core.
 It actually can crank itself down.
 It doesn't have a little buddy coming along for the ride.
 LG on their Optimus G put like an Eco mode thing, and I got an email asking me to talk
 about how Eco mode affects battery life and I don't know, not much.
 They've got a whole bunch of widgets for messing around with the processor, which made me worried
 that maybe it wouldn't be that battery friendly, but I don't have the Optimus G on me anymore,
 but in my time with them, I found the processor to be super fast and it didn't seem like it
 was problematic on battery life.
 This thing has got a huge screen, so who knows?
 It's a screen and it's the high resolution.
 It's pushing around a lot bigger, more pixels.
 We know that like with when the iPad 3 wasn't revealed, that had a really high-res screen
 and Apple added like almost double the battery over the iPad 2 to get the same battery life.
 That could make a difference.
 Obviously, I'm not going to, don't know just yet because I still got to run a few tests
 on it, but that could make it.
 If I can bring it back to the Optimus G, that's a great point that Dita raises.
 I also have zero idea what that Eco mode does on that phone, but I enabled it and it actually
 had endurance which was like, it was significant enough for me to notice that it's longer than
 most phones in that size class, and it was without battery.
 I was like, why is this happening?
 What's so special about it?
 Now that you mentioned the Eco mode and the Core Core S4, that makes perfect sense to
 me, which all in all actually makes the Droid DNA a really compelling option for a whole
 heap of people apart from the whole sense situation.
 Let me quickly mention, the price in the US of 199, and it should be launching this time,
 ProYoters are available now, but it should be launching this time next week, the 21st.
 It's kind of amazing.
 It's really impressive.
 All of us thought it would be higher than that, didn't we?
 I would have expected it, yeah, for the first 1080p phone in the US to be priced at 199
 is pretty significant.
 If we go back a year, HTC was the first company in the US to bring a 720p phone with the resound,
 and that was priced at 299.
 It's offering a lot of specs for the price, that's definitely for sure.
 We just all accepted that phones can be this big and that's okay.
 We're not complaining about phablets.
 We're not complaining about, oh god, this screen is so big, I hate this.
 Why are they forcing these huge phones on us?
 We just sort of, that's how big phones are now.
 That's how it goes.
 Then people are just going to be like, am I watching a rerun of episode 12 or episode
 24 or episode 27?
 We're echoing ourselves.
 You register your complaint once.
 We already know we have HTC.
 You register your complaint, nobody listens, and then you carry on.
 Hey dude, we already know we have HTC in our audience.
 I'm sure they're slaving away on that 4.1 inch super phone that all of us want.
 With a 720p screen or whatever it is, 300 dpi, whatever resolution that is.
 Yeah, seriously, pixel density isn't that important anymore.
 I still want to see and experience that 1080p phone naturally, obviously.
 Once you get past 340 dpi, the 720p resolution of 4.1 inch screen, then it just gets silly.
 You didn't need to say that you can't see the pixels on this thing, Dan.
 I know it's basically lit up paper.
 Because it's that Super LCD, you can see the viewing angles are really great too.
 Looking forward to the review, sir.
 And then you send it over my way.
 Where it won't work.
 Doesn't matter, man.
 No, it will work.
 I don't need it to be a phone.
 What is this outdated idea of using a phone as an actual phone?
 If I needed that, I would get BBM with those awesome voice calls, man.
 And then I would plug it into the Nexus 7 with 3G data.
 Oh, yes.
 Should we review the Nexus 7 with 3G data just this week?
 We don't normally talk about tablets here.
 I ordered the iPad mini with LTE.
 Should be arriving on Friday.
 Are you seriously doing what you're doing right now, Dieter?
 This is really compelling for audio.
 You can probably hear him jumping up and down.
 I'm not excited about going back from right now, but I mean, whatever.
 I'm excited to have a tablet with LTE in it.
 Because my Nexus 7 doesn't.
 I definitely agree with you there, Dieter.
 I like my Nexus 7 at home, but it rarely leaves the house with me just because it's a pain
 to get connected.
 Should we talk about Jelly Bean?
 It's rolled out to, there was the downloads you could get, and I'm pretty sure they're
 rolling out an OTA slowly to some devices, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7.
 I got my OTA today, actually.
 Did you get your OTA?
 Congratulations.
 For my Nexus 7.
 Nexus S and Moto Zoom not getting it.
 So this is kind of insane, if you ask me.
 Because both of those devices are on 4.1, actually 4.1.2 now.
 And I don't know the reason why they wouldn't be updated to 4.2.
 Yeah, I don't either.
 It's actually kind of aggravating.
 Maybe, I don't know.
 Maybe those lock screen widgets just take up so much resources.
 Or if it's a space issue, maybe?
 But then, you know, lighten your OS up, Google.
 Shrim some fat.
 I don't know if it's a space issue.
 I mean, the thing that's funny is because when you go from 4.0 to 4.1, there's much
 more of a jump, I think, than 4.1 to 4.2.
 There's much more of a performance increase.
 There's a lot of under the hood stuff that happened.
 So I could almost see them saying this isn't going from 4.0 to 4.1.
 From 4.1 to 4.2 is a little bit more of a disappointment.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, and you know, I actually really like the new clock on the lock screen.
 It's just really clean and clear and readable.
 Not that the stock Google lock screens have ever been particularly terrible, but the new
 one is really nice to look at in 4.2.
 And it will be available in 0.5% of Android devices, I'm sure.
 We'll look at those Android stats at the beginning of next month and it will be like that.
 This is the frustrating thing, you know, and the recurring thing.
 But if you have an older phone and you want to get to a newer version of Android, CyanogenMod
 10, they've gone to a stable release.
 So it's not technically 4.2, but they're working to integrate 4.2 stuff into CyanogenMod 10.
 This is what I'm running on my HTC One X on AT&T and I endorse CyanogenMod.
 I think it's really good and really awesome and I'm really happy with it.
 Apparently there's some drama today, like the person who owns CyanogenMod.com is like
 not giving it back to them and was like being a jerk.
 So now they've moved over to CyanogenMod.org instead.
 Yeah, they got a problem.
 I guess there's a little domain fight there.
 Someone got a little bit tiffy.
 I'm pretty happy with the CM10 on the One X.
 This is the reason I'm not buying a Nexus 4 is I can keep my LTE and have something
 relatively close to the stock experience.
 I like what CyanogenMod does on top of Android 4.1 instead of just offering a straight stock
 AOSP ROM.
 And there's still some bugs, whatever, they're still working on it.
 It's really awesome and I'm not going to buy a Nexus 4.
 Not gonna do it.
 It wouldn't be prudent.
 Vlad, why do you have no interest in the Nexus 4?
 If I may ask.
 Because the LTE thing I think is much less of an issue for you in the UK than it is for
 us here in the US.
 I just want to say with respect to what Dieter is talking right now, it's like I'm not gonna
 think about the big pink elephant.
 I'm not gonna think about the giant pink elephant.
 And the only thing in his mind is like, man there's a pink elephant in my imagination.
 So yeah Dieter, I'm sure you're not gonna buy a Nexus 4.
 I totally buy that.
 I'll just buy the Nexus 4 bumper.
 How about that?
 How ridiculous is it that they're selling a bumper?
 Dude, seriously, I don't think I've got enough credit.
 I don't think enough people have written about my foresight when I was bitching about the
 glass back.
 Like, as soon as the Nexus 4 was announced, I was first to jump on that bandwagon and
 say this glass back is trouble.
 And then the garage company reviewed it.
 Yeah, and I mean that's just one of them.
 The future is laden with cracked glass backs on Nexus 4s and people cursing their luck
 and thinking this could have been some sort of high end plastic and I would have been
 happy and probably just kind of cringed at LG's random patterns and stylings.
 But I mean, okay, let's answer Dan's question, why I'm not so psyched about Nexus 4.
 I think I also kind of addressed it when I was enthusing about the Windows Phone 8X.
 And I mean this also kind of speaks to the fact that as mobile reviewers, we're not regular
 people.
 We're different, worse in a lot of ways.
 I don't know if I agree with you.
 I think Chris is the prototypical mobile phone buyer and Chris is the perfect example.
 Okay, but then again, I don't think that I am.
 Because like the fact of the matter is you run for all these Android phones.
 You get to use them for a week, two weeks, a month, whatever.
 And then you get kind of bored with them and then you move on, etc.
 Whereas most people have to make these choices for months and months at an end.
 Again, if you're Chris Ziegler, he's dope because he freaking buys things on impulse.
 He's like, he feels the wind in his beard and then he's bought a new phone.
 It's like that.
 I don't know what to say about it.
 But okay, this point is meandering.
 What I'm really trying to say is I've just grown bored of Android to some extent.
 What I've really grown bored of is non-stock Android and basically Sense is my nemesis
 at this point.
 And it's the thing that drives me nuts because the Droid DNA would be so much more of a fascinating
 and captivating device to me if it was running 4.2 stock, which again, the Nexus 4 runs,
 but I've also had time with the Optimus G, which is essentially the Nexus 4.
 And it's like, am I going to be thrilled and excited about the Optimus G with stock Android?
 To some extent.
 I mean, obviously I prefer it, but it's just an experience that I've had already.
 This is why I'm psyched to see Windows Phone develop and grow and do some more interesting
 things because that is a chance to look at something that's truly new.
 This is why I had a digression about the iPhone 5 because I've been away from iOS for a while,
 which again marks me out as being particularly different since everybody's freaking using
 that.
 And it's probably why I'm going to be fascinated by the new BlackBerry devices when they release
 in February 2014.
 You go first and we're rooting for you.
 Yeah, no, I see your argument, Vlad.
 And it's, you know, we've been teasing Chris today, but I kind of wish he was here to talk
 about his using the Lumia 920 because yesterday he called himself a Windows Phone 8 convert
 because he's like, you know, perfectly happy with the Lumia 920 right now.
 But yeah, I mean, it's a different experience, I guess, and, you know, it's not the same
 old Android and iOS run of the mill type of thing that we've seen for a couple years now.
 Yeah.
 But, okay, let's actually get to the topic that was on top of our topic list, which is
 Apple and HTC, because that was not the week, but the weekend's absolute biggest news.
 Yeah.
 I was on the phone with Sanofsky.
 Sanofsky is the biggest news.
 Really?
 Yeah.
 Well, in our mobile world, Apple and HTC are the biggest news.
 So for the mobile show, Apple and HTC.
 So Saturday night I'm at a wedding, at the reception for this wedding, and my phone just
 starts blowing up because Apple and HTC decide to announce that they've reached a 10-year
 licensing agreement and settled all of their patent litigation.
 Around the world?
 Yeah.
 Around the world, and they had to, of course, announce it at, you know, whatever it was.
 Our post went up at 10 after 9, so they must have announced it just around 9 PM.
 So it's...
 Thanks.
 Thanks, guys.
 But it's a pretty monumental thing, it's one of the first agreements that we've seen between
 Apple and an Android manufacturer, and the fact that it's for so long, it also means
 that HTC will be able to use some of Apple's patented things in its devices, those things
 that Samsung's not allowed to use, like slide to unlock and bounce scrolling.
 I'm not sure bounce scrolling was covered, but I know slide to unlock was definitely
 licensed to HTC.
 So that makes for a very interesting competitive future between HTC and the other Android manufacturers.
 Yeah.
 I think I spotted a report today from Samsung, one of the Samsung higher-ups, saying that
 Samsung doesn't intend to follow in HTC's footsteps and agree a licensing deal with
 Apple.
 I think that was based on a relatively aggressive translation.
 And so it's...
 Yeah.
 That's what I had... what we had determined, I think.
 But even if... whether legit or not, it's like the most unsurprising thing ever.
 Yeah, I mean, they fought in court because they wouldn't license.
 Yeah.
 I mean, it's like, oh, it's like Samsung was just waiting for HTC to set the market, and
 now it's like, yeah, okay, we'll go ahead and do a deal.
 That's why I'm glad.
 It's a billion-dollar lawsuit, whatever.
 Yeah, they were just biding our time.
 We're just waiting for you guys to do it, and now we'll do a deal.
 I mean, obviously, they won't.
 But I think this is really significant because it does actually set the tone for the others.
 Again, Samsung is growing into Android's exception.
 And because of its size and because of its vertical integration and all those things,
 Samsung is kind of a unique company.
 But LG isn't in Samsung's position, for example.
 Sony certainly isn't in Samsung's position.
 And those companies are the ones that stand to be next in Apple's firing line.
 I don't think that Apple is suing them yet, but I'm sure even Apple has a limited number
 of lawyers.
 So now that they're freed up from HTC, who's to say they won't be nudging and poking?
 Those companies... and that's what Microsoft did.
 For a long time, Microsoft was suing guys like HTC and Motorola and demanding royalty
 payments for certain Microsoft patents.
 And now Microsoft has a full freaking portfolio.
 Pretty much every Android manufacturer is paying some royalty fees.
 And the thing that people have been saying is Android is free as far as Google is concerned.
 You get the source code from Google, but then you actually end up having to pay a whole
 bunch of licenses fees to Microsoft and now to Apple.
 Yeah.
 But I mean, this is how it should work, right?
 There'll be a little bit of fighting in the courts and then you just say, you know what?
 How about we spend our time not arguing about this?
 And HTC in particular, they actually had some of their devices held up.
 They couldn't sell... what was it?
 It was the Evo 4G LTE.
 Yeah, yeah.
 And so, you know, it's in there.
 Just get this behind them and I'm really happy.
 Now what will be really interesting, Vlad, you mentioned LG.
 I think that if we see license deals that cover Nexus devices, like the Galaxy Nexus
 or the Nexus 4, that would be very interesting because that would sort of be... stock Android
 is not cool with Apple's patents.
 Yeah, it implicates Android itself, yes.
 Yeah.
 Rather than the skins.
 Yeah.
 I mean, just because, for example, okay, if LG decides, okay, we'll pay a licensing fee
 and that will cover the Nexus 4, for example, that just means LG thinks it's in danger of
 losing a court case, let's say, where it needs to prove those things.
 But that doesn't necessarily prove that Android itself infringes.
 Does Apple have a suit against LG right now?
 I don't think it does.
 I don't think it does either.
 I think Motorola is the only one that's left that Apple has an active suit against, and
 that's very interesting.
 Well, yeah.
 I think the question might be, does Apple even know if it has a suit against LG?
 If you...
 Okay, assuming Apple's press relations people actually spoke to anybody and responded to
 email and you reached out to them, do you think they would actually know off the top
 of their head who they're suing and who they're not suing?
 Or if you said, hey, guys, do you have a lawsuit against Sony?
 They'd be like, yeah, let me just get to legal and find out.
 Maybe they have a post-it on their IMAX of who is currently in legal litigation with
 them right now.
 Yeah, it's like, dude, we need to take care of ASUS first of all.
 We're going to have a medical order here before we get to LG and all of that.
 I really do think this is kind of like the dark and unpleasant side of our business because
 the whole patent stuff is just so tiresome.
 I say this as somebody who studied law for a long time.
 I know there are actually fascinating areas of law.
 You might not believe it, but it's true.
 Patent law isn't one of them.
 The intellectual property should be.
 When I first went into law and started studying it, I was like, oh, dude, IP law must be the
 greatest.
 You get to talk about technology, telecoms, media, all of these glamorous and interesting
 things.
 You're on the cutting edge, yada, yada, yada.
 Then look at the things we're stuck talking about.
 It's like Apple got a patent on the rounded rectangle.
 It happened.
 It literally happened.
 It happened, and I'm reading a headline, and I'm rubbing my eyes and not believing it.
 I'm like, wait, Neil, I wrote this, so it's not a joke.
 That's it.
 I've got nothing else to contribute to that.
 As far as the lawsuits that are left, there is definitely the lawsuit with Motorola, which
 is immensely interesting because of Motorola's very close ties to Google itself now.
 We still don't really know what's going to happen with that.
 I'm not sure what that was, Dieter, but I'm just going to...
 I'm channeling Josh Topolsky here.
 I've got some problem with my hair, so I'm just checking to make sure that it doesn't
 look completely ridiculous, only partially.
 I would check as well, but my video feed looks completely gelatinated at the moment.
 Yeah.
 Vlad, I could tell that you have hair.
 Yeah.
 Which is a change.
 Well, yes.
 You've been growing that out.
 It looks very nice.
 I've made a complete recovery from my haircut.
 We don't really know what's going to happen yet with Motorola and Apple, but I think that
 will be...
 As Vlad just said how uninteresting all of this is, I think if anything, it will be interesting
 to watch to see what happens with those two.
 That's true.
 The drama and the soap opera that we also like to create around these things is going
 to sustain the story anyway.
 But speaking of soap operas, let us actually talk about Steven Sidovsky and his departure
 because Dieter says that is still a major, major thing that happened over the weekend.
 Yeah.
 So he's out.
 He left on the 12th, pretty much effective immediately, although he's going to hang around
 and help if needed.
 He's pulling a fourth stall.
 That's actually exactly right.
 People inside the company tell us that one of the big reasons that he's leaving is he
 just doesn't play well with others.
 He likes his silo control things and doesn't like to collaborate.
 That's what Microsoft needs to do now.
 They need Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 and SkyDrive and Windows Live or whatever they're
 calling it these days and Xbox and I don't even know what else.
 They all need those things to talk to each other and interoperate and share stuff more
 so than they do now.
 If he's not the person to help make that happen, then I guess he's got to go.
 Julie Larson Green is taking over for Windows and what's really interesting for us on the
 mobile side is Andy Lees who has sort of unceremoniously been taken off of the Windows Phone team to
 work on a generic cross Windows Phone 8 Windows project that was never very well defined is
 now back and his new job is what now?
 I think Windows corporate development and strategy.
 So he's sort of back in the mix as a player at Microsoft.
 I just want to say corporate development and strategy is perfectly defined and everybody
 from my grandmother to my niece, my five-year-old niece perfectly understands and grasps the
 width and breadth of that position.
 Jesus.
 Also, titles like –
 You have totally eaten your Wheaties this morning.
 You're just an angry, angry man.
 No, dude, if I eat Wheaties, I would be jogging all day.
 I'm afraid of carbs.
 If you have an acre in for like cereal like working fiber chunks or Wheaties or whatever,
 do you ever crave carbs?
 Is there like a non-carb food?
 No, but that's the point.
 Carbs make you crave carbs.
 Vegetarians eating soy and pretending it's a burger, do you do anything like that?
 You pretend that something is wheat?
 No, I never pretend.
 I keep it real.
 He keeps it real.
 He keeps it raw.
 Why are we talking about Vlad's diet again?
 Because Vlad tweeted this afternoon a picture of cauliflower and broccoli and said, this
 is as yummy as glazed donuts to me.
 No, it really is.
 It really is.
 If your palate adjusts to not be completely destroyed by eating sugar and donuts or whatever,
 you taste flavors that other people don't taste.
 Regular food is oversaturated with sugar.
 Wait, I was going to talk about Andilead.
 All I wanted to say was I was really happy that Vlad is passionate and angry about things
 today and then we started talking about cauliflower.
 That's a good point.
 Job titles like senior vice president and then another noun after that, like senior
 vice president something something operations.
 That is so grammatically busted and horrible.
 It makes me feel dirty if I ever have to write it in full.
 Set all that aside.
 The first thing to say is that Steven Sinofsky was the guy in charge of Windows 8.
 He got it done.
 Windows 8 is a product of Steven Sinofsky's work.
 Let's give the guy credit.
 He might be a complete and epic asshole to the people he worked with, but the final product
 of what he produced had a cohesive vision.
 We don't really know.
 How can you really assess something as holistic as a desktop OS over a few days or a couple
 of weeks even?
 You need to sit down and spend time with it.
 So we'll see how Windows 8 develops over the long run.
 To me, I totally agree on the point about Microsoft needing to unite the various strands
 of its ecosystem and Sinofsky's strong personality and strong need to control things getting
 in the way of that.
 He was the man in charge of Windows 8 and Windows 8 was like his baby and it was like
 a ball and he's clutching it tightly.
 Whereas what Microsoft is trying to do is take these balls, let's get back to the food
 metaphors, they're like three balls of mince and you try to splice them and make one giant
 epic ball of awesomeness.
 If he's clutching it too tightly and he can't work with the other guys, guys like Joe Belfi
 are in charge of Windows Phone and whoever's in charge of Xbox Live and those services,
 that's where the friction comes in.
 The first things that Steve Ballmer actually remarked about his successor are to me the
 most instructive pieces of information because he said looking at the technical and the professional
 requirements for the job, I think she has exactly the qualities that we need.
 The first quality that he identified was good communication skills and the second was collaborate
 effectively.
 The things that he's highlighting as positives in her, like somebody who just broken up with
 one girlfriend and moved you on to a new one and saying that the new one has these really
 great qualities, that usually tends to be the things that your girlfriend, which in
 this case is Steven Sadovsky, was lacking.
 That's enough analogies for me.
 The thing is what I would expect to be next for Windows Phone, how would this affect Windows
 Phone?
 They did it.
 They got it on the Windows 8 core.
 You can't directly take a Windows 8 app and just throw it on to Windows Phone 8.
 Maybe they'll fix that and move in that direction, but it's actually relatively close based on
 what they were talking about a build and what I've seen.
 Even if you can't just directly release it on both platforms at the same time, the skills
 that you need to make one app now directly translate to the skills to make the other
 app and you can share assets and it's actually very easy to do one or the other.
 I'm not sure what this executive shakeup means directly for the future Windows Phone that
 they haven't already accomplished under Sadovsky's leadership.
 I just want to say that Andy Lees was the guy who was the head of Kin.
 Yeah.
 Oh dude, come on.
 Don't hold that against him.
 As somebody who has a massive enormous printer background.
 Didn't Lees come late to Kin though?
 Didn't he inherit Kin?
 I can't remember the timeline.
 I just want to point out.
 Dan has an enormous printer in the background on his video feed.
 Enormous and apparently he uses it every day which makes him a completely evil person.
 I wouldn't say every day, but it gets used every week.
 So what I'm saying Dan is you can't hold bad decisions against people.
 I don't hold that against you too much.
 So you can't hold that against Andy Lees.
 Okay, Kin failed.
 So you move on, it doesn't mean that the guy himself is a complete failure.
 Well and like you were saying with his extremely nebulous title, we don't really even know
 how close he'll be to Windows Phone 8 anyways.
 But yeah, it will be very interesting to see how Windows Phone 8, like you were saying
 Dieter, how it would have developed parallel with Windows Phone or Windows 8 and if it
 will become even closer than they are now.
 The one thing that with Sanofsky is I guess a lot of people really thought him to be Steve
 Ballmer's successor as CEO.
 That's not the case.
 That's pretty interesting.
 It will be interesting to see who in Microsoft kind of bubbles to the top as maybe possibly
 the successor to Ballmer.
 Or maybe Ballmer will just continue to be for eternity.
 We should, it's funny, we haven't pointed it out, like Windows Phone 8 has launched.
 We should bring that up.
 Like the 920, the 8X are on AT&T, what's Verizon got the, I forget what's on every
 carrier.
 So the 822 and the 8X, those are going to be in stores on the 15th Verizon, clarify
 that today.
 And then also on T-Mobile, the 810.
 Sprint is going to have phones next year.
 That's available today actually from T-Mobile.
 Verizon is going to have a free Windows Phone 8 device by the end of the year, which is
 fine.
 Yeah, I mean I guess you know the Verizon has the $100 price point and the $200 price
 point so the free price point is kind of like the low end cover.
 So Verizon has definitely got a full Windows Phone 8 spread covering all of the price points
 that it would expect to cover to match against its Android offerings and of course against
 the iPhone models that it offers.
 So how excited are we about this?
 Chris was very excited.
 He went out to an AT&T store and bought a Lumia 920.
 A cyan one.
 Oh yeah, of course.
 I will answer that question glad as we get closer to the holiday season and we start
 to see how the marketing push goes and how sales go as a result of that marketing push.
 Ah, so you're going to be like a sports commentator.
 I noticed that.
 Well no, no, no, no, but no listen.
 You know, we consistently...
 Well dude, you're just saying no when you don't even know what I mean.
 What are you...
 Okay, go ahead.
 Let me get my energy out.
 I was watching the NFL over the weekend and the thing that I was consistently noticing
 is that...
 The Vikings are awesome and totally pants the Lions.
 That's what I noticed over the weekend.
 Yeah dude, Adrian Peterson man.
 Amazing.
 But the thing I was also noticing is that sports commentators love to wait until a decision's
 consequences are fully apparent and then they give their expert opinion on it.
 So they wait until...
 This is what I thought you were going to say and let me tell you why you're wrong.
 Go ahead.
 Because our consistent complaint about Windows Phone 8 is that the app ecosystem isn't there
 either in terms of breadth but especially in terms of depth and apps feeling on par
 with what's available on the other platforms.
 And Microsoft is doing everything they can to solve that problem but the thing that will
 actually solve that problem are sales numbers, are devices in people's hands and people demanding
 from these app developers to make better and more apps for Windows Phone 8.
 And the only way those sales numbers are going to go up is if we see real engineering marketing
 push.
 So we've got a chicken and egg problem here but it's a classic ecosystem conundrum.
 But one of the ways that we have seen that ecosystem conundrum get solved is Verizon,
 our AT&T carriers and the manufacturers or in this case Microsoft working together on
 a unified awesome powerful and huge holiday marketing push to actually sell devices.
 And if that happens then by the end of the holiday season we will see more devices, more
 market share and that will drive more apps.
 So am I excited?
 I'll be excited if it's able to lead to a more robust ecosystem.
 And I think it could.
 I think they're doing everything they can.
 We'll just have to wait and see what the marketing looks like.
 And I had another point and I lost it but that's because I was thinking about sports
 again.
 Let me just say your first point was so damn good that I have no comeback.
 So to follow up with Dieter's point, yesterday at the D&A launch event I had a little bit
 of time to chat with Verizon's CMO and I asked her, you know Verizon's marketing push in
 the holidays is always very large and it can be the type of thing that either makes it
 a device succeed or makes a device fail.
 And I asked you know what's it going to be like for Windows Phone 8 and Verizon hasn't
 really started its marketing campaign yet but she did say that starting when they're
 available in stores, so I guess tomorrow they're going to be available in stores so we should
 be seeing some Windows Phone 8 ads from Verizon.
 And we'll have to see if it's as big of a campaign as obviously the Droid has been and
 obviously what Verizon's done with Apple ads.
 I mean Microsoft is promising a big campaign too but like rolling thunder, that was not
 much.
 Well that was Nokia right?
 Yeah I know but what I'm saying is like big promises don't necessarily yield big results.
 And you know I mean here's the thing, this is a new platform again and I know that apps
 from Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 carry over and I know it's been around for a couple of years
 but in terms of what apps are actually able to do with native code now and like games
 able to get ported to it or even launching on it originally much more quickly, it's a
 whole new platform that has new possibilities that haven't been exploited on Windows Phone
 at all because they just weren't there.
 And I want to see you know I want to see apps, I want an IRC app that can persist in the
 background.
 I want you know killer games that appear on Windows Phone the same day they appear on
 iOS or Windows even.
 I just want a Starbucks app so I can buy coffee without having to trust a third party sketchy
 app.
 So I mean they've built everything they need to do, now they just need to sell the phones
 and get the virtual cycle and ecosystem going.
 I can't believe just the sheer dependency that Dan has built up on his smartphone.
 This guy doesn't have a Starbucks app, I can't get coffee anymore.
 You don't understand Vlad.
 I don't know how to exist anymore, can somebody help me?
 If I don't use my Starbucks app I don't earn my rewards points and then I don't get my
 free drink.
 So it's a cycle they've got me sucked in.
 Dude you know it's not a free drink.
 I'm totally sucked in.
 What's that?
 You know it's not a free drink.
 Let me have my dream okay.
 If you actually came to negotiate with people like Starbucks or people like your supermarket
 and they asked you how much do you want for your data, how much do you want for your shopping
 habits and you were going to sell them.
 You could get so much more than freaking a few cents on every purchase so then eventually
 it adds up to a free drink in quotation marks.
 You're being ripped off with all these loyalty cards.
 I mean think about it, it's a loyalty card.
 You're the loyal one.
 It's a convenience factor and the stupid rewards are whatever.
 The truth is that Dan will only get coffee from Starbucks.
 He hates local businesses, he hates entrepreneurs, he hates the local coffee shop, some mom and
 pop place.
 He wants corporations to win.
 Dan you and I are socialists but he is a hardcore capitalist.
 He's one percent.
 On the one percent they have a Starbucks app on their phone.
 They just deserve it right?
 It's sitting on his iPhone right next to his FogRye app just right there.
 I don't even need to open the app.
 The Passbook opens it for me.
 Think about that.
 I walk into the Starbucks and Passbook opens my app for me and it's like go spend this
 money on sugary loaded over roasted coffee that doesn't really taste that good.
 How are you not horrified by the stuff you're just saying right now?
 It's like oh hey it's the apocalypse.
 It's coming.
 Let's all laugh at it.
 Maybe that's the realistic part.
 The other thing we found out this week is that apparently Arabica coffee is going to
 go extinct because of global warming within the next 80 years.
 This is a crisis.
 This is a for real crisis.
 Arabica isn't the only type of coffee but it's the higher quality.
 It's the one that matters.
 Nobody wants to drink Robusta.
 Come on.
 Oh dude I can't believe how much reaction we wrote about this.
 First of all I'm like wait we write about coffee now?
 This is within our remit?
 I would have been very mad if we did not cover this story.
 People have picked it up on Facebook and on Twitter and there's hundreds and hundreds
 of comments and everybody is alarmed about it and all of these things.
 Whereas if we do an article about landfill in Southeast Asia you'll get like six comments
 and five other people will be like well that sucks.
 Is Detroit DNA coming out again?
 Before we wrap up I do want to talk about FaceTime on AT&T.
 I just want to point out that SweetBrit in the chat, was that who it was?
 Yeah SweetBrit in the chat wanted to say that Dan's so Republican he installed the latest
 Romney on his phone.
 That makes me happy.
 I love a bat pun man.
 So AT&T has backtracked just the tiniest amount.
 I wish we had Chris here to rant about this because he wrote a really good article about
 how AT&T's flip flop on FaceTime over cellular should scare you.
 They're allowing iPhones not on Mobile Share to do FaceTime over cellular but it's still
 twitchy.
 It's not every single plan.
 They just stepped it back just a little bit.
 In response to not direct regulatory pressure but the threat of a possibility of it, it
 shows that us complaining about FaceTime on the mobile podcast doesn't actually fix
 anything.
 It's insane how arbitrary these restrictions are because before it was you had to be on
 a mobile share plan.
 It didn't matter which device you owned.
 If it was FaceTime compatible and was on a mobile share plan you could use it over cellular.
 Now it's like well only if you have an LTE device but you don't have to be on LTE to
 use it, you can still be on an HSPA plus network or connection and use it but it's got to be
 an LTE device.
 So it's like sorry 4S users who are not on mobile share and sorry for iPhone users who
 are on grandfathered unlimited plans because if you're on an unlimited plan you're just
 not allowed.
 Well I'm assuming that arbitrary restriction is because they're still afraid that their
 network is going to fall down because there's just flat out more iPhone 4S users out there
 than there are iPhone 5 users.
 So it's not about LTE, it's about just limiting the numbers.
 Although I must admit as well as Dan explained everything I am completely at a loss of what
 the hell is going on over there.
 I have no idea.
 I would just like to note that how many carriers offer the iPhone across the world and there's
 one carrier that has a problem with it and it's AT&T and no other carrier is having a
 problem with FaceTime.
 Go America!
 Yeah.
 Okay, nobody enjoyed that.
 But actually I just wanted to squeeze in a couple of observations from the UK before
 Dieter wraps this up in his expert style.
 First of all on the subject of Passbook which Dan brought up with the Starbucks application
 and that's cool that it happens for you automatically Dan.
 I'm really happy for you and I'm going to let you finish buying that coffee.
 But actually Passbook in the UK is one of the saddest things you'll ever see.
 There is like four compatible things and I use zero of them.
 I want to say that it's pretty damn sad in the US too because I use it for Starbucks
 and when we reviewed iOS 6 at the time the only thing that was available for Passbook
 was a Walgreens app and so I have that installed as well.
 But yeah, it's pretty pathetic.
 Yeah, I mean it's barren at the moment.
 It's just atypical of Apple but then so is Maps so whatever.
 Hey man, Nokia Maps coming to iOS.
 We did not add that to our list, did we?
 So they rebranded it here, they bought here.com.
 They're doing crowdsourcing for their Maps data which seems like amazing but Google's
 been doing that forever and Waze is doing that and there's OpenStreetMaps and everybody's
 doing that.
 But yeah, no then it's coming to iOS is potentially really great because Nokia's mappings is really
 good.
 I just hope they get it released in relatively short order.
 So actually we've been doing this series, this mind-blowing series of living with things
 which is right now focused around home theater stuff so like Xbox 360, the PS3, Amazon devices,
 etc. and I'm thinking we need to do one with living with Nokia Maps because I actually,
 I've tried it.
 I've always tried it occasionally and given it a shot during reviews and whatever but
 I've never sat down and actually used it extensively the way that I've used Google Maps and had
 to rely on it on a daily basis.
 I'm sure the same would be fascinating to do with respect to iOS 6.
 Now that this is like a pitch meeting for future features but I do feel like sometimes
 we kind of, you know, you kind of need to spend some extensive time to really appreciate
 these things because all I ever hear about Nokia Maps is yes, it's good and it's been
 reliable enough when I've used it on occasion but I'm still kind of wary.
 Like I wouldn't buy a phone and think this is as good as Google Maps.
 Would you guys say that's the case?
 I think we're so used to Google Maps.
 In my testing in terms of accuracy and directions and everything else, Nokia Maps has been as
 good as Google Maps.
 I've had no problems there.
 I've had some unfamiliarity with the UI and I kind of don't love it and there's a problem
 specifically on the Lumia 920 where like the old Bing Maps was still there in a weird way.
 Anyway, so I think if you were to live with Nokia Maps for a month, I think you would
 probably find that you would get used to the UI, you'd feel pretty good about it and you
 may get really into stuff like the local Scouts of Windows 8 thing but I forget what Nokia's
 local, like they've got their augmented reality app.
 City Lens.
 City Lens, yeah.
 I doubt you would find it as good as, I don't know, say Yelp in certain areas.
 No, Yelp is garbage.
 Yelp can't even find carrots.
 Yelp is garbage everywhere except for San Francisco.
 Yelp is amazing in San Francisco.
 Yelp can't find carrots.
 I'm not even going to try looking for Watermelon.
 Forget Yelp, man.
 Is the Watermelon too sweet?
 Yelp would be a done.
 I mean, Watermelon must have way too much sugar, man.
 No, it doesn't.
 That's the thing.
 It's really, really sweet but it's actually very low in calories and sugar.
 It's amazing.
 Watermelon is utterly amazing.
 What do you do with the seeds?
 It's so nutritious.
 Eat them.
 Yeah?
 All right.
 Aren't you afraid of a Watermelon growing in your belly?
 Man up, man.
 Eat the seeds.
 So I just want to say that it's going to be a very amusing day when I download and install
 a Nokia Maps app on my iPhone.
 I just find that very...
 Just to clarify, is it now just called here or is it Nokia here?
 I don't recall.
 I think it's just here.
 I mean, you know, it's from Nokia so it's Nokia here.
 Chris put it yesterday.
 I was saying that and he's like, well, just think of it as the NAB tech app.
 Yeah, but I mean, I've used a whole bunch of different third party map solutions on
 iOS and they're all pretty terrible.
 Yeah.
 So far.
 Right.
 And so if they can, you know, make this feel...
 I think it's just called here Maps.
 Oh, I don't know if it's called here Maps.
 Why have the here at all if you just still call it Maps?
 I mean, are you really that worried about what is...
 Yes, damn it.
 I've said I'm going to rant about everything today so I'm worried.
 Okay.
 But the other thing I was just going to throw in quickly is something I could have commented
 on a couple of weeks back and I was missing from last week's podcast which was LTE in
 London here in the UK.
 Because I managed to get an LTE, you know, do a little round the city journey and test
 it out and see how it works.
 What LTE handset did you get?
 You broke up there for a second.
 Yeah, I broke up for a second.
 I broke up with a good friend from EE.
 It was a Galaxy S3 but, you know, they support the iPhone 5, the Lumia 920, etc.
 And they have the HTC One XL, honestly.
 The One X, One XL, One X Plus, Xperia T, Xperia TL, Nokia A20, Lumia A22, these guys are
 like...
 Yeah, I have no words left to describe them.
 But anyway, seriously.
 LTE in London is good, bordering on glorious, depending on where you are.
 And completely irrelevant, again, depending on where you are.
 So if you are where I live, in a perfectly civilized, lovely, leafy area of North London,
 this is just nothing.
 I mean, the best I can get is 3G Plus, whatever the heck that is.
 To actually do a bit of commuting, move around.
 But okay, so I'm in Mosel Hill, but as soon as I start approaching Highgate, I get reception
 and then it jumps from like 3 and 4 megabit, which is actually kind of low compared to
 the 3 network.
 I jump from that, from 3 to 4 megabit, to like 19 down and 17 up.
 And speed test starts flying.
 I mean, just literally flying.
 And I'm like, wow.
 That's when it starts becoming fun to just run the speed test.
 Yeah, I'm not kidding.
 It's like, usually I run a speed test and I go and do and think about something else.
 It's like making tea.
 That's how it is.
 Whereas with this thing, it's like you tap on speed test and you look outside and you
 look down and it's already done.
 And as you move into particularly areas of good coverage in the city, the highest speeds
 I got were like 36, 38 megabits down and something like 20 up, which is just crazy on a phone.
 And I'm really starting to appreciate why you guys are so nuts about LTE.
 And I can tell you that two weeks ago, I was saying people here in the UK, we're going
 to be okay with the fact that it doesn't have LTE.
 And the vast majority of people here are going to be perfectly fine with it because EE's
 price plans are not great.
 Its coverage is not great.
 Its bandwidth or rather the frequency at which it operates isn't great for penetration into
 buildings.
 So you won't be covered everywhere you go outside and some buildings you go inside the
 office and you lose your super fast connectivity.
 So there's a whole heap of things standing in the way.
 But when you do get that little boost of LTE, man, it's like primordial man tasting his
 first refined sugar.
 It's nuts.
 It's just a rush.
 Which Vlad will not eat.
 That's right.
 But you know, it's good.
 There are just a whole bunch of caveats at the moment.
 It will be interesting to see how the network in the UK will handle load as more people
 get on it.
 Because those speeds that you're saying, we see them from time to time in the US.
 But most of the time if you're on Verizon's LTE network, which is pretty broad and fairly
 well loaded at this point, you don't usually see 20 up and 20 down.
 But you see more like 13 down and 7 or 8 or 9 up, which is still pretty good.
 By the way, come on.
 Yeah, I mean compare that to what you experience in Avdo or HSPA.
 It's like shhh.
 Oh yeah, when it hands off down to 3G, I just pretty much want to just put my phone away
 and give up because Verizon CDMA service is so slow.
 And just one other addendum I wanted to throw in.
 And I was listening to this on the BBC, which is actually that apparently development in
 Africa with mobile telephones, first of all, sales of phones in Africa are like going off
 the chain.
 I mean I'm sure they're like 2G really basic simple phones, but everybody needs a phone
 nowadays because of mobile payments and things like that.
 They facilitate things which aren't possible and connectivity and all of these things,
 which isn't that fascinating.
 But the thing that I picked up from this BBC report was actually that quite a few carriers
 in Africa might completely skip 3G and just start building out 4G.
 And this is something I found cute about Bulgaria's broadband rollout because we never bothered
 with dial-up and DSL and all of these things.
 We just jump straight to like fiber optic connections and big fat pipes and all of these
 things, which is why I have 50 megabit at home in the most rural part of Bulgaria.
 And this is, I don't know, I just really enjoy the idea of people in Africa going from like
 2G where everything is like text-based.
 Like I'll send you a payment text, I'll send you a Facebook message text, and all of a
 sudden like 4G droid DNA is dropping out of the fucking sky.
 I'm sorry for swearing.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 Get that technology.
 On that beautiful note, I am going to wrap up the Verge mobile show for this week.
 If you want to follow us on Twitter where we do occasionally swear, you can.
 I'm at backlandblatt.
 Vlad is at VladSavov.
 Dan is at DC.
 Sefer is spelled with an E-I.
 Chris is not here is at ZPower, and if you want to tell him that you missed him on the
 show you can, but I recommend that you do so with a photo of a cyan colored phone.
 We'll be back.
 week which day
 who knows we'll see how we feel
 we're not beholden anybody
 we're boldly you are viewers but whatever
 okay goodbye thanks for watching
 makes cuts
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