 So a month ago or so, I bought a goat, took it home, and then I slaughtered the goat and I offered it up to the gods of mobile as a burnt offering, begging them to bring another mobile expert to The Verge. And a couple of weeks ago, Dan Seifert joined the team. Coincidence? Who can say? Stay tuned for The Verge mobile show. Hi, I'm Dieter Bohn. I'm Dan Seifert. Hi, I'm Chris Stigler. And I'm the voice of Vlad Tavon. Oh my god, he's here. We have been trying to get Vlad connected to us for some time now. He is live from IFA in Berlin. And how is it there, Vlad? It is nice and not sunny anymore. It's night now, but it's lovely. The people are lovely. It's a beautiful city. And I'm enjoying it apart from the really ghetto web connection that I have right now. Otherwise it's lovely. Yeah, you sound remarkably un-robot-like. What's really odd to me is that Berlin is supposed to be basically the San Francisco of Europe, right? A lot of startups there. You would assume that the web connectivity would be absolutely fantastic everywhere you go there. Apart from the hotels. And I'm in a hotel. So what can I do about that? Right. I've got a Wi-Fi here. I've basically got it taped to the window so it can maximize its connectivity. Kudos, I don't know how it lasts. But as a voice and as a still picture in this otherwise video podcast, I will do my utmost. So we're missing a golden opportunity here to haze Dan, who is with us for the first time. And I think there's no better way to do that than to just say, hey, Dan, how's it going? What's new? It's going well. I think we got a- And you could have done a lot better with that. I could have, and you really put me on the spot there. Well, he's already done 90 seconds on The Verge. So I kind of feel like he's already over that hump, so to speak. This is kind of the easy part. This is cake compared to the nightmarish hell that Ross DeLair puts you through. And I just want to say, for the people that watched the 90 seconds of The Verge that I was actually on, I am wearing a shirt that fits this time. So nobody needs to take offense or avert their eyes because of a shirt that might not fit. Oh, you can always get somebody to take offense. Just throwing that out there. Yeah, commenters, they're pretty brutal when it comes to our wardrobes, I got to say. Is that a tie you're wearing? Yeah, that's a little tie. And that's amazing. Great. That's your way to follow for the whole show. I was about to say I'm wearing a tuxedo, but then I realized that I'm on camera, so I can't really lie about that. But yeah, this is very exciting. So for those of you who don't know, all of you should know at this point, but Dan Seifert is a very, very new addition to The Verge, and we are very excited to have him aboard. And I suspect this is an early prediction, but I suspect you're going to be seeing and hearing a lot of him on this program going forward. I think that's the same as well. We'll see how he does. Yeah, no. I think he totally bombs when he's out, obviously. Right. Well, yeah. We have a pretty high bar here. You need to be able to string more words together. No pressure here at all. Yeah, no pressure. Also, Dieter, I just want to go back to your open, because that was, I mean, you've done some disturbing opens, but that really takes the cake, and I'm a little emotionally scarred right now, and frankly, I don't know if I can continue. I might just- Yeah, I would like to add that I had no idea that was coming either. I mean, I saw the notes for it in our notes, and I had no idea he was going that direction. Yeah, so just to give our listeners an idea of what's going on, we're looking at our show notes here, and it just says, Verge Mobile Show Episode 14, cold open, colon, goat sacrifice. And I didn't think to question Dieter, what the heck does that mean? I let him roll with it, and I come to find out that he was actually going to talk about buying and slaughtering a goat in the hopes that Dan Sievert would join, which, yeah, that was unexpected. I would also like to say that no animals were harmed in the making of- Yeah, I was just going to say, it turns out that sometimes these opening stories aren't actually technically true. I didn't literally buy a goat. I only metaphorically bought a goat and made a burnt offering of it to the gods of mobile. By the way, gods of mobile would make a sweet superhero movie. I think we've talked about this before. We should talk about IFA, because Vlad's here on a tenuous and risky connection, and we should use it while we can. So I guess the big news so far is LG. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think so, of what we know. Well, I mean, actually, I think it's premature to talk about IFA by exactly one day. So if we're conducting this podcast tomorrow, it will be a really fascinating breakdown of the comings and goings, the movers and the shakers. But today is just like LG announced the Optimus G, which is not IFA, at least not yet. Jeff Langdon over in Japan, he went to the entity Docomo launch event for this device and managed to get some hands-on time with it. But our dedicated- So they're seriously not dedicated to IFA? I don't know if they will have the phone here. I don't actually know that for myself. I mean, my conversations with LG have actually led me to believe that it wouldn't be launched yet. It wouldn't be launched at IFA. I expected it to be launched a little later on. But there you go. Just how far you can trust your communications with PR people, I guess. But yeah, I mean, look, if it's an IFA, it will be found, it will be videoed, and it will be sniffed and touched and tasted. No, please don't sniff it. Jeff is a pretty- Don't sniff the phone. Don't sniff the phone. You can touch it. You can look at it. You can take video of it. Don't use any of your other senses. Don't taste it. Don't sniff it. I implore you. Unless you want to come down with some diseases that you can't pronounce. There have been phones that have smelled bad. I will point that out. There are certain manufacturers where they don't get all the glue out before they ship it, and so it just smells terrible coming out of the box. Well, a really good example of that is the Nexus S, when you whip out the battery before switching it off and then stick it back in. It's a very consistent unpleasant smell. But anyway, I reject Chris's absolutism about don't sniff the phone. I should do whatever comes naturally with a pack of completely unnatural technology. It's your funeral. Vlad, it's your funeral, and frankly, we have Dan lined up as a perfectly suitable replacement for when you die. I know. I know. I'm already as present as it is. You guys are probably posting a picture of a clown while I speak. Or in the absence of a clown, myself with no clothes on. Same thing. Anyway, so yeah, the news of IFA is coming. It's not with us yet, but as far as we're concerned, the Korean companies, they've done their usual thing of pre-announcing things. So we know there's the LG Optimus G, the 4.7 inch device, and we know that Samsung is going to launch the Galaxy Note 2. So those are two big standouts from Korea, and we should get our hands on both tomorrow, basically. I don't know. The Optimus 2X was just not an impressive phone to me. So this is not the first time that LG has made a point of trying to jump out ahead of the competition and trying to make a big splash with a flagship device. And in the past, they have not, in my mind, delivered. The Optimus Black was not an impressive device. The 2X sucked. I had a G2X, and it was not a good phone. So we'll see. I'm optimistic a little bit, only because the 4X HD was impressive, at least. I mean, it's not quite up to the bar of, say, what Samsung's been producing or even HTC, but it was a marked departure from the really ho-hum phones that were coming in 2011, 2010, et cetera. Sure. The really interesting thing about that- Yeah, I'm totally ready to have this thing break my heart. I like the design. It's just a big, unapologetic slab of powerful smartphone awesomeness, as far as the specs are concerned. There's no adornments. The corners are barely, barely curved. They may as well be 90-degree straight, sharp corners. It's just a glossy black slab with a screen on it. Actually, yeah, the only real complaint I have is that it's super glossy. Yeah. I was going to say, don't speak too quickly about liking this design, because from the front, I absolutely agree with you. It's really severe-looking, which is fun and good for something that is really spec-driven, but then you flip it around, and there's this glossy back, and it just makes you cringe. I don't know why they needed to do that, why they needed to glitz it up and make it all flashy and all of those things. The really interesting aspect for me with the Optimus G is that this is the first device from LG that has the famed in-cell touch technology, which we've anticipated will be in an LG display in the next generation iPhone. This is essentially the same thing that we're seeing from Samsung with the Super AMOLED displays where they take the capacitive touch elements and the display, and they just bond the whole thing together and make the display look like it really is on the surface of the glass. It lets you build thinner displays, which lets you build thinner phones, a point that Chris has been drilling into people for a while. Obviously, the first quad-core Snapdragon S4 is going to be a spectacularly awesome chip. The potential is totally there, but then we've also said that a whole bunch of times with LG devices. Well, the other thing to point out is that it's currently only announced for Korea. We don't have... Who knows when it's going to come to the US, if ever. We're just now getting the Optimus View on Verizon as the LG Intuition, which they just have one of those cages with lots of little bingo balls in it, and they've all got ridiculous names on them. They just rolled it around, and one popped out. What does Intuition have to do with this giant, weird 4x3 device? I don't know. But that's a long time from the time that device is announced to it arriving here, and so I'm not really... I'm betting if it does come to the US, it'll be a while, and by the time it does, I don't know if I'll care as much. Yeah, especially for $200 on contract. Are you kidding me? Yeah, I know. I have a couple of questions. Before we move on, there are a couple of things I just want to say real quick about the Optimus G. I feel like... And actually about the Snapdragon S4 Pro in particular, because I keep going back to something that was said to Vlad and I at MWC this year when we spoke to ARM, and the gentleman that we spoke to said, this year I'll be using a quad-core A9. This time next year, I'll be using a dual-core A15, and at this point, OMAP 5 is right around the corner. So we expect before the end of the year, we're going to have some OMAP 5 announcements, which I think is widely expected to be the first A15 SoC on the market. So is the S4 Pros... Really, is the entire S4 line's reign with the crate architecture about to come to an end, and what kind of battery characteristics and performance characteristics are we going to see from these quad-core crate chips versus the OMAP 5 and whatever other other A15 chips we see over the next few months? Well, I mean, for me at this point, I'm more concerned with battery life than I am with performance, and if the OMAP can win out on battery life, then I'll switch over. I mean, I've got no problems with the dual-core S4. Honestly, I really am not... Especially once you get something close to jellybean on it, it's just fine. So I'm totally convinced that... All these arguments about quad-core is a joke and it's not necessary, blah, blah, blah. I was convinced as soon as I started using the One X. So I'm less worried about the speed and the power of these things than I am about who's going to win on the battery life front, especially in a quad-core space. To me, that's a much more interesting question. Certainly, I think the battery life is definitely an issue, but as devices... We're at 720p devices now. As we move into 1080p devices, we might see some issues with the current dual-core chips pushing those graphics. So I think that's where we might see an advantage on the quad-core end and then hopefully better battery life with the newer quad-core chips, of course. Does that make sense to anybody? It makes sense to Chris. Yeah, no, I think that that's... Yeah, it makes total sense to me. Total sense. My gig for this podcast is that I'm going to believe anything that Dan says. That's my role here. Chris, I think you have the wrong idea for what hazing means. I think it kind of goes the other way. Which is anything that Dan says, we need to just slam it into the ground and pretend like it's completely wrong. But you know what else might be a more appropriate- By the way, I want to point out that if you're listening to this later and you're not watching us live, I strongly recommend that you watch the video version of this podcast and not just listen to the audio version because the images of Vlad that are going up on the site as he speaks are stupendous. Because if anybody's getting hazed here, I really think it's Vlad and not me, which is hysterical. I think we might very well make this a new segment or aspect of our show. Just no video for you from Vlad, just pictures. I just have to take some pictures during the week. Biceps after biceps. Yeah, basically. Do we want to talk about these rumored Galaxy Note 2 specs? They're pretty much in line with the stuff that we've heard before. Only a 5.5 inch screen and the rest is 1280x720, 3G and 4G radios, and a 1.4 gigahertz quad core Exynos processor. None of that is strikingly different from where we thought they were headed. We're going to know for really real as soon as Samsung announces it. I'm the resident stylus fanatic, but for some reason, maybe it's the fact that we saw the Note 10.1 review from Neelai. I'm just not excited about the Note 2 at all. I wasn't a believer in the original Note and Samsung proved me wrong by selling millions and millions of them. The Note 2, I have a hard time believing that anybody is waiting for this device. The specs are totally believable to me. There is one thing that I want to point out, which is that we're hearing all this talk, and we've talked about it recently on the show. We're hearing all this talk about devices getting this 5 inch LG 1080p display possibly before the end of the year. I think there was some HTC rumors recently. That really makes this Galaxy Note 2 potentially look lame pretty fast if it's coming to market with the 5.5 inch 720p at the same time that we're seeing devices with 5 inch 1080p screens on the market. That's one thing to consider. Yeah. I was going to say, I'm in the same boat as the e-tourist so far as, yes, I find the specs perfectly in line with the Galaxy S3 and perfectly in line with what Samsung has churning out of its other vertical companies. It makes sense in that respect. I was also in agreement with Dieter when it comes to talking about the original Galaxy Note. I was here at IFA when the original Galaxy Note launched, and to me, it was a case of the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is an amazing device, and this Galaxy Note thing is a gimmick. I was like, okay, they're really trying to push the Note to us, but the Tab 7.7 is the thing that I find exciting and interesting. The first thing to say is Samsung Mobile and Pact tomorrow need not only be about the Galaxy Note 2. There may be other devices that we just completely not heard about. That's one thing. The second though is that evidently, whatever market there is for these notes is, I mean, terrible pun coming up. I apologize in advance, but it's not striking the right note with us, but it is with a whole bunch of other people. My theory, my only theory is if you look at like seven-inch tablets, like the original Galaxy Tab, if you look at the Nexus 7, and then consider shrinking that down to like 5.3, 5.5 inches, the note form factor, maybe that makes sense to people. Whereas all of us just keep considering the Note in terms of expanding a smartphone up. Whereas if you think of a seven-inch tablet, which is kind of a one-hand device, and then shrink it down, stick a stylus on it, maybe that's the appeal for other people. I took that argument or I looked at that argument when Note first came out. The problem that I came up with was the Nexus 7 runs tablet software with tablet apps. The Note does not. The Note runs phone software with phone apps and there's a couple of unique apps from Samsung that's preloaded. For instance, if you were to grab or just look at the Gmail app, the Gmail app is the phone version instead of the two-pane tablet version. That's why I think we think a lot of it as it's a phone going up to a 5.3 or 5.5-inch screen instead of a tablet coming down to that size. Then the other thing that I kind of have a theory about is that it's a very popular device, but Samsung's not saying where all those sales are happening. I think it's really popular among Asian cultures because the stylus makes it really easy to input their languages and their characters. It's a lot harder to write in English on it with a stylus than it is, say, Korean or Japanese or something like that. Yeah, I mean, the thing that I don't forget about the Note is I desperately want it to be awesome for a whole bunch of apps with stylus support. Every time I go and try it, it's just not there. Maybe you're right that it's just the default use case of it for inputting language is what's making it so popular. I have to disagree with you about the Nexus 7 running tablet apps because I use Nexus 7 every day and 90% of the apps are basically just blown-up phone apps. It's just less annoying because it's only a 7-inch tablet. Android tablet still just isn't there. Yeah, I mean, that problem is there, but that's an Android tablet problem. If you look at Google's apps, like the Gmail app, there's a separate tablet version versus the phone version because you get two panes with the tablet version, a little bit different UI that takes a better advantage of the larger screen. I wish they would do the same thing with their Google Reader app because, oh my God. No, Google Reader does have a different tablet UI than it does on the phone. If you flip landscape, you get a two-pane view. Really? Yeah. Okay, I'm going to try it. No, I don't know if that's available. You just got on the Nexus 7. You just got served, Peter. You just got served. Well, I always use it in portrait and it's completely annoying. I wish it had two-pane in portrait because that's how I'd like to read because I need volume of headlines. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the Note, it's just not a new thing anymore, right? So I don't know if it's going to catch people's attention the way that the first one did against all odds. But I have to, like I said at the outset, I have to admit that it could and that I'm being a skeptic for skeptic's sake instead of not actually believing. Do we want to talk about the S3 colors? I want to point out that the brown one looks really cool to me and I totally would buy a brown Galaxy S3. Yeah, I kind of love it. As would I. Yeah. The brown is gorgeous. The brown is absolutely fantastic. So the only question is which US carrier or carriers, plural, are going to carry which of those colors? Because I'm sure that there was some consternation on the part of Verizon and others that AT&T picked up an exclusive color. So I just wonder who's going to buy it. Yeah, I can't- They got the red, right? Yes. The what? AT&T got the red. I could see a US carrier picking up the black or the, what do they call it? Graphite gray or something like that. I find it really hard to believe that any US carrier is going to pick up the brown as depressing as that sounds. I just can't see it. Also just to mention, there is no red Galaxy S3. I just want to get that on the record. There is a burgundy Galaxy S3, which is so glossy that I don't understand any self-respecting heterosexual male using it. It just looks like lipstick all over, but there is no red Galaxy S3. Don't they call it garnet red or something? Yeah, that's like, I mean, their brown is amber brown. Amber is not brown. They're just different colors, man. Get with the program. Also, I have no idea what the brown one looks like because I was on the flight when Samsung decided to announce this thing. So I'm just taking your word for it. It's gorgeous. It's a glossy brown. I'll touch it tomorrow. I'm sure I'll touch it tomorrow somewhere. I'm waiting for a matte one. Samsung needs to build a matte phone. That would be wonderful. Well, they should just sell the back plates individually, and they could market up 300% and I would buy like four different colors. Just have a black front and then different colors for the back plate. I would be all over that, but they're not going to do it, and that's super annoying. Are you talking about matte back plates? Any back plates, but less specifically matte. When you start mixing, see, this is what was great about dumb phones back in the day is that like the Nokia Express on covers, it would replace the entire case, and that entire concept is basically gone now, right? I guess it's partially replaced by the fact that the majority of people seem to get some sort of protective case with their phone, and that's what they use to customize and style their device. But if you want to style the case, it's like the actual phone case itself, that concept is just gone. Hey, Newsbroke, while we podcasted. Sorry, Vlad. Newsbroke, it looks like Isis is going to be debuting its mobile payment solution in September. They're going to introduce it in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas next month, according to Verifone CEO. So Verifone is going to be providing the payment terminals, and it looks like they're definitely going to be requiring NFC, which is, I don't know. I feel like NFC shouldn't be a requirement for this sort of thing. There should be some sort of backup option, because there's just not that many NFC phones out there. But we're finally going to see Isis actually happen, all these carriers working together. It's actually like a real thing. I feel like we've been waiting for this forever. We have been, but I've been using Google Wallet. The latest version of Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus is good enough now. And you can add all your cards to it. I'm just happy with the way it works. I don't need anything else. I want everybody else to stop development efforts on mobile payments. I'm done. This is good. Everybody has a PayPass terminal. I have my phone. I'm happy. You're one of like 80 people that lives that life. Nobody has Google Wallet. The few people that have access to Google Wallet on whatever their device is don't know that they can use it. It's like you are the 1% of the 1% that has a mobile payment solution that's reached some level of ubiquity and actually knows that they use it and actually uses it. It's like you and one other guy. You're the other guy. You are the other guy, Dieter. No, I'm not. I don't have Google Wallet on my phone. But to Chris's point, if development ceased on the other things and Google Wallet was able to be brought to more devices, then more people would have it instead of just kind of like this mishmash of various protocols and standards and all this other nonsense that everybody wants to throw their hat in. We actually got an email to a mobile podcast email address, which is pretty amazing, mobileshow at theverge.com pointing out that NFC isn't actually necessary to mobile payments. That Apple's solution with Passbook, we just heard, looks like NFC is not likely to get in the next iPhone. There'll be some other way of doing it and that we don't need a single universal standard. We just need all the different standards to work together. There's a little bit of hope for that since there's that mobile payment committee that ISIS and Google Wallet and everybody else are all part of now. But I still am not optimistic it's going to happen in short order. We've talked about this a million times and it's whatever Apple decides on that's going to become the de facto standard. But I mean Google Wallet is progressing. They will let any card in now and I guess they're going to add loyalty passes and loyalty cards and IDs and whatever to it. So it's opening up a bit to look a bit more like PayPass on iOS. These things are all starting to offer all the features that they need to. The one feature that they don't have is anybody using them, except for Chris. I'm using it and that's all that matters. There are mobile payment systems that are used like every day all the time, but they're well square in Starbucks, right? Yeah, square in Starbucks. They're limited to those proprietary systems. Right. And of course, call me when it's widespread, whatever it is, whether it's a mishmash like Visa, MasterCard, call me when it's widespread. I'll join in. Until then, it's just noise, it's corporate noise to me. I don't think it works. Call me when it will work on any phone without Verizon or some carrier or Asus deciding which phones are going to have it. Call me when it's not a differentiating feature for a phone and when it's just the standard on a phone. When I buy a phone, I know that mobile payments will work on it, whether it's Android or iOS or Tizen or whatever. Hopefully you'll never, never buy it. I'm going to have to call you from Europe. If you don't want Verizon or AT&T involvement, it's going to have to come from Europe. Really what we're waiting for is we're waiting for it to reach the Bluetooth ubiquity. Bluetooth is exactly the same on every single phone, no matter which one you buy these days. Now Vlad, I do want to point out that AT&T, because I've seen it on Google Street View before, AT&T for some reason has an office building in Belgium. I've seen it. I feel like it's some sort of super secret skunkworks, like all the stuff that they don't want anybody to know anything about, they do in Belgium and then they import it to the US. I am happy to travel to Belgium to investigate that anomaly. Then again, Vodafone has an office in Silicon Valley, so I guess it's not that strange. No, I think it's strange. I think I need to travel over there and try out some of the Belgian delicacies on my way there and just really dig into that story. Sure, sure. I think you have a report brewing. Mobile payments, we've talked about this ad nauseam over the past few months, but the problem with them, which is never going to really get resolved to anybody's satisfaction is the fact that there are too many people who want their palms greased to make it happen, right? First and foremost, the carriers, which is why ISIS exists in the first place. ISIS would not exist if it were not for the fact that three of the four US nationals believe that they are entitled to a percentage of this, what they perceive to be an entire new economy waiting to happen. In fact, really, they have absolutely nothing to do with it other than the fact that they are selling phones. If it were up to me, carriers would not even... It's almost a net neutrality thing, right? Carriers really should have absolutely nothing to do with this. Mobile payments should be some secure hardware on the phone. It should be an app that you can download from any market, and that's it. There are enough people involved in making these transactions happen securely as it is without the carriers getting involved. To me, ISIS is... Like Vlad said, ISIS is noise, and they have absolutely no business being involved in this. Next topic. I love that we closed this one nicely. What's next up? Sorry, I had to move and close the window. It is ridiculously insanely hot in San Francisco today, and so I had the window open. There is a truck backing up outside my building, which is in a perpetual state of construction, which is awesome. Next topic. We finally have got Nikon announcing the S800C, which is an Android-powered camera, and Samsung is also rumored to be introducing a Galaxy camera at IFA. I am wondering why it's taken this long for this to happen. It seems like a really natural thing to just have the cool photo apps that run on these platforms... Well, maybe that's okay, but... I think I have the obvious answer, which is that with proprietary firmware, camera manufacturers are able to... It's almost like the NASA argument, where if you develop your own proprietary firmware, you can do it very tightly and in a very, very small amount of ROM, and the UI is fast. Exactly. It's... What's the term? It's formally verified so that you know exactly what's going to happen in every possible use case because the firmware doesn't do that much. Whereas with Android, it opens up a potential can of worms, and it becomes a much bigger project to test this firmware and test the camera in the same way and to the same degree that you would a traditional closed system. I think that this Coolpix actually boots up into something proprietary so that it can just start taking pictures right away while Android gets finished loading in the background. Just in case Android is taking too long, it'll let you get your big pictures right away, and then it'll let you jump into Android-specific stuff once it's ready. As clever as that is, it's kind of messed up that they have to do that. Yeah, well, yeah. But yeah. But, I mean, this was always the idea with Android, right? It's an open system that anybody can use to slap into anything. We were expecting to see consoles and cars and now cameras and, I don't know, toasters or whatever running this OS because it's open source. You could just plug it into anything. We really haven't seen it be... It could have replaced WinCE in some cases. I mean, I guess it's not really exactly the same thing as that, but I would have expected more consumer electronics to be running Android. I'm still livid that there aren't a lot of very good aftermarket Android-based car stereos, for example. So putting it in a camera makes really good sense to me just because there are photo apps that you'd want to have direct access to a good lens. So this makes sense. I would... I don't know if I'd buy this, but I buy into the idea of Android running on a camera. I mean, Dan, am I crazy? I mean, you're more of a camera dude than me. No, I think that, just like you said, the idea is great. I don't know if this particular model is the answer. I feel like I would love to have this on a higher-end camera maybe that could really... A person that's using a higher-end camera can maybe really take advantage of the connectivity of Wi-Fi and things like that in the various Android apps that they could upload it to a Dropbox account or something like that very quickly and easily if they're working with a team. Things like that that really would make it quite awesome. Because when I look at this particular device, you're paying 350 bucks for a $150 camera to get the Android functionality. And I don't know how many people that would normally be buying this camera would buy into that. Yeah, it feels to me like they were kind of hedging their bets a little bit and saying, well, we're going to try this, but we're going to start with a mid-range camera, and if it works out, maybe we'll expand it to the rest of the range. Because I totally agree, Dan. If they had been able to do this in a cool way on the P7700, then that would be a different story. But I don't know if you guys remember, Kodak tried to do something like this like a decade ago. There was a third-party company whose name escapes me that developed an open camera OS. And I think Kodak was the only major OEM to use it, but it had apps that you could install. It was like a whole thing. And I mean, it was still, it wasn't anything like truly open. It wasn't like an Android kind of thing. But it was a platform that you could actually pay to get access to the API with, and then you could develop apps for it. And it just kind of died off. But at the time, I thought it was a really cool idea for all the same reasons. You could have your own filters that you had and all these things. And now that the optics are much better, the electronics are so much faster, I'm pretty excited about what this means for the future of cameras. And it really kind of validates the whole Nokia peer-review way of thinking, which is that camera phones and point-and-shoots have gotten so close to converging on each other's territories that they're just about the same thing now. And the S800 is, I mean, for all practical purposes, it's a camera phone without the GSM radio, right? Which is what I've been saying over the past few weeks is what the peer-view should have been. They should have just taken out the GSM radio and put it in a single camera. Well, on that topic, Chris, somebody on Twitter a couple of months ago maybe pointed out to me that two years ago while writing for Engadget, I wrote a post where I rather mockingly addressed what Anssi Vanjoki, who was still one of the leading guys at Nokia said. He said that DSLRs are soon going to be obviated by camera phones, which two or three years ago whenever that post went up and whenever Anssi's words were spoken, this seemed like a really absurd thing to say. And I still feel like DSLRs have a role to play. Their sensor sizes cannot be duplicated. I mean, the way POV tries and look at how thick of a phone it is, even though, as you say, it's more of a camera than a phone at this point. But definitely, Anssi Vanjoki's words were informed by the technology, the POV technology, which we've now seen in the market way back then. And his vision is one that, as you say, Chris, a lot of people share, a lot of people want to see come to fruition in some sort of admittedly compromised way where you get something approximating DSLR quality while bringing it together with what Dan was saying, the app ecosystem of a fully developed software platform like Android. And this is something that has bugged me for the longest time, which is the camera software is just really, really dumb. Oh, it's so bad. There are two aspects of it. One is there's a really clever stuff, which is autofocus and judging the proper distance and metering, which sometimes is really perfect and sometimes it's horrible again. So these clever little automations of processes and the speed with which they're done so that you press the shutter and all these automatic things kick off and do their job, those are really the indistinguishable from magic kind of software technologies that camera makers deserve great credit for. But then when it comes to the software that you interact with as a user, the UX of cameras, it is absolutely utterly atrocious. And these displays that you've had, they've grown, they've increased in resolution and it's just being wasted. I mean, we're looking at something that would be embarrassing for BlackBerry to tote out, you know, just text your menus and then nightmarish and they're written by people whose native language isn't even English. I mean, it's just a train wreck. It's horrible. And absolutely, Nikon has nothing to lose in just dumping Android on one of these cameras and saying, hey guys, it's an Android camera. Honestly, I'm kind of disappointed in everybody else that they didn't beat Nikon 2 this because this point issue that Nikon is bringing out is running gingerbread and it's got mediocre specs as far as the phone aspect goes. So I mean, it doesn't excite me. As much as the idea of an Android camera doesn't excite me, this particular one doesn't. Yeah, that's exactly right. The important thing is that there be APIs for all these settings that you talk about. The camera needs to be open to having Android apps be able to adjust all the different settings that there are on a modern DSLR. And if someone were to just publish a spec, we're not going to say, here it is, it's Android, we slapped it onto a camera. But now here you can write an app. Here's all the stuff that we're opening up. We've done a couple of things. I think people would really go crazy on that. And you could write a lot of really interesting apps to control the camera and do interesting things as long as the Android OS has got full access to all the settings on the camera. Yeah, and this is the point. The only company at this point that can do this thing and do it justice, and I'm kind of surprised to be saying it, is Samsung. So this rumored Samsung camera phone with Android has good potential. And the reason for that is Samsung is already making lenses for its mirrorless cameras. So even though camera lenses are a really new thing for Samsung, the company is, I mean, it's partnered with some lens makers, some other optics makers. I can't remember the name of the company at this point. But it has some experience of building lenses. It has some experience of building cameras, and that experience is growing. And it absolutely has the hardware that can underpin a really, really appealing camera phone. But as I say, this Nikon one is great on paper, but it doesn't excite me as an actual product at the end. And there's just so much room for somebody to do something better and just create their own market. This is what Apple does, right? There's room for a device, there's room for something new, and Apple takes it and then suffocates the hell out of everybody else. But I really believe that Android is the great platform, the perfect platform to do this, which rules Apple out. And then Samsung is a big player, but then everybody else doesn't need to be sleeping. Like, Sony has a press conference tomorrow. Why didn't they give us one of these things? I mean, we're going to go gaga. I know Ross Miller, he's just like, you know, he's going to rip the shirt off his back. He's going to go nuts. He's like, Sony does something like this. But you remember, Vlad, I don't know. Well, any of you guys, I don't know if you remember this, but when Sony first debuted the Vita, which was not called the Vita at the time, it was whatever the original term for it was. Next Generation. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I think they said that the maybe this was actually this actually happened after that. But regardless, they said that they could repurpose the Vita OS for other devices. Now I don't know if that philosophy or that guidance has changed as Sony is kind of metamorphosed in the past few months. But that's something to consider as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see Sony try to do something with, you know, I'm sure that it continues to rub Sony the wrong way. I mean, Sony has always taken pride in creating its own proprietary, you know, accessories, every standards and platforms. Yeah. And I'm sure that they would love to get back to their former glory to the point where they can do that and get away with it. And maybe Vita OS is part of that strategy. I think that's a long shot, but we could always trade. Just real quick, I do want to point out that Sam Byford has put together a really nice roundup of all the next iPhone slash iPhone 5 rumors all in one place. So you can see everything, the larger screen, the smaller dock connector, the slightly changed design all together in one place. And it's really funny that like we're, you know, we're talking about, you know, if we've got all these different announcements that are coming up, we've got a whole bunch of stuff next, is it next week already that we're going to have Motorola and Nokia? Oh my God. Time is moving way too fast. And so we're sort of like just in the run up to this thing getting announced. But does anybody feel like there's something we don't know about the next iPhone at this point? Like, are there any, like we know by and large what iOS 6 is going to look like. We've got enough parts leaks to put together a whole phone. We know that the screen and the dock connector and like, I don't feel like there's anything that is going to really surprise me right now. Am I underestimating Apple? The romantic tech nerd inside of me really wants to believe that Apple has been fleecing the entire world for the past several months and has been seeding us with fake parts and is going to just completely blow everyone away with some some totally different design in September. But I just don't see how that's remotely possible. I think that the reality is that they have been thoroughly scooped and are probably not too happy about it and are kind of resigned to the reality that this is just how the world works now. It's basically impossible to keep stuff secret. And you know what that says to me? That says that the phrase double down officially means we're not going to do it. We're going to fail at it. Anytime anybody ever says I'm going to double down on X, what that means is I'm going to utterly fail to achieve X. It's just like in real Blackjack where double doubling down is very rarely the right move. I'm referring to Mike Klausaridis who said RIM would double down. Everyone has said they are going to double down on something at this point. Yeah. Right. But I love the idea that- Tim Cook said they double down on secrecy. I mean, it's the kiss of death. If a CEO says double down, it's all over. I just love the idea that Mike Klausaridis was the guy who said that tone. It would be so perfect if he was indeed the first CEO to start talking about doubling down because what is followed since then is just excellent. It's just excellent. Who was it? It was definitely John Rubinstein. Was it him or was it, what's his name? The other HP guy, the X Palm guy? Apothecary? No. Oh, Bradley? Todd Bradley? Yeah, Todd Bradley. One of those guys said that they were doubling down on Palm. No, it was Mike Heard. Mike Heard. The guy I got fired. Mark Heard. I think. Mark Heard. Yeah. You could be right. Either way, it's- Regardless, the point is, it's the kiss of death. Yeah. I guess as long as we're talking about Apple, we should also mention that they basically won the case against Samsung, the big court case in San Jose. There's of course other ones coming and there's going to be an appeal and there might be an injunction on the Galaxy S2. We don't need to go deeply into this because there's a whole special edition of Vergecast that was done basically live as the verdict was coming in. Actually, literally, as the final verdict came in, they were already doing the podcast because there had to be a couple little corrections to it. But it's a mobile show, it bears on mobile. It's interesting. I think the fact that we're going to see possibly some injunctions on the Galaxy S2, that might be a real world effect on this. I think Samsung had already changed its game. I don't see this exact case playing out again over and over and over again with Apple just going after every Android manufacturer with the exact same stuff. I think they felt Samsung was a special case. Let me just note that we deserve special credit for going through most of this podcast without banging on and on about this lawsuit because I can pretty much guarantee you that makes us unique in this week's video, audio, any sort of industry commentary because everybody has some sort of an opinion, some sort of an angle. I've actually read somebody write, it's too early to describe Samsung as clear cut winners of this. Some people are so convinced that Samsung won just by being associated with Apple's products, which there's some validity in. For a lot of people, the effect of this lawsuit is going to be just glancing over the headlines and seeing that Samsung is having to pay damages for essentially copying Apple hardware. A lot of people got to start doing the math in their head or doing the maths in their head for our UK listeners and start thinking, hey, hang on a second. These guys are producing MacBook Airs and whatnot and iPhones slightly different but not different enough not to be illegal and the G-Pod on the iPhone, why am I being ripped off by Apple? I'll just go and buy the cheaper stuff. I don't know how much of an impact that's going to have on Samsung's business. I don't think that's going to be a significant impact. Also I think to a great degree, it has been overblown and there's been a great degree of overreaction to how much of an impact the ruling itself is going to have on Samsung's business. As you were just mentioning, if Apple gets an injunction against the Galaxy S2, what does that mean for Samsung? Samsung is heavily trying to sell and promote the Galaxy S3. It's not really interested in it. It hurts for Boost Mobile. This is exactly what I'm saying. Samsung not selling any more Galaxy S2s from this day forth until the end of the world is not even going to be a rounding error, a currency- I don't know if I fully agree with that though because I think Samsung easily positions the Galaxy S2 as an entry-level model compared to the Galaxy S3 just like Apple does with last year's iPhone 4 that's still selling for $100. If you look at the US carriers at least, every single one of them that carry the Galaxy S2 still carries the Galaxy S2 and they run deals where it's like buy one, get one free and it's $100 instead of being $200 or $250. There's a huge market for that $100 price point smartphone level. If you're going to buy Samsung's smartphone- The other thing is it would have been Samsung's high margin product. They've been making it for a long time. It's the best-selling Android variant and Android handset of all time as far as I can tell. They would have been able to just keep churning it out as buy last year's model. It's still quite good and it's a little bit cheaper. How much will it affect Samsung in the US? I don't think the Galaxy S2 took the US by storm because there are all these different variants and so there was less of a cohesive sense of branding to it. Maybe I pushed my point a little bit too far to the extreme, but the estimates are that the entire impact of the lawsuit, including the damages, including potential from lost sales due to a potential injunction from Apple coming further down the line in September, it will be something like 4% of Samsung revenue. That's how much of a ding Samsung might take. Whereas in the first day of trading, immediately after the judgment, Samsung stock price fell by 10%. There's a potential impact potential, like at absolute max of 4% of the Samsung's annual revenue, whereas the company's entire price fell by 10%. People clearly overreacted. The other thing to say is somebody tweeted this and it was pretty much perfectly spot on. The tweet was, unlike everybody else on Twitter this weekend, I am not actually a patent law expert. Everybody has some freaking interpretation and some freaking forecast about this thing. Whereas the other thing we really, really know for sure is that the lawyers on either side have won massively and will continue to win. They'll have generations in their families secured because of this crazy, crazy lawsuit. My big question out of this is, what is Apple going to do with this? Does Apple think that it has a, I don't know, about a moral authority, but if they've got a, what's the word with elections when someone wins by a landslide, they've got the people behind them, they've got a- A mandate? I'm so hopped up on Sudafed right now. I don't know the word I'm looking for. A mandate. A mandate. They have a mandate to go out and file similar lawsuits and go after everybody. Or if this was a one-off thing to set an example of Samsung and they're going to deal with their other lawsuits with Motorola and HTC and whoever else it is that they're suing. But now that they've won this, they can start wrapping up and start getting the settlements in motion and we can get back to business. Apple will absolutely continue to pursue litigation against a variety of OEMs leading eventually to Google proper ad nauseam. Mark my words. They are not going to stop. They are going to, I mean, they are taking Jobs famous statement that he is going to spend every last dime of Apple's burying Android. They're taking that as gospel and they're going to continue to pursue it doggedly to the ends of the earth. I'm absolutely convinced. And I'm not saying that I disagree. I think that Apple made many excellent points during this Samsung trial. And I can't say that I really agree with many aspects of the verdict. But that's not to say that every single lawsuit that Apple has filed around the world has been completely reasonable and we don't know what forms those lawsuits are going to take going forward. By the way, I just want to point something out which I don't think Apple realizes and this just occurred to me. But I was doing some research while you guys were talking. The droid charge, the Samsung droid charge for Verizon is one of the devices that that Apple is attempting to get an injunction against, which I mean, I don't even know Verizon still sells the droid charge. It's actually right on the front page of Verizon. If you go to Verizon's website, it was highlighted. Are you serious? Yeah, it's like free on contract. They're trying to move stock before it gets injunct. Let me double check that. Well, so U.S. Cellular is really going to hate me for pointing this out, but the Galaxy S Aviator is basically the droid charge and Apple failed to take notice of it. So Apple, just FYI, you might want to get an injunction against the Aviator as well because the Aviator is definitely still very much for sale on U.S. Cellular. Well, so I mean, if I'm Samsung, do I say, oh, well, I can't sell the Galaxy S2. I'm going to change one thing about it and give it another ridiculous crazy name and start selling it again. And it'll take Apple two years to get around to getting an injunction on this. That's one of the Apple's big complaints is like they hate doing these lawsuits because they can't get them through the court system fast enough to have a real effect on sales. So I mean, like, you know, I just don't see Samsung significantly changing their game. I think they already have. And we saw with the Galaxy S3. Yeah, I think that long term it works out to it works out to a mandated royalty, which is what, frankly, I've been advocating all along where Apple is just going to continue or potentially could continue to win these kinds of lawsuits for decades to come every few years and they just pocket a billion or two. And it works out to being a forced royalty on these patents that they hold. Well, let's also kind of try and differentiate and split them out a little bit. The first thing is that Samsung is going to have infringed on software patents on one side and on design rights on the other side. And the point that Dieter raised about the Galaxy S2, rename it, give it a new design and start selling it again. I was being facetious with that, by the way. I was joking. But that's fair enough, actually. Like, if the Galaxy S2 offends the design rights of the iPhone and you tweak its design, where are you offending this side? I mean, Apple can't get this through the courts because then it's like, well, what are you suing for now? Now you're just suing for the fact that Samsung is selling phones, which no longer look like the iPhone. But the most significant ones and the more intriguing ones, I think, are the software patents. You know, things like pinch to zoom, what was it? The bounce back when you're scrolling. And there was one other one. There were three major ones, three major software patents. Tap to zoom, bounce, and I'm forgetting the third. It might be, yeah. It's not quite pinch to zoom. It's like the instance before you get to pinch to zoom, recognizing two fingers versus one finger, something like that. Neelai can explain that way better than I can. It's not, Neelai is very adamant in saying that it's not pinch to zoom, but it's one of the steps before pinch to zoom. And I'm very adamant in saying I really don't give a. No, seriously, it's like, on the one hand, I feel like these things shouldn't be paid in civil at all, and I know there are countries that don't have software patent systems in place at all, and for whatever reason, software is still being made in those countries. People must be crazy or hooked up on something. But okay, so that's one aspect. But then on the other hand, I just kind of feel like, well, you know, things like pinch to zoom or the moment before pinch to zoom, that moment of anticipation can be recreated in other ways. And the perfect example for me is the scroll back bounce, the one that you have so familiar with iOS. Yes, it works great, and it looks great, and it's really functional, but there are so many other ways in which you can be creative and inventive and not copy it. And a great one for me, and this is probably the only thing I'm going to praise about HTC Sense 4, is the way that HTC does it there. And it's the same way that Sony does it with a PS Vita. It's just the way that the items on the screen, the list items just kind of stretch out, and then they just collapse again, kind of in an accordion sort of way. It's very natural. It's very instinctive, and it conveys the exact same point. Windows Phone does that as well. I love the way Windows Phone does it, the squish. Yeah, Windows Phone does it. Yeah, squishing rather than pinching. It's a crazy conversation we're having. Yes, it's the same message, but differently, and that's the whole point of creativity. Even though I hate the software patent system, I just feel like these companies are being lazy if they are literally just going to copy Apple. If you look at the grid, we had a post earlier today about the changes that Samsung's making to the software of the phones that are supposedly infringed or have been found to infringe. If you look at the grid of the patents that were infringed, there are certain phones that infringe all three software patents, and then a slightly newer phone that doesn't infringe any of them because Samsung had already worked around and figured out a workaround for the bounce back and this pre-pinch to zoom and the double tap to zoom. There's definitely, like you were saying, there's definitely workarounds available. On those devices where the workaround was implemented from day one, I don't recall anybody complaining from the phone's launch that it didn't have those particular features exactly the same as an older Samsung phone. Maybe the bounce back, certain people didn't miss that, but I don't think the other ones were terribly missed. I will say that HTC's workaround in Sense4 for the bounce, I just can't stand it where it separates all the items in the list, like the accordion down, and then they can reconnect back up together. I never liked it. It always looked terrible to me. I don't mind it. I like the Windows phone one the best. That's my favorite, the Squish. Yeah, Windows phone looks good. Even stock Android, the way it does it with the glow. I don't like that because it feels like you're coming to a hard stop. You're scrolling and then way out of the picture. Yeah, it's just tactile. It's like hitting a wall. Yeah, with the glow, you're scrolling and where you move affects what's happening on the screen and then all of a sudden that stops working. It's like, what? Apple's implementation of it is really, really good. You can see why it's tempting to copy it because it lets it still feel tactile, but also it shows you it's at the end. The way Android does it with the glow is fine. It's just aggravating. The glow should grow down as you move your fingers so there's still some tactile response or visible response. If you really love that bounce back feature, ironically, the Firefox browser for Android, whatever the latest versions are, has bounce back all over it, no matter if you're running it with ICS or Jelly Bean or an older version of Android. I have no idea how Mozilla gets away with that because it's very obvious bounce back and to the side and everything like that. It's just something I observed. Yeah, I haven't used Firefox on mobile in a long, long time, so maybe I'll check it out. Do we want to talk about these? We usually skip these like company A patented feature X and what does it mean because you never really know how long it'll be before a patent turns into something. But Nokia got a couple of patents on designs that look like unreleased Nokia phones basically. There's the Lumia Aero, which looks like a mid-range or maybe a low-end phone, looks basically like an iteration on the 610. And then there's the Fi, or is it the Fi, PHI? How would that be pronounced? I imagine Fi. Fi, probably Fi, which looks like basically a very slightly iterated version of the 900. Is it even an iterated? Yeah, it's a slightly iterated version of the 900. Most importantly, it has the curved glass on the edge. Does it? Yeah. Yes, yes. And that is a bit good. People are anticipating it to be 4.7 inches in size. So like a big one. Yeah. I mean, the problem that Nokia is going to have here, as much as I continue to love this industrial design, this design DNA for them, the problem they are going to have with consumers is that they have now been exposed to the 900. In the US, I'm talking about, of course. They've now been exposed to the 900 for several months. This new device is going to come in, say, October, November, somewhere in that time frame. It's going to be on AT&T shelves looking basically the same as the 900. How do you convince people who've been around the AT&T portfolio for a while that this is a genuinely and thoroughly new device? I don't know how you communicate that to them. Tiny tiles, man. Tiny little tiles. Oh, wait, no. That'll look like that on the current phones as well. Apple's got the same problem between the 4 and the 4S. I mean. Yeah. But the difference is that every single person texting me or not in the United States knows exactly what iPhone is. I mean, I get I get text messages from my least tech savvy friends who I can make fun of on this show because they definitely don't listen to me. I get text messages from them saying, when is the next iPhone coming out? Because they they like the iPhone is pop culture, right? It's not it's not even tech anymore. It's just pop culture. That is not true. So so does not have that advantage. Real point of order since we've got into the judicial sphere today, earlier on, you said mark my words. I don't think we need to do that because you marked them yourself. What hanging on the table? Oh, yes, this is true. Yes. But besides that, I mean, perfect example for exactly what you're saying, Chris. On my flight over from London today, some guy dropped his phone on the takeoff and the road back and this girl tried to pick it up, but it kept rolling back and it rolled all the way to the air hostesses. And she said to him, he was about to get up while the plane was taking off. She said to him, no, no, it's fine. They have your iPhone. And it struck me that she doesn't say they have your phone. She just saw a rolling thing falling down the aisle and she knew it was an iPhone. And that's exactly to your point. It's beyond just being a brand and beyond just being Apple's product. It's a thing now. It's like a whole other category of phone. So yes, just because it looks like the old iPhone doesn't really matter to Apple, but it might matter to Nokia. Right. If people can't differentiate. Yeah. I can see that point. I think it matters more to Nokia than it does to Apple for the reasons you guys have all stated basically. Now what they can do is offer some hot new colors. Give me my orange. A brown. I'm telling you my burnt sienna orange would I. Orange would be hot. Yeah. Orange would be pretty great. I would even take the what the amber brown. I forget what the color was of the brown. So actually no a brown Lumion 800 would look pretty terrible. Now that I think about it. What the only the only way brown works is if it's double shot like the old Zune or if it's they can do something like with with the brushed look or something. But yeah, matte brown is just not good. It would look like not good at all. A chocolate bar. Yeah. Yeah. But you know the leak for this Nokia 5 was of it with a yellow outfit. Yep. And we've already discussed the whole Nokia being inspired by the CMYK color palette and the fact that it already has cyan, magenta and black phones as I have a yellow one. Why doesn't have a yellow one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the latest leak, the one that we've seen and the one that seems to have been confirmed by everything since as a Nokia 5 was it with a yellow outfit. So here into yellow, you can get excited. Otherwise, great. We will find out on the fifth and that will be but the main event on the fifth we talked about this last week is Motorola. We're expecting what the Razer HD basically. But then there's also now this Razer M, which is like a mid range kind of Razer. But it's QHD man at four point three. That's the end. That's pretty ugly. What's interesting is it's super AMOLED, which makes me think that it's probably the same super AMOLED screen that was in the Razer and the Razer Max, which was a terrible, absolutely awful display. Yeah. Oh, I'm using it. Stop hating on it. You're still using it? Have you charged it since we last spoke? The Razer Max with ice cream sandwich and that crazy battery is a kick. It's a killer phone for a trade show like this because I can't rely on the one X to last me the full day. Whereas this thing, I can rely on it to last me tomorrow. There's something you said. You can't compete with that. I mean, it's a bad display. Yes, but I can read stuff on it. That will do. That's fine. Yeah, I am jealous of that battery. And then the other mid range phone that we had rumored, actually more than rumor, this is exclusive to us, was the HTC Proto. Chris, you want to talk about this? I would be honored and delighted to talk about the HTC Proto. So this is a device that bears a striking resemblance to a phone that HTC released earlier this year in China. We wrote about it. Richard Lai of Engadget Chinese is actually the one who pointed this out to me. It's the T something, something, something w and I wish I had a link to give you guys right now. I don't. But point is this this phone already exists in China. It looks like they're expanding its scope globally, may or may not be known as the desire X at this point. We're not sure, but it's very much a mid range phone, kind of in the same vein as the one V, but without the chin and with slightly upgraded specs. Looks like we're looking at a one gigahertz dual core Snapdragon S4. You know, like the S4 range is very, very broad and this is on the lower end of the S4 line, but it but Qualcomm does technically categorize it as an S4. So that's an upgrade from the single core one V. This isn't going to replace your one X, but it's a pretty smart looking phone. So we'll have to see how it actually I'm guessing that we're going to see this at IFA. And if not, then shortly thereafter. Sorry, I was just. It's the it's the new desire V that is what they call it in China, a.k.a. the HTC VT328T for China Mobile rolls right off the tongue. That's sexy. Yeah, right out the top. I will say I'm a big fan of the vertical HTC logo on the side of the phone instead of just centered in the middle. I think that looks a lot cooler. Yeah, much more fitting was their aesthetic, I think. Great. So I get ready to see that one in the next day or two, I suspect. Yeah, this is this is what I'm going to do when we do a video hands on. That's how I'm going to kick it off. Yay. Mid-range Android again. Yeah. It's not. It's not. It's a 10 second hands on video. It's not. Why do you do that? It's a 10 second hands on video and just stare at the camera. It's not. Why do you do this to me? If I laugh, I'm going to hawk up a lung right now. OK, with that, I think it's time to end the Verge Mobile show. It has been lovely having you all with us. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can. We are at Verge. I am at Backlog. Chris is at Zpar. Vlad is at VladSavop. And Dan, it was amazing having you with us. And as DCSIEFERT. SEIFERT. So close. E-I. Dang it. Say it again so everybody can get it right. It's DCSEIFERT. E-I. You know, it's because my name is IE. And so I just always get mad when people spell it wrong. So I just assume. We'll be back next week. Vlad will have survived IFA. Good luck to you, Vlad. Thanks so much for watching, everybody. One second. One second. One second. Hold on. Hold on. I mean. We're holding on. OK. Just to justify this interruption, I'm going to say beta. So yay. Enjoy that. But also, I just want to talk up the fact that I would like our loyal listeners to please tune in tomorrow because myself and Ross Miller are going to be live blogging our little hearts out. We've got the Sony press event at 4 p.m. Berlin time, which works out to 10 a.m. Eastern in the United States. And then two hours after that, we've got Samsung Mobile Impact, Galaxy Note 2 action, which is right at noon Eastern, 6 p.m. Berlin time. So tune in to the site at that time. We'll have the live blog. We'll have pictures. We'll have videos. We'll say things in funny accents. There'll probably be beer. It'd be great. The Samsung Unpacked events are always completely insane. And so you definitely are going to want to see what Latin Ross have to say about the madness that's occurring in front of them. It's true. Well, now I don't have a well-rehearsed scripted wrap up thing. And so all I can say is goodbye, everybody. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Thank you! Bye! Reverse at AP eighhoor. Bye.
 So a month ago or so, I bought a goat, took it home, and then I slaughtered the goat and
 I offered it up to the gods of mobile as a burnt offering, begging them to bring another
 mobile expert to The Verge.
 And a couple of weeks ago, Dan Seifert joined the team.
 Coincidence?
 Who can say?
 Stay tuned for The Verge mobile show.
 Hi, I'm Dieter Bohn.
 I'm Dan Seifert.
 Hi, I'm Chris Stigler.
 And I'm the voice of Vlad Tavon.
 Oh my god, he's here.
 We have been trying to get Vlad connected to us for some time now.
 He is live from IFA in Berlin.
 And how is it there, Vlad?
 It is nice and not sunny anymore.
 It's night now, but it's lovely.
 The people are lovely.
 It's a beautiful city.
 And I'm enjoying it apart from the really ghetto web connection that I have right now.
 Otherwise it's lovely.
 Yeah, you sound remarkably un-robot-like.
 What's really odd to me is that Berlin is supposed to be basically the San Francisco
 of Europe, right?
 A lot of startups there.
 You would assume that the web connectivity would be absolutely fantastic everywhere you
 go there.
 Apart from the hotels.
 And I'm in a hotel.
 So what can I do about that?
 Right.
 I've got a Wi-Fi here.
 I've basically got it taped to the window so it can maximize its connectivity.
 Kudos, I don't know how it lasts.
 But as a voice and as a still picture in this otherwise video podcast, I will do my utmost.
 So we're missing a golden opportunity here to haze Dan, who is with us for the first
 time.
 And I think there's no better way to do that than to just say, hey, Dan, how's it going?
 What's new?
 It's going well.
 I think we got a-
 And you could have done a lot better with that.
 I could have, and you really put me on the spot there.
 Well, he's already done 90 seconds on The Verge.
 So I kind of feel like he's already over that hump, so to speak.
 This is kind of the easy part.
 This is cake compared to the nightmarish hell that Ross DeLair puts you through.
 And I just want to say, for the people that watched the 90 seconds of The Verge that I
 was actually on, I am wearing a shirt that fits this time.
 So nobody needs to take offense or avert their eyes because of a shirt that might not fit.
 Oh, you can always get somebody to take offense.
 Just throwing that out there.
 Yeah, commenters, they're pretty brutal when it comes to our wardrobes, I got to say.
 Is that a tie you're wearing?
 Yeah, that's a little tie.
 And that's amazing.
 Great.
 That's your way to follow for the whole show.
 I was about to say I'm wearing a tuxedo, but then I realized that I'm on camera, so I can't
 really lie about that.
 But yeah, this is very exciting.
 So for those of you who don't know, all of you should know at this point, but Dan Seifert
 is a very, very new addition to The Verge, and we are very excited to have him aboard.
 And I suspect this is an early prediction, but I suspect you're going to be seeing and
 hearing a lot of him on this program going forward.
 I think that's the same as well.
 We'll see how he does.
 Yeah, no.
 I think he totally bombs when he's out, obviously.
 Right.
 Well, yeah.
 We have a pretty high bar here.
 You need to be able to string more words together.
 No pressure here at all.
 Yeah, no pressure.
 Also, Dieter, I just want to go back to your open, because that was, I mean, you've done
 some disturbing opens, but that really takes the cake, and I'm a little emotionally scarred
 right now, and frankly, I don't know if I can continue.
 I might just-
 Yeah, I would like to add that I had no idea that was coming either.
 I mean, I saw the notes for it in our notes, and I had no idea he was going that direction.
 Yeah, so just to give our listeners an idea of what's going on, we're looking at our show
 notes here, and it just says, Verge Mobile Show Episode 14, cold open, colon, goat sacrifice.
 And I didn't think to question Dieter, what the heck does that mean?
 I let him roll with it, and I come to find out that he was actually going to talk about
 buying and slaughtering a goat in the hopes that Dan Sievert would join, which, yeah,
 that was unexpected.
 I would also like to say that no animals were harmed in the making of-
 Yeah, I was just going to say, it turns out that sometimes these opening stories aren't
 actually technically true.
 I didn't literally buy a goat.
 I only metaphorically bought a goat and made a burnt offering of it to the gods of mobile.
 By the way, gods of mobile would make a sweet superhero movie.
 I think we've talked about this before.
 We should talk about IFA, because Vlad's here on a tenuous and risky connection, and we
 should use it while we can.
 So I guess the big news so far is LG.
 Is that fair to say?
 Yeah, I think so, of what we know.
 Well, I mean, actually, I think it's premature to talk about IFA by exactly one day.
 So if we're conducting this podcast tomorrow, it will be a really fascinating breakdown
 of the comings and goings, the movers and the shakers.
 But today is just like LG announced the Optimus G, which is not IFA, at least not yet.
 Jeff Langdon over in Japan, he went to the entity Docomo launch event for this device
 and managed to get some hands-on time with it.
 But our dedicated- So they're seriously not dedicated to IFA?
 I don't know if they will have the phone here.
 I don't actually know that for myself.
 I mean, my conversations with LG have actually led me to believe that it wouldn't be launched
 yet.
 It wouldn't be launched at IFA.
 I expected it to be launched a little later on.
 But there you go.
 Just how far you can trust your communications with PR people, I guess.
 But yeah, I mean, look, if it's an IFA, it will be found, it will be videoed, and it
 will be sniffed and touched and tasted.
 No, please don't sniff it.
 Jeff is a pretty- Don't sniff the phone.
 Don't sniff the phone.
 You can touch it.
 You can look at it.
 You can take video of it.
 Don't use any of your other senses.
 Don't taste it.
 Don't sniff it.
 I implore you.
 Unless you want to come down with some diseases that you can't pronounce.
 There have been phones that have smelled bad.
 I will point that out.
 There are certain manufacturers where they don't get all the glue out before they ship
 it, and so it just smells terrible coming out of the box.
 Well, a really good example of that is the Nexus S, when you whip out the battery before
 switching it off and then stick it back in.
 It's a very consistent unpleasant smell.
 But anyway, I reject Chris's absolutism about don't sniff the phone.
 I should do whatever comes naturally with a pack of completely unnatural technology.
 It's your funeral.
 Vlad, it's your funeral, and frankly, we have Dan lined up as a perfectly suitable replacement
 for when you die.
 I know.
 I know.
 I'm already as present as it is.
 You guys are probably posting a picture of a clown while I speak.
 Or in the absence of a clown, myself with no clothes on.
 Same thing.
 Anyway, so yeah, the news of IFA is coming.
 It's not with us yet, but as far as we're concerned, the Korean companies, they've done
 their usual thing of pre-announcing things.
 So we know there's the LG Optimus G, the 4.7 inch device, and we know that Samsung is going
 to launch the Galaxy Note 2.
 So those are two big standouts from Korea, and we should get our hands on both tomorrow,
 basically.
 I don't know.
 The Optimus 2X was just not an impressive phone to me.
 So this is not the first time that LG has made a point of trying to jump out ahead of
 the competition and trying to make a big splash with a flagship device.
 And in the past, they have not, in my mind, delivered.
 The Optimus Black was not an impressive device.
 The 2X sucked.
 I had a G2X, and it was not a good phone.
 So we'll see.
 I'm optimistic a little bit, only because the 4X HD was impressive, at least.
 I mean, it's not quite up to the bar of, say, what Samsung's been producing or even HTC,
 but it was a marked departure from the really ho-hum phones that were coming in 2011, 2010,
 et cetera.
 Sure.
 The really interesting thing about that-
 Yeah, I'm totally ready to have this thing break my heart.
 I like the design.
 It's just a big, unapologetic slab of powerful smartphone awesomeness, as far as the specs
 are concerned.
 There's no adornments.
 The corners are barely, barely curved.
 They may as well be 90-degree straight, sharp corners.
 It's just a glossy black slab with a screen on it.
 Actually, yeah, the only real complaint I have is that it's super glossy.
 Yeah.
 I was going to say, don't speak too quickly about liking this design, because from the
 front, I absolutely agree with you.
 It's really severe-looking, which is fun and good for something that is really spec-driven,
 but then you flip it around, and there's this glossy back, and it just makes you cringe.
 I don't know why they needed to do that, why they needed to glitz it up and make it all
 flashy and all of those things.
 The really interesting aspect for me with the Optimus G is that this is the first device
 from LG that has the famed in-cell touch technology, which we've anticipated will be in an LG display
 in the next generation iPhone.
 This is essentially the same thing that we're seeing from Samsung with the Super AMOLED
 displays where they take the capacitive touch elements and the display, and they just bond
 the whole thing together and make the display look like it really is on the surface of the
 glass.
 It lets you build thinner displays, which lets you build thinner phones, a point that
 Chris has been drilling into people for a while.
 Obviously, the first quad-core Snapdragon S4 is going to be a spectacularly awesome
 chip.
 The potential is totally there, but then we've also said that a whole bunch of times with
 LG devices.
 Well, the other thing to point out is that it's currently only announced for Korea.
 We don't have... Who knows when it's going to come to the US, if ever.
 We're just now getting the Optimus View on Verizon as the LG Intuition, which they just
 have one of those cages with lots of little bingo balls in it, and they've all got ridiculous
 names on them.
 They just rolled it around, and one popped out.
 What does Intuition have to do with this giant, weird 4x3 device?
 I don't know.
 But that's a long time from the time that device is announced to it arriving here, and
 so I'm not really... I'm betting if it does come to the US, it'll be a while, and by the
 time it does, I don't know if I'll care as much.
 Yeah, especially for $200 on contract.
 Are you kidding me?
 Yeah, I know.
 I have a couple of questions.
 Before we move on, there are a couple of things I just want to say real quick about the Optimus
 G.
 I feel like... And actually about the Snapdragon S4 Pro in particular, because I keep going
 back to something that was said to Vlad and I at MWC this year when we spoke to ARM, and
 the gentleman that we spoke to said, this year I'll be using a quad-core A9.
 This time next year, I'll be using a dual-core A15, and at this point, OMAP 5 is right around
 the corner.
 So we expect before the end of the year, we're going to have some OMAP 5 announcements, which
 I think is widely expected to be the first A15 SoC on the market.
 So is the S4 Pros... Really, is the entire S4 line's reign with the crate architecture
 about to come to an end, and what kind of battery characteristics and performance characteristics
 are we going to see from these quad-core crate chips versus the OMAP 5 and whatever other
 other A15 chips we see over the next few months?
 Well, I mean, for me at this point, I'm more concerned with battery life than I am with
 performance, and if the OMAP can win out on battery life, then I'll switch over.
 I mean, I've got no problems with the dual-core S4.
 Honestly, I really am not... Especially once you get something close to jellybean on it,
 it's just fine.
 So I'm totally convinced that... All these arguments about quad-core is a joke and it's
 not necessary, blah, blah, blah.
 I was convinced as soon as I started using the One X.
 So I'm less worried about the speed and the power of these things than I am about who's
 going to win on the battery life front, especially in a quad-core space.
 To me, that's a much more interesting question.
 Certainly, I think the battery life is definitely an issue, but as devices... We're at 720p
 devices now.
 As we move into 1080p devices, we might see some issues with the current dual-core chips
 pushing those graphics.
 So I think that's where we might see an advantage on the quad-core end and then hopefully better
 battery life with the newer quad-core chips, of course.
 Does that make sense to anybody?
 It makes sense to Chris.
 Yeah, no, I think that that's... Yeah, it makes total sense to me.
 Total sense.
 My gig for this podcast is that I'm going to believe anything that Dan says.
 That's my role here.
 Chris, I think you have the wrong idea for what hazing means.
 I think it kind of goes the other way.
 Which is anything that Dan says, we need to just slam it into the ground and pretend like
 it's completely wrong.
 But you know what else might be a more appropriate-
 By the way, I want to point out that if you're listening to this later and you're not watching
 us live, I strongly recommend that you watch the video version of this podcast and not
 just listen to the audio version because the images of Vlad that are going up on the site
 as he speaks are stupendous.
 Because if anybody's getting hazed here, I really think it's Vlad and not me, which is
 hysterical.
 I think we might very well make this a new segment or aspect of our show.
 Just no video for you from Vlad, just pictures.
 I just have to take some pictures during the week.
 Biceps after biceps.
 Yeah, basically.
 Do we want to talk about these rumored Galaxy Note 2 specs?
 They're pretty much in line with the stuff that we've heard before.
 Only a 5.5 inch screen and the rest is 1280x720, 3G and 4G radios, and a 1.4 gigahertz quad
 core Exynos processor.
 None of that is strikingly different from where we thought they were headed.
 We're going to know for really real as soon as Samsung announces it.
 I'm the resident stylus fanatic, but for some reason, maybe it's the fact that we saw the
 Note 10.1 review from Neelai.
 I'm just not excited about the Note 2 at all.
 I wasn't a believer in the original Note and Samsung proved me wrong by selling millions
 and millions of them.
 The Note 2, I have a hard time believing that anybody is waiting for this device.
 The specs are totally believable to me.
 There is one thing that I want to point out, which is that we're hearing all this talk,
 and we've talked about it recently on the show.
 We're hearing all this talk about devices getting this 5 inch LG 1080p display possibly
 before the end of the year.
 I think there was some HTC rumors recently.
 That really makes this Galaxy Note 2 potentially look lame pretty fast if it's coming to market
 with the 5.5 inch 720p at the same time that we're seeing devices with 5 inch 1080p screens
 on the market.
 That's one thing to consider.
 Yeah.
 I was going to say, I'm in the same boat as the e-tourist so far as, yes, I find the specs
 perfectly in line with the Galaxy S3 and perfectly in line with what Samsung has churning out
 of its other vertical companies.
 It makes sense in that respect.
 I was also in agreement with Dieter when it comes to talking about the original Galaxy
 Note.
 I was here at IFA when the original Galaxy Note launched, and to me, it was a case of
 the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is an amazing device, and this Galaxy Note thing is a gimmick.
 I was like, okay, they're really trying to push the Note to us, but the Tab 7.7 is the
 thing that I find exciting and interesting.
 The first thing to say is Samsung Mobile and Pact tomorrow need not only be about the Galaxy
 Note 2.
 There may be other devices that we just completely not heard about.
 That's one thing.
 The second though is that evidently, whatever market there is for these notes is, I mean,
 terrible pun coming up.
 I apologize in advance, but it's not striking the right note with us, but it is with a whole
 bunch of other people.
 My theory, my only theory is if you look at like seven-inch tablets, like the original
 Galaxy Tab, if you look at the Nexus 7, and then consider shrinking that down to like
 5.3, 5.5 inches, the note form factor, maybe that makes sense to people.
 Whereas all of us just keep considering the Note in terms of expanding a smartphone up.
 Whereas if you think of a seven-inch tablet, which is kind of a one-hand device, and then
 shrink it down, stick a stylus on it, maybe that's the appeal for other people.
 I took that argument or I looked at that argument when Note first came out.
 The problem that I came up with was the Nexus 7 runs tablet software with tablet apps.
 The Note does not.
 The Note runs phone software with phone apps and there's a couple of unique apps from Samsung
 that's preloaded.
 For instance, if you were to grab or just look at the Gmail app, the Gmail app is the
 phone version instead of the two-pane tablet version.
 That's why I think we think a lot of it as it's a phone going up to a 5.3 or 5.5-inch
 screen instead of a tablet coming down to that size.
 Then the other thing that I kind of have a theory about is that it's a very popular device,
 but Samsung's not saying where all those sales are happening.
 I think it's really popular among Asian cultures because the stylus makes it really easy to
 input their languages and their characters.
 It's a lot harder to write in English on it with a stylus than it is, say, Korean or Japanese
 or something like that.
 Yeah, I mean, the thing that I don't forget about the Note is I desperately want it to
 be awesome for a whole bunch of apps with stylus support.
 Every time I go and try it, it's just not there.
 Maybe you're right that it's just the default use case of it for inputting language is what's
 making it so popular.
 I have to disagree with you about the Nexus 7 running tablet apps because I use Nexus
 7 every day and 90% of the apps are basically just blown-up phone apps.
 It's just less annoying because it's only a 7-inch tablet.
 Android tablet still just isn't there.
 Yeah, I mean, that problem is there, but that's an Android tablet problem.
 If you look at Google's apps, like the Gmail app, there's a separate tablet version versus
 the phone version because you get two panes with the tablet version, a little bit different
 UI that takes a better advantage of the larger screen.
 I wish they would do the same thing with their Google Reader app because, oh my God.
 No, Google Reader does have a different tablet UI than it does on the phone.
 If you flip landscape, you get a two-pane view.
 Really?
 Yeah.
 Okay, I'm going to try it.
 No, I don't know if that's available.
 You just got on the Nexus 7.
 You just got served, Peter.
 You just got served.
 Well, I always use it in portrait and it's completely annoying.
 I wish it had two-pane in portrait because that's how I'd like to read because I need
 volume of headlines.
 Yeah, I don't know.
 I mean, the Note, it's just not a new thing anymore, right?
 So I don't know if it's going to catch people's attention the way that the first one did against
 all odds.
 But I have to, like I said at the outset, I have to admit that it could and that I'm
 being a skeptic for skeptic's sake instead of not actually believing.
 Do we want to talk about the S3 colors?
 I want to point out that the brown one looks really cool to me and I totally would buy
 a brown Galaxy S3.
 Yeah, I kind of love it.
 As would I.
 Yeah.
 The brown is gorgeous.
 The brown is absolutely fantastic.
 So the only question is which US carrier or carriers, plural, are going to carry which
 of those colors?
 Because I'm sure that there was some consternation on the part of Verizon and others that AT&T
 picked up an exclusive color.
 So I just wonder who's going to buy it.
 Yeah, I can't-
 They got the red, right?
 Yes.
 The what?
 AT&T got the red.
 I could see a US carrier picking up the black or the, what do they call it?
 Graphite gray or something like that.
 I find it really hard to believe that any US carrier is going to pick up the brown as
 depressing as that sounds.
 I just can't see it.
 Also just to mention, there is no red Galaxy S3.
 I just want to get that on the record.
 There is a burgundy Galaxy S3, which is so glossy that I don't understand any self-respecting
 heterosexual male using it.
 It just looks like lipstick all over, but there is no red Galaxy S3.
 Don't they call it garnet red or something?
 Yeah, that's like, I mean, their brown is amber brown.
 Amber is not brown.
 They're just different colors, man.
 Get with the program.
 Also, I have no idea what the brown one looks like because I was on the flight when Samsung
 decided to announce this thing.
 So I'm just taking your word for it.
 It's gorgeous.
 It's a glossy brown.
 I'll touch it tomorrow.
 I'm sure I'll touch it tomorrow somewhere.
 I'm waiting for a matte one.
 Samsung needs to build a matte phone.
 That would be wonderful.
 Well, they should just sell the back plates individually, and they could market up 300%
 and I would buy like four different colors.
 Just have a black front and then different colors for the back plate.
 I would be all over that, but they're not going to do it, and that's super annoying.
 Are you talking about matte back plates?
 Any back plates, but less specifically matte.
 When you start mixing, see, this is what was great about dumb phones back in the day is
 that like the Nokia Express on covers, it would replace the entire case, and that entire
 concept is basically gone now, right?
 I guess it's partially replaced by the fact that the majority of people seem to get some
 sort of protective case with their phone, and that's what they use to customize and
 style their device.
 But if you want to style the case, it's like the actual phone case itself, that concept
 is just gone.
 Hey, Newsbroke, while we podcasted.
 Sorry, Vlad.
 Newsbroke, it looks like Isis is going to be debuting its mobile payment solution in
 September.
 They're going to introduce it in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas next month, according
 to Verifone CEO.
 So Verifone is going to be providing the payment terminals, and it looks like they're definitely
 going to be requiring NFC, which is, I don't know.
 I feel like NFC shouldn't be a requirement for this sort of thing.
 There should be some sort of backup option, because there's just not that many NFC phones
 out there.
 But we're finally going to see Isis actually happen, all these carriers working together.
 It's actually like a real thing.
 I feel like we've been waiting for this forever.
 We have been, but I've been using Google Wallet.
 The latest version of Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus is good enough now.
 And you can add all your cards to it.
 I'm just happy with the way it works.
 I don't need anything else.
 I want everybody else to stop development efforts on mobile payments.
 I'm done.
 This is good.
 Everybody has a PayPass terminal.
 I have my phone.
 I'm happy.
 You're one of like 80 people that lives that life.
 Nobody has Google Wallet.
 The few people that have access to Google Wallet on whatever their device is don't know
 that they can use it.
 It's like you are the 1% of the 1% that has a mobile payment solution that's reached
 some level of ubiquity and actually knows that they use it and actually uses it.
 It's like you and one other guy.
 You're the other guy.
 You are the other guy, Dieter.
 No, I'm not.
 I don't have Google Wallet on my phone.
 But to Chris's point, if development ceased on the other things and Google Wallet was
 able to be brought to more devices, then more people would have it instead of just kind
 of like this mishmash of various protocols and standards and all this other nonsense
 that everybody wants to throw their hat in.
 We actually got an email to a mobile podcast email address, which is pretty amazing, mobileshow
 at theverge.com pointing out that NFC isn't actually necessary to mobile payments.
 That Apple's solution with Passbook, we just heard, looks like NFC is not likely to get
 in the next iPhone.
 There'll be some other way of doing it and that we don't need a single universal standard.
 We just need all the different standards to work together.
 There's a little bit of hope for that since there's that mobile payment committee that
 ISIS and Google Wallet and everybody else are all part of now.
 But I still am not optimistic it's going to happen in short order.
 We've talked about this a million times and it's whatever Apple decides on that's going
 to become the de facto standard.
 But I mean Google Wallet is progressing.
 They will let any card in now and I guess they're going to add loyalty passes and loyalty
 cards and IDs and whatever to it.
 So it's opening up a bit to look a bit more like PayPass on iOS.
 These things are all starting to offer all the features that they need to.
 The one feature that they don't have is anybody using them, except for Chris.
 I'm using it and that's all that matters.
 There are mobile payment systems that are used like every day all the time, but they're
 well square in Starbucks, right?
 Yeah, square in Starbucks.
 They're limited to those proprietary systems.
 Right.
 And of course, call me when it's widespread, whatever it is, whether it's a mishmash like
 Visa, MasterCard, call me when it's widespread.
 I'll join in.
 Until then, it's just noise, it's corporate noise to me.
 I don't think it works.
 Call me when it will work on any phone without Verizon or some carrier or Asus deciding which
 phones are going to have it.
 Call me when it's not a differentiating feature for a phone and when it's just the standard
 on a phone.
 When I buy a phone, I know that mobile payments will work on it, whether it's Android or iOS
 or Tizen or whatever.
 Hopefully you'll never, never buy it.
 I'm going to have to call you from Europe.
 If you don't want Verizon or AT&T involvement, it's going to have to come from Europe.
 Really what we're waiting for is we're waiting for it to reach the Bluetooth ubiquity.
 Bluetooth is exactly the same on every single phone, no matter which one you buy these days.
 Now Vlad, I do want to point out that AT&T, because I've seen it on Google Street View
 before, AT&T for some reason has an office building in Belgium.
 I've seen it.
 I feel like it's some sort of super secret skunkworks, like all the stuff that they don't
 want anybody to know anything about, they do in Belgium and then they import it to the
 US.
 I am happy to travel to Belgium to investigate that anomaly.
 Then again, Vodafone has an office in Silicon Valley, so I guess it's not that strange.
 No, I think it's strange.
 I think I need to travel over there and try out some of the Belgian delicacies on my way
 there and just really dig into that story.
 Sure, sure.
 I think you have a report brewing.
 Mobile payments, we've talked about this ad nauseam over the past few months, but the
 problem with them, which is never going to really get resolved to anybody's satisfaction
 is the fact that there are too many people who want their palms greased to make it happen,
 right?
 First and foremost, the carriers, which is why ISIS exists in the first place.
 ISIS would not exist if it were not for the fact that three of the four US nationals believe
 that they are entitled to a percentage of this, what they perceive to be an entire new
 economy waiting to happen.
 In fact, really, they have absolutely nothing to do with it other than the fact that they
 are selling phones.
 If it were up to me, carriers would not even... It's almost a net neutrality thing, right?
 Carriers really should have absolutely nothing to do with this.
 Mobile payments should be some secure hardware on the phone.
 It should be an app that you can download from any market, and that's it.
 There are enough people involved in making these transactions happen securely as it is
 without the carriers getting involved.
 To me, ISIS is... Like Vlad said, ISIS is noise, and they have absolutely no business
 being involved in this.
 Next topic.
 I love that we closed this one nicely.
 What's next up?
 Sorry, I had to move and close the window.
 It is ridiculously insanely hot in San Francisco today, and so I had the window open.
 There is a truck backing up outside my building, which is in a perpetual state of construction,
 which is awesome.
 Next topic.
 We finally have got Nikon announcing the S800C, which is an Android-powered camera, and Samsung
 is also rumored to be introducing a Galaxy camera at IFA.
 I am wondering why it's taken this long for this to happen.
 It seems like a really natural thing to just have the cool photo apps that run on these
 platforms... Well, maybe that's okay, but...
 I think I have the obvious answer, which is that with proprietary firmware, camera manufacturers
 are able to... It's almost like the NASA argument, where if you develop your own proprietary
 firmware, you can do it very tightly and in a very, very small amount of ROM, and the
 UI is fast.
 Exactly.
 It's... What's the term?
 It's formally verified so that you know exactly what's going to happen in every possible use
 case because the firmware doesn't do that much.
 Whereas with Android, it opens up a potential can of worms, and it becomes a much bigger
 project to test this firmware and test the camera in the same way and to the same degree
 that you would a traditional closed system.
 I think that this Coolpix actually boots up into something proprietary so that it can
 just start taking pictures right away while Android gets finished loading in the background.
 Just in case Android is taking too long, it'll let you get your big pictures right away,
 and then it'll let you jump into Android-specific stuff once it's ready.
 As clever as that is, it's kind of messed up that they have to do that.
 Yeah, well, yeah.
 But yeah.
 But, I mean, this was always the idea with Android, right?
 It's an open system that anybody can use to slap into anything.
 We were expecting to see consoles and cars and now cameras and, I don't know, toasters
 or whatever running this OS because it's open source.
 You could just plug it into anything.
 We really haven't seen it be...
 It could have replaced WinCE in some cases.
 I mean, I guess it's not really exactly the same thing as that, but I would have expected
 more consumer electronics to be running Android.
 I'm still livid that there aren't a lot of very good aftermarket Android-based car stereos,
 for example.
 So putting it in a camera makes really good sense to me just because there are photo apps
 that you'd want to have direct access to a good lens.
 So this makes sense.
 I would...
 I don't know if I'd buy this, but I buy into the idea of Android running on a camera.
 I mean, Dan, am I crazy?
 I mean, you're more of a camera dude than me.
 No, I think that, just like you said, the idea is great.
 I don't know if this particular model is the answer.
 I feel like I would love to have this on a higher-end camera maybe that could really...
 A person that's using a higher-end camera can maybe really take advantage of the connectivity
 of Wi-Fi and things like that in the various Android apps that they could upload it to
 a Dropbox account or something like that very quickly and easily if they're working with
 a team.
 Things like that that really would make it quite awesome.
 Because when I look at this particular device, you're paying 350 bucks for a $150 camera
 to get the Android functionality.
 And I don't know how many people that would normally be buying this camera would buy into
 that.
 Yeah, it feels to me like they were kind of hedging their bets a little bit and saying,
 well, we're going to try this, but we're going to start with a mid-range camera, and if it
 works out, maybe we'll expand it to the rest of the range.
 Because I totally agree, Dan.
 If they had been able to do this in a cool way on the P7700, then that would be a different
 story.
 But I don't know if you guys remember, Kodak tried to do something like this like a decade
 ago.
 There was a third-party company whose name escapes me that developed an open camera OS.
 And I think Kodak was the only major OEM to use it, but it had apps that you could install.
 It was like a whole thing.
 And I mean, it was still, it wasn't anything like truly open.
 It wasn't like an Android kind of thing.
 But it was a platform that you could actually pay to get access to the API with, and then
 you could develop apps for it.
 And it just kind of died off.
 But at the time, I thought it was a really cool idea for all the same reasons.
 You could have your own filters that you had and all these things.
 And now that the optics are much better, the electronics are so much faster, I'm pretty
 excited about what this means for the future of cameras.
 And it really kind of validates the whole Nokia peer-review way of thinking, which is
 that camera phones and point-and-shoots have gotten so close to converging on each other's
 territories that they're just about the same thing now.
 And the S800 is, I mean, for all practical purposes, it's a camera phone without the
 GSM radio, right?
 Which is what I've been saying over the past few weeks is what the peer-view should have
 been.
 They should have just taken out the GSM radio and put it in a single camera.
 Well, on that topic, Chris, somebody on Twitter a couple of months ago maybe pointed out to
 me that two years ago while writing for Engadget, I wrote a post where I rather mockingly addressed
 what Anssi Vanjoki, who was still one of the leading guys at Nokia said.
 He said that DSLRs are soon going to be obviated by camera phones, which two or three years
 ago whenever that post went up and whenever Anssi's words were spoken, this seemed like
 a really absurd thing to say.
 And I still feel like DSLRs have a role to play.
 Their sensor sizes cannot be duplicated.
 I mean, the way POV tries and look at how thick of a phone it is, even though, as you
 say, it's more of a camera than a phone at this point.
 But definitely, Anssi Vanjoki's words were informed by the technology, the POV technology,
 which we've now seen in the market way back then.
 And his vision is one that, as you say, Chris, a lot of people share, a lot of people want
 to see come to fruition in some sort of admittedly compromised way where you get something approximating
 DSLR quality while bringing it together with what Dan was saying, the app ecosystem of
 a fully developed software platform like Android.
 And this is something that has bugged me for the longest time, which is the camera software
 is just really, really dumb.
 Oh, it's so bad.
 There are two aspects of it.
 One is there's a really clever stuff, which is autofocus and judging the proper distance
 and metering, which sometimes is really perfect and sometimes it's horrible again.
 So these clever little automations of processes and the speed with which they're done so that
 you press the shutter and all these automatic things kick off and do their job, those are
 really the indistinguishable from magic kind of software technologies that camera makers
 deserve great credit for.
 But then when it comes to the software that you interact with as a user, the UX of cameras,
 it is absolutely utterly atrocious.
 And these displays that you've had, they've grown, they've increased in resolution and
 it's just being wasted.
 I mean, we're looking at something that would be embarrassing for BlackBerry to tote out,
 you know, just text your menus and then nightmarish and they're written by people whose native
 language isn't even English.
 I mean, it's just a train wreck.
 It's horrible.
 And absolutely, Nikon has nothing to lose in just dumping Android on one of these cameras
 and saying, hey guys, it's an Android camera.
 Honestly, I'm kind of disappointed in everybody else that they didn't beat Nikon 2 this because
 this point issue that Nikon is bringing out is running gingerbread and it's got mediocre
 specs as far as the phone aspect goes.
 So I mean, it doesn't excite me.
 As much as the idea of an Android camera doesn't excite me, this particular one doesn't.
 Yeah, that's exactly right.
 The important thing is that there be APIs for all these settings that you talk about.
 The camera needs to be open to having Android apps be able to adjust all the different settings
 that there are on a modern DSLR.
 And if someone were to just publish a spec, we're not going to say, here it is, it's Android,
 we slapped it onto a camera.
 But now here you can write an app.
 Here's all the stuff that we're opening up.
 We've done a couple of things.
 I think people would really go crazy on that.
 And you could write a lot of really interesting apps to control the camera and do interesting
 things as long as the Android OS has got full access to all the settings on the camera.
 Yeah, and this is the point.
 The only company at this point that can do this thing and do it justice, and I'm kind
 of surprised to be saying it, is Samsung.
 So this rumored Samsung camera phone with Android has good potential.
 And the reason for that is Samsung is already making lenses for its mirrorless cameras.
 So even though camera lenses are a really new thing for Samsung, the company is, I mean,
 it's partnered with some lens makers, some other optics makers.
 I can't remember the name of the company at this point.
 But it has some experience of building lenses.
 It has some experience of building cameras, and that experience is growing.
 And it absolutely has the hardware that can underpin a really, really appealing camera
 phone.
 But as I say, this Nikon one is great on paper, but it doesn't excite me as an actual product
 at the end.
 And there's just so much room for somebody to do something better and just create their
 own market.
 This is what Apple does, right?
 There's room for a device, there's room for something new, and Apple takes it and then
 suffocates the hell out of everybody else.
 But I really believe that Android is the great platform, the perfect platform to do this,
 which rules Apple out.
 And then Samsung is a big player, but then everybody else doesn't need to be sleeping.
 Like, Sony has a press conference tomorrow.
 Why didn't they give us one of these things?
 I mean, we're going to go gaga.
 I know Ross Miller, he's just like, you know, he's going to rip the shirt off his back.
 He's going to go nuts.
 He's like, Sony does something like this.
 But you remember, Vlad, I don't know.
 Well, any of you guys, I don't know if you remember this, but when Sony first debuted
 the Vita, which was not called the Vita at the time, it was whatever the original term
 for it was.
 Next Generation.
 Yeah.
 Yes.
 Yeah, I think they said that the maybe this was actually this actually happened after
 that.
 But regardless, they said that they could repurpose the Vita OS for other devices.
 Now I don't know if that philosophy or that guidance has changed as Sony is kind of metamorphosed
 in the past few months.
 But that's something to consider as well.
 I wouldn't be surprised to see Sony try to do something with, you know, I'm sure that
 it continues to rub Sony the wrong way.
 I mean, Sony has always taken pride in creating its own proprietary, you know, accessories,
 every standards and platforms.
 Yeah.
 And I'm sure that they would love to get back to their former glory to the point where they
 can do that and get away with it.
 And maybe Vita OS is part of that strategy.
 I think that's a long shot, but we could always trade.
 Just real quick, I do want to point out that Sam Byford has put together a really nice
 roundup of all the next iPhone slash iPhone 5 rumors all in one place.
 So you can see everything, the larger screen, the smaller dock connector, the slightly changed
 design all together in one place.
 And it's really funny that like we're, you know, we're talking about, you know, if we've
 got all these different announcements that are coming up, we've got a whole bunch of
 stuff next, is it next week already that we're going to have Motorola and Nokia?
 Oh my God.
 Time is moving way too fast.
 And so we're sort of like just in the run up to this thing getting announced.
 But does anybody feel like there's something we don't know about the next iPhone at this
 point?
 Like, are there any, like we know by and large what iOS 6 is going to look like.
 We've got enough parts leaks to put together a whole phone.
 We know that the screen and the dock connector and like, I don't feel like there's anything
 that is going to really surprise me right now.
 Am I underestimating Apple?
 The romantic tech nerd inside of me really wants to believe that Apple has been fleecing
 the entire world for the past several months and has been seeding us with fake parts and
 is going to just completely blow everyone away with some some totally different design
 in September.
 But I just don't see how that's remotely possible.
 I think that the reality is that they have been thoroughly scooped and are probably not
 too happy about it and are kind of resigned to the reality that this is just how the world
 works now.
 It's basically impossible to keep stuff secret.
 And you know what that says to me?
 That says that the phrase double down officially means we're not going to do it.
 We're going to fail at it.
 Anytime anybody ever says I'm going to double down on X, what that means is I'm going to
 utterly fail to achieve X.
 It's just like in real Blackjack where double doubling down is very rarely the right move.
 I'm referring to Mike Klausaridis who said RIM would double down.
 Everyone has said they are going to double down on something at this point.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 But I love the idea that-
 Tim Cook said they double down on secrecy.
 I mean, it's the kiss of death.
 If a CEO says double down, it's all over.
 I just love the idea that Mike Klausaridis was the guy who said that tone.
 It would be so perfect if he was indeed the first CEO to start talking about doubling
 down because what is followed since then is just excellent.
 It's just excellent.
 Who was it?
 It was definitely John Rubinstein.
 Was it him or was it, what's his name?
 The other HP guy, the X Palm guy?
 Apothecary?
 No.
 Oh, Bradley?
 Todd Bradley?
 Yeah, Todd Bradley.
 One of those guys said that they were doubling down on Palm.
 No, it was Mike Heard.
 Mike Heard.
 The guy I got fired.
 Mark Heard.
 I think.
 Mark Heard.
 Yeah.
 You could be right.
 Either way, it's-
 Regardless, the point is, it's the kiss of death.
 Yeah.
 I guess as long as we're talking about Apple, we should also mention that they basically
 won the case against Samsung, the big court case in San Jose.
 There's of course other ones coming and there's going to be an appeal and there might be an
 injunction on the Galaxy S2.
 We don't need to go deeply into this because there's a whole special edition of Vergecast
 that was done basically live as the verdict was coming in.
 Actually, literally, as the final verdict came in, they were already doing the podcast
 because there had to be a couple little corrections to it.
 But it's a mobile show, it bears on mobile.
 It's interesting.
 I think the fact that we're going to see possibly some injunctions on the Galaxy S2, that might
 be a real world effect on this.
 I think Samsung had already changed its game.
 I don't see this exact case playing out again over and over and over again with Apple just
 going after every Android manufacturer with the exact same stuff.
 I think they felt Samsung was a special case.
 Let me just note that we deserve special credit for going through most of this podcast without
 banging on and on about this lawsuit because I can pretty much guarantee you that makes
 us unique in this week's video, audio, any sort of industry commentary because everybody
 has some sort of an opinion, some sort of an angle.
 I've actually read somebody write, it's too early to describe Samsung as clear cut winners
 of this.
 Some people are so convinced that Samsung won just by being associated with Apple's
 products, which there's some validity in.
 For a lot of people, the effect of this lawsuit is going to be just glancing over the headlines
 and seeing that Samsung is having to pay damages for essentially copying Apple hardware.
 A lot of people got to start doing the math in their head or doing the maths in their
 head for our UK listeners and start thinking, hey, hang on a second.
 These guys are producing MacBook Airs and whatnot and iPhones slightly different but
 not different enough not to be illegal and the G-Pod on the iPhone, why am I being ripped
 off by Apple?
 I'll just go and buy the cheaper stuff.
 I don't know how much of an impact that's going to have on Samsung's business.
 I don't think that's going to be a significant impact.
 Also I think to a great degree, it has been overblown and there's been a great degree
 of overreaction to how much of an impact the ruling itself is going to have on Samsung's
 business.
 As you were just mentioning, if Apple gets an injunction against the Galaxy S2, what
 does that mean for Samsung?
 Samsung is heavily trying to sell and promote the Galaxy S3.
 It's not really interested in it.
 It hurts for Boost Mobile.
 This is exactly what I'm saying.
 Samsung not selling any more Galaxy S2s from this day forth until the end of the world
 is not even going to be a rounding error, a currency-
 I don't know if I fully agree with that though because I think Samsung easily positions the
 Galaxy S2 as an entry-level model compared to the Galaxy S3 just like Apple does with
 last year's iPhone 4 that's still selling for $100.
 If you look at the US carriers at least, every single one of them that carry the Galaxy S2
 still carries the Galaxy S2 and they run deals where it's like buy one, get one free and
 it's $100 instead of being $200 or $250.
 There's a huge market for that $100 price point smartphone level.
 If you're going to buy Samsung's smartphone-
 The other thing is it would have been Samsung's high margin product.
 They've been making it for a long time.
 It's the best-selling Android variant and Android handset of all time as far as I can
 tell.
 They would have been able to just keep churning it out as buy last year's model.
 It's still quite good and it's a little bit cheaper.
 How much will it affect Samsung in the US?
 I don't think the Galaxy S2 took the US by storm because there are all these different
 variants and so there was less of a cohesive sense of branding to it.
 Maybe I pushed my point a little bit too far to the extreme, but the estimates are that
 the entire impact of the lawsuit, including the damages, including potential from lost
 sales due to a potential injunction from Apple coming further down the line in September,
 it will be something like 4% of Samsung revenue.
 That's how much of a ding Samsung might take.
 Whereas in the first day of trading, immediately after the judgment, Samsung stock price fell
 by 10%.
 There's a potential impact potential, like at absolute max of 4% of the Samsung's annual
 revenue, whereas the company's entire price fell by 10%.
 People clearly overreacted.
 The other thing to say is somebody tweeted this and it was pretty much perfectly spot
 on.
 The tweet was, unlike everybody else on Twitter this weekend, I am not actually a patent law
 expert.
 Everybody has some freaking interpretation and some freaking forecast about this thing.
 Whereas the other thing we really, really know for sure is that the lawyers on either
 side have won massively and will continue to win.
 They'll have generations in their families secured because of this crazy, crazy lawsuit.
 My big question out of this is, what is Apple going to do with this?
 Does Apple think that it has a, I don't know, about a moral authority, but if they've got
 a, what's the word with elections when someone wins by a landslide, they've got the people
 behind them, they've got a- A mandate?
 I'm so hopped up on Sudafed right now.
 I don't know the word I'm looking for.
 A mandate.
 A mandate.
 They have a mandate to go out and file similar lawsuits and go after everybody.
 Or if this was a one-off thing to set an example of Samsung and they're going to deal with
 their other lawsuits with Motorola and HTC and whoever else it is that they're suing.
 But now that they've won this, they can start wrapping up and start getting the settlements
 in motion and we can get back to business.
 Apple will absolutely continue to pursue litigation against a variety of OEMs leading eventually
 to Google proper ad nauseam.
 Mark my words.
 They are not going to stop.
 They are going to, I mean, they are taking Jobs famous statement that he is going to
 spend every last dime of Apple's burying Android.
 They're taking that as gospel and they're going to continue to pursue it doggedly to
 the ends of the earth.
 I'm absolutely convinced.
 And I'm not saying that I disagree.
 I think that Apple made many excellent points during this Samsung trial.
 And I can't say that I really agree with many aspects of the verdict.
 But that's not to say that every single lawsuit that Apple has filed around the world has
 been completely reasonable and we don't know what forms those lawsuits are going to take
 going forward.
 By the way, I just want to point something out which I don't think Apple realizes and
 this just occurred to me.
 But I was doing some research while you guys were talking.
 The droid charge, the Samsung droid charge for Verizon is one of the devices that that
 Apple is attempting to get an injunction against, which I mean, I don't even know Verizon still
 sells the droid charge.
 It's actually right on the front page of Verizon.
 If you go to Verizon's website, it was highlighted.
 Are you serious?
 Yeah, it's like free on contract.
 They're trying to move stock before it gets injunct.
 Let me double check that.
 Well, so U.S. Cellular is really going to hate me for pointing this out, but the Galaxy
 S Aviator is basically the droid charge and Apple failed to take notice of it.
 So Apple, just FYI, you might want to get an injunction against the Aviator as well
 because the Aviator is definitely still very much for sale on U.S. Cellular.
 Well, so I mean, if I'm Samsung, do I say, oh, well, I can't sell the Galaxy S2.
 I'm going to change one thing about it and give it another ridiculous crazy name and
 start selling it again.
 And it'll take Apple two years to get around to getting an injunction on this.
 That's one of the Apple's big complaints is like they hate doing these lawsuits because
 they can't get them through the court system fast enough to have a real effect on sales.
 So I mean, like, you know, I just don't see Samsung significantly changing their game.
 I think they already have.
 And we saw with the Galaxy S3.
 Yeah, I think that long term it works out to it works out to a mandated royalty, which
 is what, frankly, I've been advocating all along where Apple is just going to continue
 or potentially could continue to win these kinds of lawsuits for decades to come every
 few years and they just pocket a billion or two.
 And it works out to being a forced royalty on these patents that they hold.
 Well, let's also kind of try and differentiate and split them out a little bit.
 The first thing is that Samsung is going to have infringed on software patents on one
 side and on design rights on the other side.
 And the point that Dieter raised about the Galaxy S2, rename it, give it a new design
 and start selling it again.
 I was being facetious with that, by the way.
 I was joking.
 But that's fair enough, actually.
 Like, if the Galaxy S2 offends the design rights of the iPhone and you tweak its design,
 where are you offending this side?
 I mean, Apple can't get this through the courts because then it's like, well, what are you
 suing for now?
 Now you're just suing for the fact that Samsung is selling phones, which no longer look like
 the iPhone.
 But the most significant ones and the more intriguing ones, I think, are the software
 patents.
 You know, things like pinch to zoom, what was it?
 The bounce back when you're scrolling.
 And there was one other one.
 There were three major ones, three major software patents.
 Tap to zoom, bounce, and I'm forgetting the third.
 It might be, yeah.
 It's not quite pinch to zoom.
 It's like the instance before you get to pinch to zoom, recognizing two fingers versus one
 finger, something like that.
 Neelai can explain that way better than I can.
 It's not, Neelai is very adamant in saying that it's not pinch to zoom, but it's one
 of the steps before pinch to zoom.
 And I'm very adamant in saying I really don't give a.
 No, seriously, it's like, on the one hand, I feel like these things shouldn't be paid
 in civil at all, and I know there are countries that don't have software patent systems in
 place at all, and for whatever reason, software is still being made in those countries.
 People must be crazy or hooked up on something.
 But okay, so that's one aspect.
 But then on the other hand, I just kind of feel like, well, you know, things like pinch
 to zoom or the moment before pinch to zoom, that moment of anticipation can be recreated
 in other ways.
 And the perfect example for me is the scroll back bounce, the one that you have so familiar
 with iOS.
 Yes, it works great, and it looks great, and it's really functional, but there are so many
 other ways in which you can be creative and inventive and not copy it.
 And a great one for me, and this is probably the only thing I'm going to praise about HTC
 Sense 4, is the way that HTC does it there.
 And it's the same way that Sony does it with a PS Vita.
 It's just the way that the items on the screen, the list items just kind of stretch out, and
 then they just collapse again, kind of in an accordion sort of way.
 It's very natural.
 It's very instinctive, and it conveys the exact same point.
 Windows Phone does that as well.
 I love the way Windows Phone does it, the squish.
 Yeah, Windows Phone does it.
 Yeah, squishing rather than pinching.
 It's a crazy conversation we're having.
 Yes, it's the same message, but differently, and that's the whole point of creativity.
 Even though I hate the software patent system, I just feel like these companies are being
 lazy if they are literally just going to copy Apple.
 If you look at the grid, we had a post earlier today about the changes that Samsung's making
 to the software of the phones that are supposedly infringed or have been found to infringe.
 If you look at the grid of the patents that were infringed, there are certain phones that
 infringe all three software patents, and then a slightly newer phone that doesn't infringe
 any of them because Samsung had already worked around and figured out a workaround for the
 bounce back and this pre-pinch to zoom and the double tap to zoom.
 There's definitely, like you were saying, there's definitely workarounds available.
 On those devices where the workaround was implemented from day one, I don't recall anybody
 complaining from the phone's launch that it didn't have those particular features exactly
 the same as an older Samsung phone.
 Maybe the bounce back, certain people didn't miss that, but I don't think the other ones
 were terribly missed.
 I will say that HTC's workaround in Sense4 for the bounce, I just can't stand it where
 it separates all the items in the list, like the accordion down, and then they can reconnect
 back up together.
 I never liked it.
 It always looked terrible to me.
 I don't mind it.
 I like the Windows phone one the best.
 That's my favorite, the Squish.
 Yeah, Windows phone looks good.
 Even stock Android, the way it does it with the glow.
 I don't like that because it feels like you're coming to a hard stop.
 You're scrolling and then way out of the picture.
 Yeah, it's just tactile.
 It's like hitting a wall.
 Yeah, with the glow, you're scrolling and where you move affects what's happening on
 the screen and then all of a sudden that stops working.
 It's like, what?
 Apple's implementation of it is really, really good.
 You can see why it's tempting to copy it because it lets it still feel tactile, but also it
 shows you it's at the end.
 The way Android does it with the glow is fine.
 It's just aggravating.
 The glow should grow down as you move your fingers so there's still some tactile response
 or visible response.
 If you really love that bounce back feature, ironically, the Firefox browser for Android,
 whatever the latest versions are, has bounce back all over it, no matter if you're running
 it with ICS or Jelly Bean or an older version of Android.
 I have no idea how Mozilla gets away with that because it's very obvious bounce back
 and to the side and everything like that.
 It's just something I observed.
 Yeah, I haven't used Firefox on mobile in a long, long time, so maybe I'll check it
 out.
 Do we want to talk about these?
 We usually skip these like company A patented feature X and what does it mean because you
 never really know how long it'll be before a patent turns into something.
 But Nokia got a couple of patents on designs that look like unreleased Nokia phones basically.
 There's the Lumia Aero, which looks like a mid-range or maybe a low-end phone, looks
 basically like an iteration on the 610.
 And then there's the Fi, or is it the Fi, PHI?
 How would that be pronounced?
 I imagine Fi.
 Fi, probably Fi, which looks like basically a very slightly iterated version of the 900.
 Is it even an iterated?
 Yeah, it's a slightly iterated version of the 900.
 Most importantly, it has the curved glass on the edge.
 Does it?
 Yeah.
 Yes, yes.
 And that is a bit good.
 People are anticipating it to be 4.7 inches in size.
 So like a big one.
 Yeah.
 I mean, the problem that Nokia is going to have here, as much as I continue to love this
 industrial design, this design DNA for them, the problem they are going to have with consumers
 is that they have now been exposed to the 900.
 In the US, I'm talking about, of course.
 They've now been exposed to the 900 for several months.
 This new device is going to come in, say, October, November, somewhere in that time
 frame.
 It's going to be on AT&T shelves looking basically the same as the 900.
 How do you convince people who've been around the AT&T portfolio for a while that this is
 a genuinely and thoroughly new device?
 I don't know how you communicate that to them.
 Tiny tiles, man.
 Tiny little tiles.
 Oh, wait, no.
 That'll look like that on the current phones as well.
 Apple's got the same problem between the 4 and the 4S.
 I mean.
 Yeah.
 But the difference is that every single person texting me or not in the United States knows
 exactly what iPhone is.
 I mean, I get I get text messages from my least tech savvy friends who I can make fun
 of on this show because they definitely don't listen to me.
 I get text messages from them saying, when is the next iPhone coming out?
 Because they they like the iPhone is pop culture, right?
 It's not it's not even tech anymore.
 It's just pop culture.
 That is not true.
 So so does not have that advantage.
 Real point of order since we've got into the judicial sphere today, earlier on, you said
 mark my words.
 I don't think we need to do that because you marked them yourself.
 What hanging on the table?
 Oh, yes, this is true.
 Yes.
 But besides that, I mean, perfect example for exactly what you're saying, Chris.
 On my flight over from London today, some guy dropped his phone on the takeoff and
 the road back and this girl tried to pick it up, but it kept rolling back and it rolled
 all the way to the air hostesses.
 And she said to him, he was about to get up while the plane was taking off.
 She said to him, no, no, it's fine.
 They have your iPhone.
 And it struck me that she doesn't say they have your phone.
 She just saw a rolling thing falling down the aisle and she knew it was an iPhone.
 And that's exactly to your point.
 It's beyond just being a brand and beyond just being Apple's product.
 It's a thing now.
 It's like a whole other category of phone.
 So yes, just because it looks like the old iPhone doesn't really matter to Apple, but
 it might matter to Nokia.
 Right.
 If people can't differentiate.
 Yeah.
 I can see that point.
 I think it matters more to Nokia than it does to Apple for the reasons you guys have all
 stated basically.
 Now what they can do is offer some hot new colors.
 Give me my orange.
 A brown.
 I'm telling you my burnt sienna orange would I.
 Orange would be hot.
 Yeah.
 Orange would be pretty great.
 I would even take the what the amber brown.
 I forget what the color was of the brown.
 So actually no a brown Lumion 800 would look pretty terrible.
 Now that I think about it.
 What the only the only way brown works is if it's double shot like the old Zune or if
 it's they can do something like with with the brushed look or something.
 But yeah, matte brown is just not good.
 It would look like not good at all.
 A chocolate bar.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 But you know the leak for this Nokia 5 was of it with a yellow outfit.
 Yep.
 And we've already discussed the whole Nokia being inspired by the CMYK color palette and
 the fact that it already has cyan, magenta and black phones as I have a yellow one.
 Why doesn't have a yellow one?
 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 But the latest leak, the one that we've seen and the one that seems to have been confirmed
 by everything since as a Nokia 5 was it with a yellow outfit.
 So here into yellow, you can get excited.
 Otherwise, great.
 We will find out on the fifth and that will be but the main event on the fifth we talked
 about this last week is Motorola.
 We're expecting what the Razer HD basically.
 But then there's also now this Razer M, which is like a mid range kind of Razer.
 But it's QHD man at four point three.
 That's the end.
 That's pretty ugly.
 What's interesting is it's super AMOLED, which makes me think that it's probably the same
 super AMOLED screen that was in the Razer and the Razer Max, which was a terrible, absolutely
 awful display.
 Yeah.
 Oh, I'm using it.
 Stop hating on it.
 You're still using it?
 Have you charged it since we last spoke?
 The Razer Max with ice cream sandwich and that crazy battery is a kick.
 It's a killer phone for a trade show like this because I can't rely on the one X to
 last me the full day.
 Whereas this thing, I can rely on it to last me tomorrow.
 There's something you said.
 You can't compete with that.
 I mean, it's a bad display.
 Yes, but I can read stuff on it.
 That will do.
 That's fine.
 Yeah, I am jealous of that battery.
 And then the other mid range phone that we had rumored, actually more than rumor, this
 is exclusive to us, was the HTC Proto.
 Chris, you want to talk about this?
 I would be honored and delighted to talk about the HTC Proto.
 So this is a device that bears a striking resemblance to a phone that HTC released earlier
 this year in China.
 We wrote about it.
 Richard Lai of Engadget Chinese is actually the one who pointed this out to me.
 It's the T something, something, something w and I wish I had a link to give you guys
 right now.
 I don't.
 But point is this this phone already exists in China.
 It looks like they're expanding its scope globally, may or may not be known as the desire
 X at this point.
 We're not sure, but it's very much a mid range phone, kind of in the same vein as the one
 V, but without the chin and with slightly upgraded specs.
 Looks like we're looking at a one gigahertz dual core Snapdragon S4.
 You know, like the S4 range is very, very broad and this is on the lower end of the
 S4 line, but it but Qualcomm does technically categorize it as an S4.
 So that's an upgrade from the single core one V. This isn't going to replace your one
 X, but it's a pretty smart looking phone.
 So we'll have to see how it actually I'm guessing that we're going to see this at IFA.
 And if not, then shortly thereafter.
 Sorry, I was just.
 It's the it's the new desire V that is what they call it in China, a.k.a. the HTC VT328T
 for China Mobile rolls right off the tongue.
 That's sexy.
 Yeah, right out the top.
 I will say I'm a big fan of the vertical HTC logo on the side of the phone instead of just
 centered in the middle.
 I think that looks a lot cooler.
 Yeah, much more fitting was their aesthetic, I think.
 Great.
 So I get ready to see that one in the next day or two, I suspect.
 Yeah, this is this is what I'm going to do when we do a video hands on.
 That's how I'm going to kick it off.
 Yay.
 Mid-range Android again.
 Yeah.
 It's not.
 It's not.
 It's a 10 second hands on video.
 It's not.
 Why do you do that?
 It's a 10 second hands on video and just stare at the camera.
 It's not.
 Why do you do this to me?
 If I laugh, I'm going to hawk up a lung right now.
 OK, with that, I think it's time to end the Verge Mobile show.
 It has been lovely having you all with us.
 If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can.
 We are at Verge.
 I am at Backlog.
 Chris is at Zpar.
 Vlad is at VladSavop.
 And Dan, it was amazing having you with us.
 And as DCSIEFERT.
 SEIFERT.
 So close.
 E-I.
 Dang it.
 Say it again so everybody can get it right.
 It's DCSEIFERT.
 E-I.
 You know, it's because my name is IE.
 And so I just always get mad when people spell it wrong.
 So I just assume.
 We'll be back next week.
 Vlad will have survived IFA.
 Good luck to you, Vlad.
 Thanks so much for watching, everybody.
 One second.
 One second.
 One second.
 Hold on.
 Hold on.
 I mean.
 We're holding on.
 OK.
 Just to justify this interruption, I'm going to say beta.
 So yay.
 Enjoy that.
 But also, I just want to talk up the fact that I would like our loyal listeners to please
 tune in tomorrow because myself and Ross Miller are going to be live blogging our little hearts
 out.
 We've got the Sony press event at 4 p.m. Berlin time, which works out to 10 a.m. Eastern in
 the United States.
 And then two hours after that, we've got Samsung Mobile Impact, Galaxy Note 2 action, which
 is right at noon Eastern, 6 p.m. Berlin time.
 So tune in to the site at that time.
 We'll have the live blog.
 We'll have pictures.
 We'll have videos.
 We'll say things in funny accents.
 There'll probably be beer.
 It'd be great.
 The Samsung Unpacked events are always completely insane.
 And so you definitely are going to want to see what Latin Ross have to say about the
 madness that's occurring in front of them.
 It's true.
 Well, now I don't have a well-rehearsed scripted wrap up thing.
 And so all I can say is goodbye, everybody.
 Thanks, guys.
 Thank you.
 Bye.
 Thank you.
 Thank you!
 Bye!
 Reverse at AP eighhoor.
 Bye.