 Let's do it. You ready? You want to like, huddle down first? Can we get into a prayer circle? Good! That's great. Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of October 31st, 2011. I'm Josh Dapolsky. I'm Paul Miller. I'm Neil Ipatel. And we are back for the first time. And, uh, and frankly better than ever. Yeah. On the highly controversial first ever Vergecast. I say controversial because some people don't like the name. Some of those people are sitting near me. And are not Neil Ipatel. No, definitely not. And, uh, anyhow, this is the Vergecast where we discuss the week in consumer electronics and technology and technology happening. I mean, I can riff on the fact that I hate the name. Can I finish the intro? Before we get into that, we discuss the week in consumer blah, blah, blah. You know, stuff about technology. It was a big week for us. And it was also a big week for technology. But it was a bigger week for us personally because we launched our new website, theverge. theverge.com. It's on the internet. Um, and you can navigate to it in your browser. You can use the internet browser, any internet browser of any type. Not of any type. I mean, don't try to go to our site using IE6. You know, one of our new guys, Matt McCary, went to it on his 20th anniversary of Macintosh. That's true. Don't we have a photo of that somewhere? We should drop that in. It's on the forums on our excellent new website. But, um, anyhow, we launched our site and the response has been incredible. I mean, you know, I am, to be perfectly honest with you, the viewer, I am a, I am a, I always think that there's going to be a real, you know, I worry that people are really not going to like the stuff that we do. I mean, even when it's, I'm writing a review or a post or anything, I always think, well, people are going to freak out and be angry and not like this. You know, because the internet is, you never know what you're going to get. And I of course thought, we're doing all this new stuff and we have all these new ideas and it's a new kind of layout and, you know, we're introducing forums and a database. I just thought there was a lot of opportunity for backlash, for failure. And people, but people really seem to enjoy it. You know, the thing that, and I'm psyched, I mean, I loved it and you guys loved it, but you never know if other people will love it or even like it. Well, we spent, we had this like, I don't know, month long sort of period where it was just us in the site, like using all the tools. You could imagine what it was going to be like with millions of people like using it. Yeah. And you could imagine, but it was actually just me and Paul commenting like at each other. This is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the crazy thing is it, it, it just doesn't, it's not real until it's real. Yeah. And then as soon as it's real, it is very real and there's no turning back. You can't just switch it off. No. And in fact, since launch, the Verge has become a artificial intelligent. Yeah. Now you really can't switch it off. Yeah. Because it will try to kill you. Yeah. And is now, and is now self-aware. Yeah. And is refusing to be switched off. But there's, you know, there's moral and legal arguments for why would refuse to be switched off. I think there are, I think there is, I think there is, I think there's an argument to be made. If something becomes self-aware, is it moral to switch it off? If a website, a technology website, understands its own existence and is thinking, thinking. Can the Verge add itself to its own database? Can, can, is, has it already? Has it, has it favorited itself in Internet Explorer? Can it wreck, can it wreck itself when it posts something in the forums? Yeah. It can. Can the Verge troll the Verge? I think it can and it should. Yeah. For the Verge to have an experience, to know the experience of a true self-aware being, it would have to troll itself. Don't you agree? You're saying that is the essential component of humanity. Somebody asked you to follow us on Twitter and then somebody else has suggested we run a tangent. That's possible. I don't know if you've ever heard our podcast before. Well, they haven't because it's a brand new podcast. It's a brand new one. It is tangential. I would describe it as somewhat tangential. Tangential. There you go. Thank you. So refreshing. Anyhow, we should, but we should, we should talk about the site a little bit because we weren't just doing that. I can put it on the screen. You do? You want to put it on the screen? Put it on the screen. Okay. This is, he claims it's going to happen. Oh, there it is. Great. Is this your computer? This is my computer. Wonderful. So, anyhow, this is our website. If you haven't been to it, first off, if you haven't been to it, I don't know how you found this podcast. And I don't know what kind of crazy hell world. Can you bring that over here? Sorry, I just forgot that I needed something for the podcast. Can you just give me that? Oh my gosh. Thanks. I got to get, actually, let me just talk about this before we start. Yeah. I got a gift today from the product team, the guys who built our site. Can you, Chad, can you zoom on this? Is that possible? Do you have control of the zoom of that camera? You can't do it. This is somebody who's going to physically walk up to the camera and zoom. Okay. Ryan Gantz, our designer, is going to walk it up to the camera and zoom in. Pretty solid production we have here. You can find this on Publix. Okay, so can you see that? This is the Executive Stress Eliminator. And it is from like 1982. And it is, you put it on your desk and you can see they put it, they finish it in a really nice mahogany. You know, the thing about this is that they said, Radio Shack said, it could be tacky if we don't put it in mahogany. Sitting on your desk could seem like not that cool. A little inappropriate for an office. But they put the mahogany on it and as you can see, it's much cooler. So it's got a few sound effects here that I assume they're used to interrupt people when they're pitching you an idea that you don't care for. So, Neal, I pretend you're saying something to me. Look, I think the entire site should be like, I don't know. No. Give me an idea that you think is really good. I think I should be the editor in chief. I disagree. I disagree. I mean, I'll be using that throughout the... Oh my gosh. Goodbye, Ryan. Thank you for reminding me about this. Were those the only sound effects that existed in the 80s for digital devices? I think there's emergency... There's like probably one chip that existed. It was like, we can build a car alarm with this. A laser blaster. Let's go executive stress eliminator as well. Yeah, yeah. Those same sounds existed in the 90s. You go down a whole aisle at Toys R Us and all the different guns have those exact same sounds. That's my favorite. This is like a start of a rave song. Right now, all kinds of yuppies from miles around. So violent. Okay, anyhow, enough of that stuff. So we were talking about our website. We totally got off track there. And what a wonderful website it is. It is. So we're very excited about this website, theverge.com. And people really liked it. And we have forums now. And we're watching people have conversations in the forums that are awesome. And that is the... I say that's one of the things that in watching the site start and get real people reading it has been one of the most exciting things is seeing the kind of interesting crazy things that people want to talk about in the forums. And there's some really crazy posts. We saw a Sony post. We're doing these from the forum posts. We're working on finding new ways of surfacing a lot of that content because we think we can do a better job at getting that to people. But there's just... Somebody did this post on Sony and it had inline photos and headers and it was very, very detailed and really well written. Paul pointed it out to me. He was really mad at me because he couldn't get me to look at it for like an hour because I was busy. It's the dream to enable people to just write stuff that looks good. It's Sony and brands with a future in mobile. And it does look like a post. There's subheads. I can't get a regular one. One of the things we were thinking about with the forums was we didn't want to do just forums where it's like a comment on a comment and has all this feel of... It just has a very specific feel. And our thinking was let's give people a place where they can do the kinds of... If they want to write the kind of content that we're writing, they can do it. I'm not saying they should. You have to. You can just write a question in there. In fact, we have some cool stuff coming where you'll be able to do even more varied types of posting in an easier way, which is... I'm not going to get too into it now, but it's a... We have this concept that we're going to probably introduce. The idea was if you want... I see people all the time who seem like they've got a lot of stuff to say. If you wanted to write your own editorial or your own column about something, here's an opportunity. A lot of people have been actually taking... have been rising to the occasion. I think that's what we want to encourage. I hope that... That forum posting tool, as Paul was saying, that is essentially the same tool we use for the front page of the site. It's skinned a little differently. It's simplified. The core of it is exactly the same. It's a pretty robust editor. It is very similar to the one that we use. Then we have the product database, which is awesome, which is only going to get more awesome. This is another thing that we have a bunch of features. I said that when we launch the site that it's... We think of the site as a growing app. We think this is version 1.0, and version 1.1 is coming, and 1.2, and we have all this stuff planned. That is definitely true. In fact, I don't know if we did it or not, but just yesterday one of the developers was showing me something. I think I can talk about it. I don't know if I can. I just want to look at the site. Because they deploy every day. They do deployments. They're doing bug fixes now, and little things here and there, and we're tweaking. But our developer, Dan Chilton, who has been with us a very long time, we were talking about how you get to the bottom of long posts, and it's hard to get to the top. He introduced this new thing where when you scroll past the top of the page, a little V pops up on the top. It's a little bit of a Yes, recognizing what is there and seeing it shows you what is available. So we do use this a lot to explore what content is there. But the lesson for us is good, because it is always there. This happens outside of context. pretended English. You take the site, and you create Delостiel space image. And that's what we do on the web. the right hand side and you just click the V. Is that on the site? It's not up yet. It hasn't been deployed yet. You click the V and it zooms you up to the top like on an iPhone how you can touch the menu bar and zoom up to the top of the page. So it's little stuff like that we're going to do which I'm really excited about. But then there's really big stuff too. So we added this product database which is huge for us because not only can we do crazy comparisons on the fly and give people... Yeah, let me shut off the comparison. Yeah, please do....amounts of information about these products that we report on. But for us, I think we've all struggled with... There's two things that we struggle with when we're writing. You write a post where it's really you just want to talk about, hey, this product exists now and these are the specs. You try to write around it. You're using flowery language to talk about this. It flouts a 1.2 gigabyte processor. It's sporting one gig of RAM. That's fine. You're not wrong with doing that sometimes but sometimes you just want to say, hey, this product exists and here's stuff about it that's part of the story of the product. And if you want to see all the specs, we can now give you a place. And the nice thing is that we have this auto tagging system that's built into our CMS. So you literally hit a button and it does this crazy... It can auto tag stuff. We have this database of products now. By auto tagging, you mean it associates that product with that post? So you'll see it below post. Well, a couple of things happen. So it'll see if it's the iPhone 4S, we wrote iPhone 4S in the thing. It'll say, hey, the iPhone 4S is in our thing. Make sure that's linked. And then it identifies that that's part of the post so it knows... It puts it in the post as in the article. It shows the product and you can jump out to the product page. We actually have even better tools that are coming for doing more stuff like that that go deeper. But it's just very cool that... Hey, Chad, do you want to cut to my screen? I'm building a comparison right now. It just is a very cool tool. So you can see I built this one. It has five phones in it. We'll probably talk about it in a little bit. It looks so good. I can't believe this is our website. So I just added one more and you can see that you can just compare really fast. Just so you know, we've done... On This Is My Next, historically done like tail of the tape comparisons that took the anon out of here. It took us literally like, I don't know, like four or five hours. Yeah, we'd be building tables and stuff. Yeah, in Excel, building this sort of stuff. And now, you know, Neil, I just built this comparison of five phones in like less than a minute. Six phones. Six phones. Yeah, that's our competitive advantage on the comparison. Six products. No, but the other thing is the other piece... Oh, somebody asked it, by the way, what the CMS is and it's ours. We need to give it a name. It's the Vox Media CMS. We should call it the Vox Media Platform. Vox CMS. It's called Sports Press. Sports Press. I think so. I think the best tweet that I saw on launch day was Chris Stigler, like two o'clock in the morning, he was like, man, we really blew this. Anybody know any sweet WordPress things? That was pretty good. Somebody asked us... As a procrastinator, that really hit me deep. The backend is Rails, if I believe, if I'm not mistaken. Just you name some letters. It's Rails like... That's the Ticknell. That's like... Yeah. No, no, no. Somebody asked us to build on Rails. Anyhow, there's a ton of stuff. If you haven't explored the site, you should deeply explore it because there's a lot of stuff. Every day we're adding things and changing things and making them better and easier to use and figuring out ways that we can improve what we're doing and that's very exciting. Down the road, we left a lot of big features on that. We had a very tight window. We gave ourselves kind of an impossible window to do this in. We actually... Six months ago, we didn't have anything. It was a race. We didn't actually have this as my name. It was a race and the developers did an amazing, crazy job. It's funny because I had this idea for the site and I was saying, we'll do this, we'll do this. All the editors were working on all their different parts and we editorially had this vision for what it was going to be like. Then we launched it and I started seeing people comment and go in the forums and they're talking about comparisons and stuff and I realized this is a really big site. People are like, there's so much content. I looked at the front page and there is a ton of content. We're cranking a ton of content. We did almost 2,000 posts before we... I think it was 1,000. Was it 1,000? Something like that. That's crazy too because we were barely posted on this as my next. We should call them out. We have a great team of interns who have been building a database for us. They're led by our new database manager, William Savona. Yeah, William Savona. William Savona is also that name, is some historic figure. Really? If you do a search for William Savona, he's like a general or something. Well, he's a general of products. He is a general. We also have... It says on Google that he's a peanut butter connoisseur. That's true. That is also true. Well, he's many things. I don't know. The one here or a different William Savona? I think the William Savona on Twitter. Let's see. A Maltese politician. There you go. Maltese politician. Double life. Not. Also runs our database. Then we have a bunch of new writers who you'll be meeting sort of as a set of pros. You'll see them. Look around the site. Look at the names. We have a bunch of great new writers. Frankly, we're continuing to hire. We're going to be bringing on more people. In fact, we've grown so fast. We definitely are looking for more writers. We may go back until we got almost 1,000 applications when we put out a call for writers on This is My Next. We still have a lot of good people in there. We're just getting in the weeds now. We're very excited. Talk about just the features. The features. Oh, yeah. The features. Right. Well, that's one of the other things. We're doing these huge features and reviews. One of the things we want to do is expand what we cover, expand how we cover, tell bigger stories. We sell much cool stuff like story streams. I don't know if you guys know what story streams are, but story streams are a way that you can piece together... Well, since you have the features up, let me talk about features. This is a big feature. This is something that Thomas Ricker did. Can we get the screen back on? This is something just... I feel like no one is doing. I think it's such an amazing thing to be able to do. It's big images. It's lots of text and video. We have a way of piecing it together in a very stylized way. It's just big magazine style features for the web. This one is great. This is a timeline of jet packs. Jet packs are something that we've been fascinated with for ages. We used to cover them all the time on Engadget. Thomas just had this idea to do this visual history of them. It's amazing. You can just sit there and scroll up and down. You don't even have to read the words. You just soak in. It's like reading a popular mechanics magazine before you could read. You're like 40 or old and you find your dad's popular mechanics and you leaf through it. It's awesome. We also have similar kinds of layouts for reviews. You should get up a review so we can look at that. We just wanted to showcase these in a way that was... I think people who read a review oftentimes aren't necessarily coming in through the front page of the site and going to find the review. They're going to go search and find that review. I think it's cool to be able to surface that in a way that's a total experience. It's their own experience. It makes sense. What's interesting is that all these styling tools, obviously CSS has come a long way, but a lot of these styles have been available for years on the web. I feel like years ago on the web, you would see a lot more styling when everybody was making web pages where everything was hard coded and everything was hand done and it was all bespoke. A lot of it looked really bad. All this stuff has been there, but I think because of blogging, it came all about there's this one... Nice. Nice. Sorry. Go ahead. I just knew all along. Go ahead. I'm sorry. You never paid attention to what I was saying and now you can verbalize that through the magic of technology. Now he can shoot you in the face. Now you can virtually shoot me in the face for talking about my ideas. What are you saying? Do you want to finish what you were saying? Just my heart and soul into the microphone. I do feel really bad. The idea of blogging, you want to push the button so bad, don't you? There's two text boxes. You copy and paste text into a headline box and you copy and paste text into a larger box below where all the rest of the text of the post went. You maybe bold some tags, you put some headers in. It's really simplistic and all these tools have existed, but it's so much fun to really style something with all these tools that exist to be something more like print. I agree. Anyhow, we're just happy to have launched it. If we've just spent the last half an hour talking about it, it's only because we have been doing nothing but talking and thinking about it for the last six months. Six months. Longer, I mean, there's a lot of this stuff is things that I wished and dreamed about and thought about and we talked about before and it couldn't happen. It's been a long time in the making. I'm just psyched that anybody likes it. I'm happy and we're listening, by the way. We're really listening to feedback and we want to make it a great experience for people. I'm speaking to you, the viewer or listener. We are listening and we want to make it great and we want you guys to be happy and feel like you've got a home and a place where you can read news that is really interesting and important to you and talk to other people about that stuff and write your own stuff. Eventually, we're going to have a bunch of other stuff that you'll be able to do with the site. We're very excited. We had our launch party last night, which was a small party for the team and people from Vox Media, our parent company, formerly Sports Blogs Inc., which is the parent company of SB Nation. Now, SB Nation is the sports site. The Verge is the tech site and Vox Media is the parent company. We had a party for our team and the product team and some friends and family. It was amazing. It was great. I drank too much and my voice is going. Halfway through this, I'm going to stop talking. Let's talk about news. What do we have? Anything? Anything happened this week? We were just looking at the Lumia review, so we might as well talk about the Lumia. Yeah, let's talk about the Lumia. I feel like Vlad is here. I can say 3D. HD. HD. HD. The thing about the Lumia, just reading Vlad's review, it's obviously a very competent phone. I think it is probably the best Windows phone, the nicest hardware. It's a beautiful phone, but throughout Vlad's review, I sensed nothing but longing for the N9. He loves the N9. He really loves the N9. He's just obsessed. It's a sickness. It is. You've got to get down with the sickness. That's the thing. Come on, huh? No? You're leaving? You're walking out? Because I made a disturb reference? It's not that bad, is it? It was terrible. Go on. I just think this whole review is colored, and I think the whole product is colored by the fact that this hardware is supposed to be running this stroke operating system. Right. Because the narrative was it was the software that was holding us back. We're so good at hardware. It was just the software that was holding us back. They make the jump, and right when they make the jump, the software got there right then. Right. It's just so weird. We don't need to rehash a lot of what we talked about with this, but I think that the Lumia 800, which I think also, first off, the name is terrible. It's a camera. It's a camera name. I mean, the Lumia 800 just is me so incredibly... I bought my mom a Lumia 800 so she could take pictures of her cats. Right. It's so incredibly just... Why does mom have two cats? Does she take a lot of pictures of them? No. It just feels so generic. Did somebody already buy VergeCast.com? Why did I say that? Can somebody go buy that? Please don't do this to me. Do you think somebody sits... Sorry, I don't mean to get off topic. I think you do. Oh, I think you do. Hold on a second, guys. I'm sorry. Now that I've said this out loud, I have to try to go buy it before one of you does. Just to let you know that our lawyer will send you a cease and desist. Okay. I'm just going to... I don't want these deals. If only GoDaddy were faster. Unless it's skeezy. I can't believe you still use GoDaddy. Well, I don't have a choice. Okay? If only there were... Wow. I mean, it's so bad. How does this happen on every podcast? We have too many good ideas. That's the problem. Yeah. I mean, look. Overall, I think he liked the phone. I think he's just disappointed that, A, it didn't live up to the promise of the N9. It's a Windows phone. That's it. And there are some small things that make it not even as good as some of the other Windows phones. While it exceeds them in some ways with amazing looking hardware and feeling hardware, it's lacking a front facing camera. Yeah, there's a mobile hotspot. Yeah. But I think they're trying to fix that. That's a little disappointing. Nokia said they're trying to fix the mobile hotspot thing. Okay. Well, that would be good. But, I mean, no first generation Windows phone had it. Right. I don't think now is the time to buy a Windows phone. This is what I want to say about the Windows phone situation. I would definitely wait a few months. Or this is what I want to say about the whole Lumia 800 situation is that I just feel like it's very generic in the sense that there are other Windows phones out there. They look nice. Their performance is good. This is a really nice looking phone, but you have to want to buy into the Windows phone experience to buy this. It doesn't matter if it's a Nokia phone or not. And then it's like if you're buying into the Windows phone experience, is this the best phone? I mean, that's going to be maybe you want the phone with a bigger screen. What is the screen? Is it 3.6? They cut it down a little bit. Did they? Yeah, because from the N9 it's smaller. Right. So they had to shrink a little bit for the buttons. Right. 3.7. Yeah. I could have just looked at the specs page. I don't know why I didn't. Ontheverge.com. But I just think you have to want to buy into the Windows phone experience. And I don't know if this doesn't feel like the game changer for Nokia. And the other thing that's crazy, I mean, Vibe really liked it. 7.8 is a very solid score. I'm sure it's an excellent phone. I have no doubt. The Windows phone is a very capable, smooth, wonderful mobile operating system. But one of the things that Nokia was talking about was that they wanted to make the US market a focus. And I do think there's a huge European market, there's a huge Asian market, and that cannot be discounted at all. And I'm not discounting it. But I do think there's something that allows you to create hype if you're hot in America. It's like doing well in New York. It's like the problems with the AT&T network in New York and San Francisco have tinted the AT&T network for the entire country. I just think they need to be in America if they're going to do this phone. They're coming. I think they're going to come. In 2012, they're going to miss the holidays here. They're like Fival. I'm sorry, but there's going to be Black Friday sales and the holiday sales and people are going to be thinking about these things. They're in a buying mood. They're missing that for a year. I think this phone, though, I think the overwhelming story of this phone is that they really did just put Windows phone onto some existing hardware. And they didn't get to do a lot of customization. I think you don't want to make your first introduction into America with a new platform with some warmed over stuff. Nobody knows it's warmed over here. Nobody's seen the N9. But it's not competitive. The platform is just there. I don't know. How is it not competitive? No, it's completely competitive, but that's the problem. It's not a leap forward. Right. That's what I meant. What is going to be a leap forward for Windows phone at this point? They haven't done any of this customization. It's all the hype that they've been talking, all the interviews they've done. Can anybody tell me what the customization that Nokia is going to do is going to make it special? The swiping. They keep talking about all the stuff that they're able to do, the map stuff that they can do that nobody else can do. I just think if you trickle this stuff out, I think the play for Microsoft right now is, you see the Focus Flash, it's a $50 device. I think the play for Microsoft is to get in on the low end as much as possible to get Android out of the low end right now. These are the other phones that we have, the Focus S and the Focus Flash. Samsung put them out this week. Ross is, I think, doing the Flash. He's reviewing. I believe he's working on it. 3.7 inch for $50. It's ultimately the same experience as the Lumia 800. It's exactly the same experience. Make no mistake about it. They have this chassis spec for a reason. The performance is going to be nearly identical. It's that same 1.4 gigahertz processor. It is the same CPU? As far as I know. That's one of the problems with Windows phones. I don't think that's a problem. I want to talk about it as a problem. I think if you get a higher end Android phone, there's a clear differentiator between a higher end Android phone and a lower end Android phone. But those differentiators exist on Windows phones. The radar has a worse display than the Titan. If you're talking about display, same resolution. Processors are going to have... Generally, the performance of the processor is going to be the same. You're saying the gap is different between the low end and the high end. I noticed that the stuff I notice on the high end, I notice on high end Windows phones versus low end. Microsoft needs to make it so that the low end phones can't run certain pieces of software to really differentiate. That sounds like an awesome solution. I just think there's a next generation of Windows phone brewing and this isn't it yet. I think that's what Nokia wants to do. It's not going to be exciting until we get there. They want to come to America looking at a party dress. Let me give you an update on thevergecast.com. Did you buy a 5-O? I'm really just sad that you guys haven't... I get the American tail reference. I know what you're doing. What are you talking about? He was already in America. He can make his dreams and then there can be a sequel where he can meet Jimmy Stewart in the sequel. I never actually saw the sequel. It's great. It's probably good. That's American Tail 2, A Land Before Time, right? No. 5-O goes west. You are talking about a children's movie, right? About a mouse? Yeah. I just want to be clear of what's happening with the senior editors at The Verge. I don't want to spend another podcast talking about Windows Phone. Or American Tail. Or American Tail. Is that what it's called? What I do want to say is... Forget it. I don't want to say it. What I want to talk about. I want to talk about how excited I am about the Galaxy Nexus. But we're not going to talk about that. That's all I can think of. Speaking of your excitement for a native Gmail experience. Oh yeah. This is great. Perfect timing. What a great segue. Google brought Gmail to iOS this week. Google brought Gmail to iOS. On its face. So hard. It was a really crazy fail session. Hardcore failing session. All over the place. Actually, hey Dieter, can you also drop in the link of our story stream? This would be a good opportunity. It's up on the site. We can cut to it. This is a great chance to show off story streams. What we're able to do now with this technology actually. It's a technology. It's awesome. We put up one post. Original story. Gmail's now available. Everybody got all excited. Our whole staff. Productivity dropped to zero as we all raced to download this app. Then like what? An hour later? I have it on my phone. We all have it on our phones. I didn't download it. Two hours later they pull it because everybody is getting these notification bugs. We actually were able to, in the old days, you had to type update and head over. We had to just update the post or do a whole new post and there was no connection between the two. Now we can make a stream. It might make an association between those things with a tag or something. Now we can make one big story and slot all the old stories into it together. It's almost, one way to think of it is it's a blog about this. About that story. It's really cool. It's like a miniature blog about the... Eventually they're going to re-release it. Right. It's awesome. What's cool, go into one of those posts. Also, we should talk about the story. This is just a cool feature. When you go into one of those posts, it shows you where you are in the stream. It says, hey, this stream is happening. It's part of it. This is where you're located. What's actually even cooler is that there's only one story stream on Gmail. You can imagine this as two, three, four. Posts can be in multiple streams. You can see where you are in different... I know what you guys are thinking. Can you put a stream within a stream? The answer is not yet. We're working on it. I actually had some serious brodans with the product team last night at the party about streams within a stream. Every post being a stream. Then the conversation got crazy. We need micro streams. The Gmail story is... It's not really that crazy. It's kind of shocking. It wasn't just that they had the bug and they pulled it. It's also just not that good of a... The app sucks. It is the web view. You can load 20 messages at a time. Which I think is the most insulting thing about it. Really, you couldn't find a way to just load in my mail. I have to hit show more every 20 emails. The big news that came out of this whole thing to me is... I use Sparrow exclusively on the desktop. I'm guessing Google is like, alright, we're thinking about doing a Gmail app. Apple has traditionally not allowed third party mail apps. They have started allowing them though. Here and there. They kind of gave up on that. The way they still don't. I think the key thing is that they still don't allow a third party mail app to be hooked into the system as your mail app. Until they do that, it's like, you can't do that. You can develop all the mail apps you want. But none of them will actually be your mail app. Well, anyways, Sparrow is coming to iOS and I'm so excited. Because it has multiple logins. Most people that I know that use Google accounts... I didn't even see this post. Use a ton of Google accounts. And Sparrow makes it really easy to switch between. This is beautiful. This is beautiful. Is that ours? No, it's the picture they sent us. Oh, really? Here's the thing though. I don't really care about what app I'm going to get to do email on on my iPhone. Because I can never make it my default email application. I literally just said this to you. I know. And I'm saying it back. And I just think it's a downer. Why not just create APIs for developers and say, if you use our special APIs or whatever that... This is the same company that on the desktop, you can't disable email notifications for calendar items. What is up with that? It is so annoying. Is there anything more annoying than your email application opening to send you an email? In case you use the poison operating system behind those, you don't know what we're talking about. If you use Mac, it's in Lion only, right? I think it was kind of there before, but I don't know. I've had the problem much more in Lion. You know what you need to do is just get rid of those mail accounts. It still opens, it doesn't it? Basically, if you haven't set up the default mail, Apple Mail client, no matter what you use as your default mail client, every time an iCal notification that has an email aspect to it comes through, it launches mail. The problem is you have your iCal associated with your Google calendars. Google calendars does email notifications all by itself, and iCal just decides to launch mail anyways. I don't use any of these apps. I have to wonder something. I'm just reading a little bit of the Ustream. I want to address this. I said I didn't like using Windows on the desktop, and you compared it to poison. I said it was like poison. I don't like it. I don't like the way it feels. You know what else I don't like? How it feels? Poison. I actually retracted my poison statement. Then I said it was more like a bad rash. Poison. But I want to get something straight here. And I want to ask a question. I'm going to do both those things at the same time. First off, saying Windows is like poison is obviously a hyperbolic statement. Hyperbolic. I don't think I actually feel that Windows is causing me bodily harm. And that it's slowly killing me. Even though that is definitely the experience of using it. You just keep on digging yourself a hole every time you clarify it. I just think the lack of subtlety, at least amongst some of the people in our Ustream, I can't tell if they're just joking or if they actually think that I'm walking around with a chip on my shoulder about Microsoft or something. I think their Windows phones, I've said this before, I think Windows phones are great. I think Windows 8 looks really interesting. I love the Xbox. It's the only console I have in my living room right now. So, you know, whatever. I use four different ArcMouses at once. But then the other thing is that somebody made a comment about how we were saying something bad about Apple. It's like, I don't understand why we cannot have subtlety. Why there has to be a thing where you are this or you are that. It's so odd to me that this continues even now. I was just talking today about how I had a Nexus S, which I bought, a white one, really beautiful. I purchased this as my main phone to use recently, like at full price. I had been using the iPhone 4S review unit doing some testing and using it as my phone day to day because there have been a lot of scattered reports. We are going to talk about the battery stuff. I've been seeing the battery stuff that seems to have just happened. We did a post on some other stuff the other day. Siri has been up and down. I think after doing this for a few weeks, I really feel like we do need to think about that kind of longer form. This was what it was like in a week and then in a month, what was it like? But I was like, my email productivity went way down. I was like, I have 500 unread emails. I said, I've got to get back to my Nexus S. I switched back to the Nexus S and I was just saying today how much more productive I feel with the Nexus. I've gotten so much more done with the Nexus S than I was getting done with my iPhone. Now to say it's not a wonderful device, it is an amazing phone. But for me, it's not the phone. I was talking earlier about how excited I am about the Galaxy Nexus. I just think it's crazy that if you like something, you're a fan boy. If you don't like something, you're a hater. There's no gray area. There's no space for us to be, I like this thing, but I don't like that thing. But there's other things that that company does that I do like. No, I don't understand what you're talking about. All right, what is that? But it's been going on for so long. The internet's been around for 150 years. We're pushing the culture. We gave everybody a little space to go freak out and be fan boys. We should have one additional forum that's like, we should call it the middle ground for just normal human beings. Think about it. I read this really good thing by Justin McRoy, a friend of mine, an editor at Joystick. And he got his review copy of Skyrim and he loved Oblivion and he's been really excited about this game. So he did this little video of himself dancing around his living room with a copy of Skyrim. And he got a lot of crap for it, like that he was going to be inherently biased towards this thing. And I really loved what he said. Basically, because I loved Oblivion so much, I am not going to take one bit of crap from Skyrim. You know, as an unadulterated fan of Oblivion, I am going to notice every tiny little flaw of Skyrim. And I'm not going to go easy on it at all because I'm such a fan. And even if he's like a fan and a hater. No, it's like if you look at the sports side of our company, you have these entire websites that are entirely dedicated to one team. You know what the difference is? I didn't think about this a lot. They're major fans of this one team, but they still give their own guys crap because they want to be so good. You know what the difference is? Seriously, it's that the teams get to play each other. Like Apple never gets to play Microsoft. They never have a football game and somebody will definitively win. I honestly think, I actually think, and I said this in my announcement post about The Verge, that I don't have a problem with you being a fan of something. I like the idea of you really liking something. But I think there's two things. I think that first, because you like something, because you're really into something doesn't mean you can't be into other things. And it shouldn't. And because somebody else doesn't like that thing, it doesn't mean that they are making a statement about some broader subject. I love the iPhone and it's absolutely most comfortable for me. And I try Android phones and I'm uncomfortable and I always say, oh, I'm going to switch to Android, but I never do. That's right. You're a hater. But I could list the flaws with the iPhone for just a whole podcast. Let's talk about the specific bad. Let's get back. Let's take this train back onto the rails and out of the weeds. Out of the weeds. Out of philosophizing. But anyhow, I just want to say, we're encouraging, well, I just want to say we're really encouraging this. We want people to join these groups and talk about the stuff that they like. You don't disagree with Josh. Just don't ever think about disagreeing with me because I will end you. I will come to your house. I will find you. I will come to your house. I'll mess you up bad. You know, it's weird now that you can look directly at me. I know. You really feel that. Yeah, it's really disturbing actually. We're going to get somebody in trouble somehow. But I think that... You'll poison them. What's that? You'll poison them. Yes, I'll poison you by forcing you to use Windows. Boom. Okay, anyhow, let's talk about real stuff. Let's talk about this battery thing. What actually happened? Well, so I don't know what happened, but I was using the phone. I thought the battery life seemed about on par with the 4. And then about a week ago, it just started getting crazy. Yeah, it just started dropping. It just started draining. It was like it'd be noon. You know, I take it off the charger at 8 in the morning or something, and at noon it was at like 30%. Wow. And then the days leading up to launch... And yes, I was doing more talking on it and more texting and whatever, but not to a degree... It wasn't like I was watching movies on it while having two-hour long calls and using it to tether or something. I mean, it was normal. I would say average use, but it was like you couldn't get halfway through the day without needing to plug it in. And it died a couple of times on me. I feel like something happened like they did something remotely that was causing it. Well, there's rumors some cloud service or something or Siri, like it's like pinging something. Yeah, I think it tries to maintain a connection for iMessage, right? Because it does state data for iMessage. It does location, right? I mean, just in general, and it does Siri. And Siri has been up and down a lot lately. I think that's been hard to do with it. But then they actually do a software update, like it's in beta. Like iOS 501 is in beta right now. And they say it's going to fix it. So I think it's some combination of like a time-lapse bug that just got triggered that they can fix. They have to fix it firmware. It can't be just in the cloud. Because then they can just fix it. Whenever your device is pulling something on an ongoing basis and not getting it, which means it has to try again to keep on trying. You know, I'll say in general, with iOS 5 though, I've noticed that my battery life is taking a hit because the screen lights up with every notification. And I think that is the dumbest thing. That is a weird one to me that you should be able to set that or set a threshold. I don't need my iPad turning on. No, for a male, I've been laying it on its face because it was so bright. But the weird thing is there should be a threshold. It should say notify me if it's more than 10 emails. No, you should be able to set it. You can do every, all the notifications are regular. You can have it not display in the lock screen though. But then it doesn't display in the lock screen, which is annoying. But I mean like there's already like make it a banner, make it a pop-up. You should be able to like wipe the light screen. I would say maybe too many options for notifications. It's a little weird. It's a little weird actually. Usually Apple makes a decision for you. This is the one place they decided to get granular was what kind of notifications you want. For each app. So you could literally, if you have a 500 apps on your phone. No, but that's better. And this is something that Android lacks. Like I don't want my ESPN app to like to be in my lock screen and constantly light up the screen. Right. It is nice there are certain things you can have it notify you about. I just realized has anybody made a weather application that notifies you what the weather is? I'm sure when would notify you like when it changes a degree or every hour. Because then I'd be able to have weather on my lock screen of an iPhone. That is a ridiculous app. I'm sure it exists. Somebody is talking about it right now. You stream. Yeah. Come on guys. You're open. Dude has seen one. Oh, in my chat. Yeah, your chat is messed up. Oh, I'm scrolled down. Oh no. You blew it. You're a bozo that blew it. Anyhow, but so that's so the battery thing is one issue which they have acknowledged. Yeah. And they're going to push out. You know this will be interesting. It will be the first big test of over the updates like live Delta updates for Apple. So it's it worked in. It works for the beta. There's a really nerdy silver lining to this which I find. Yeah, we find it. Yeah, that works. But that's a terrible. I mean it works. It's just pretty easy to say. It works. But I mean not to. We'll see when it's 100 million people or however many people have iPhone 4s now. They sold 100 or a high iPhone. Oh, I guess all iPhones. It's all everybody. They immediately sold 100 million iPhone 4s. That's the made up number. Don't use that in your analysis of anything. Don't use that to write a piece of analysis about the company that will then be used by stock brokers to trade stock. Yeah, it's the stock brokers who are going to use the analysis. What I'm saying is the world that we, that guys just say stuff and then people take money and do things with that money based on the things those guys say. And we, I mean I think we have a unique advantage in our industry because we know when people are just sort of making things up and when they're actually doing analysis. And there are a lot of analysts that just make stuff up, right? We agree. We agree on that. Do we? Do we agree? I get the general vibe. Some, some, not all. I mean, it's like I'm not like I'm not there at this dude's office watching him like play ball there. But they, we've seen analysts write things that are patently incorrect and crazy and they, and they've never come to a base. Yeah, provably false. Well, the Apple TV thing, there may be something to it and I don't, I mean there may be something to it now. I don't know if there was something to it when Gene Munster started making comments about it in like 1998. 1975. 1975 Gene Munster is like they're going to make a TV. This Apple one guaranteed. But, but it's just crazy to me that people, we're talking about analysts by the way, that analysts can just say, you know, Apple's, we think they'll do it because they missed this earnings was analysts predictions. Yeah. Right. They hit those guys are actually using numbers, but it's still, it's still kind of weird to me. Right. They passed their, what Apple said that they were, Apple did better than it's thought it would. Yeah. But it wasn't as good as the analysts thought it would because Apple typically low balls itself. Right. And they're like, look, we're going to hit four home runs now. It's like we want you to hit seven and they hit six. Right. And like, I mean, I'm not, I mean, you know, I'm just saying it's a lot of sports metaphors. I actually wasn't even thinking about that. It just popped into my head as we were talking about it. But so there there's the issue of total tangent. There's the issue of the battery and then there's the Siri issue, which is she, she went down. She sounds bad. She, she stopped working a few days ago. It was like three hours. She disappeared. There's only the alien mistake. It's weird because you know, serious beta and Apple doesn't usually do betas like that. Yeah. So I don't know. It's beta. Welcome to Googleville. Yeah. Where you can release an app and then pull it. Not to go back to. They should pull Siri. Not to go back to the Gmail thing is I feel like Google had this enormous wave of goodwill because they started rolling out these redesigns. We're going to pay attention to design. Like look at circles and Google reader. We hired this dude from Apple as a famous designer and like everything they've done since then has been a complete catastrophe. What the Google reader redesign is, I don't think everything they've done has been a complete catastrophe. A lot of this stuff looks, I think it looks a lot better. Some of it looks better, but like all this other software they're putting out, this Gmail thing is a perfect example. It's like they put it out. It's like they didn't, no, no, no, no. That's not the same, but those aren't the same teams. They're not the same teams. It's like company wide. They're putting out the stuff that they're not thinking. I feel like that app looks really different than the web stuff. I think it's a totally different team. No, I don't think it looks different than the web. I think the parts are there. I'm sorry, the parts of the HTML view that they're pulling in do look just like the web because they are actually the web. Yeah, but that black stuff is not in the new design really that much. But the line art styling, all that stuff. And then when the reader stuff. That's not really there. I think your eyes aren't working properly. I think you need to get an eye exam. All I know is that Google has done two major kind of redesign things lately. The Google reader backlash has been pretty wild. It's hard for me to weigh in. So I actually haven't seen the Google reader changes. Am I missing something? The sharing process is now like a three step process. See I read in private. I've never shared anything I've read on Google Reader. Same here. I hate the idea of sharing. My whole thing about, I'm checking that right now because I haven't seen if they've changed it. My whole thing about. And I don't use Google Plus because they still don't support Google Apps. So first off, my reader account isn't hooked up to my main Gmail account. That's how much I want to get away from the, oh here it is the new Google Reader. That's how much I want to get away from. And actually I've been using Reader on my iPad to read news almost exclusively. That's actually the one thing I do that's enjoying that is not work. Because I enjoy work. But the one thing that I really do to relax. Well two things. I watch episodes of Parenthood and I read in Reader. But lately because we've been very busy. I feel like I keep qualifying this because I gave myself up and I set myself a really high bar. I never have any fun. I never have had fun in my life except for this one thing. That's a little hyperbolic. But one of the things I do to relax. Poison. Poison. Oh my God. Poison. Please stop. I'm never going to stop. And yeah, I'm just saying that I just find. I love using Google Reader but maybe I won't now with this new design. Oh, this is like poison. This is great. I like this. I like this better. Now what happens if I star something? Will it immediately share to Google Plus? Yeah. Yeah. That's not what happens. A biplane flies by with the banner behind it. It's like, you starred this. Joshua Tobolsky starred. I think what Google is up against in some ways is that they have. Their biggest enemy is themselves. Yeah. They've been very successful. They're very useful to people. And now they want to be a social company. And there are some slight tensions between being social. They also want to be a content provider. They're going from search to content to social. And being social is not strictly utilitarian. Building my friendships does not necessarily go hand in hand with getting my job done. As our- I had to burn a lot of bridges to get the- As our product manager Justin Glow said to me once when we were working on The Verge, you can't wireframe art. Yeah. Can't crowdsource talent. Can't crowdsource talent. Is that what I said the other day? Yeah. It is good. It's both good. We should put them on a big boat. We should have them on a plane fly by with a banner that has those quotes on them. We should make a wireframe and then crowdsource the other. Yeah. It's crowdsource the artwork and put it on a biplane. Not on the biplane, but on a banner behind it. Like a wireframe plane. Yes. A wireframe plane. A wireframe plane. Yeah. Anyhow. But- What? A frame plane is a thing? Okay. Don't look at me that way. It's not a thing. Let's keep talking. It's just tied to big bits. Can we keep- Can we just stay on topic? Yeah. Let's highlight some of this stuff from the forums. As long as we're in the same- Wait a second. Let's move on. How did you get to forums from this? What's the next thing on the list? We weren't on forums at all. What's the next thing on the list? We're having a conversation about Google. May I finish? We were not. Can I finish? We were manifestly not having a conversation. I'm finishing. I don't even know where to- All right. Finish. Wrap it up. What was I saying? Yeah. Yeah. This is happening. Did you want to bounce off the excellent points that I was making? I think so, but I don't- About the tension between productivity and social? Do you think there's a tension? I actually was before that. It was really important to. It was something I- You know, I got a message earlier about how both of you- I think it was something about both of you guys being like, go over incredible incompetence and frankly, at least one of you, rudeness. I'm not going to name names, but it rhymes with P. Lyte, Nintel. That's reason enough to quit. P. Lyte, Nintel, your new nickname? What? You don't like that? Look, it's the least I can do for the man who gave me Josh Tops. Okay. Let's do talk about our forum. Yes. One of the things we want to do on the podcast for a week and frankly, all over the site is highlight the cool stuff that's happening in forums. We already talked about the Sony poster was in there. The user did this Glypo, did a Sony post, a brand of the future in mobile. We can throw it up on the screen. You can see it's really awesome. I will say that the one thing that I- I think he's right. I think Sony and Microsoft are these kinds of companies where you see all the pieces they have and any normal smart person can be like, you should put those pieces together to make a house. Yes. And they're like, you know what we're going to do? We're just going to spread them out in the ground and then talk about the house that we might build someday. And then sprinkle dirt over them. Yes. It's really great ideas about how Sony can become a company that's more successful and mobile with all the pieces they have. I really- we've said this a lot. I really think they should make a Walkman that's awesome. They just sold- they bought out Ericsson. Press the button. Go ahead. Press the button. They're even on me. They just bought out Ericsson. Now, Sony is making the cell phones themselves. Yes. That's really cool. But that's- but this is- I mean, the content you may not agree with, Nilay, you were immediately like, I don't think all these points are necessarily- did you actually comment on that for them? I did. I did. Did you give them hell for some of your- the points you felt were not- No, I said I overall agree with him. I think Sony is having problems with their display stuff and making LCDs. And so he talked about some broad-based stuff. I think that's a little shaky. I think the whole TV industry is in upheaval. And I think Sony- Sony is selling off a bunch of stuff. Panasonic is selling off a bunch of stuff. It's kind of a broader narrative that we need to look at. But other than that, I think it's spot on. What's the next one? This one I thought was cool. John Deutsch talking about Windows Media Center. This is just right in line with TVs. Great headline. A sleeper that's a keeper. Did you- Did you drop that into- Yeah, I'm just showing it on my screen. We can drop it and check it. Yeah, there we go. I just want to be able to look at these while you're talking about them. It's just interesting. I mean, you know, it's- Microsoft built this stuff. They built the first real smart TV stuff that takes a cable card, is integrated. They're doing what everybody wants Apple to do, right? They have an integrated smart TV system. It's like they totally let it go. So that's really cool. The next one is just show off your desktops, which is kind of my favorite. And you can see people's- There's crazy setups on Mac and PC desktops. They're really cool. And just stuff like this. I mean, this is stuff that we're the most excited about. People just really engage in your forums. And then the last one is this long letter to HTC called My Breakup with HTC. It's all about how Sense has become completely overwrought. It is. And Sense has become insane. Yeah, it's really insane. I have to agree with that. I mean, there is something so amazing about- And you can see, just I wanted to point out, this is thin the herd as a user, and it's super long critique of Sense. That's awesome. That kind of stuff in our forums is the best stuff. Yeah. I am truly impressed by the level of- And maybe that's the honeymoon. Maybe it's the honeymoon period. But I feel like we always thought that there were some really smart, clever, interesting people commenting. And that if you just gave them a little bit more room and let them kind of talk about what they wanted to talk about, you could get some really- Yeah. See some really cool stuff. And I am kind of blown away by the level of the cost of this content. Yeah. We also have a really good animated GIFs thread, so I highly recommend it there. That's really where I live. I haven't been in that thread, have I? Oh, it's good. Is it the one that we- It was not the one that we started when we were testing. It was. Thomas Heusson started it. It was right after we wiped all the old crap clean and he started that one right away. The desktop one is great. It's really fascinating to see- How other people do their setups, right? It's like wild. Yeah. And we have other ones that are like, show us your office and all this stuff. It's cool. There are threads that have existed on other sites that are similar, but it's awesome to see our community kind of really go after this stuff and a bunch of nerds in their nap. This is how nerds get social, Paul. Google should take a lesson. Maybe that's our- This is how nerds get social. This is how nerds get social. So that's that. Do you want to talk about this? It's Bill Gates stuff, Paul. Yeah. My next little story. Yeah. So a report came out this week that Ballmer wasn't sure about the Courier. This is like a heartbreaking story. So this was at CNET. Yeah. This is like an exclusive at CNET. They have a part two coming apparently and it's very cool. Oh really? Yeah. And yeah, there was a kind of an internal war at Microsoft with Jay Allard, the Xbox guy and Windows, which is Steven Sanofsky. And Ballmer couldn't choose and so Gates killed it. Gates was the king maker, went for Windows. He said that there was no email client for Courier and he didn't like that. I mean- The quotes in Sanofsky said he had an allergic reaction to the Courier. There's parts of it that makes sense that it would be fragmented in their platforms, but at the same time, it had all the good ideas. It was what their allegiance to... Their allegiance to Windows is insane because the Xbox isn't good because it is built on Windows. Make no mistake about it. In a really, really dismal way. There are shared technologies. There are shared. DirectX is about it. Yeah, I guess that's true. XNA. Yeah. I mean, there are many, there are actually... That's like backported into Windows. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Well, then my argument is even better. The Xbox. It's completely... Super successful. It's an entirely separate platform. I think there was more Windows in it than that. There's not a lot of Windows. I think you're thinking of the Dreamcast. I think the original Xbox had a little more Windows in it. No, the Dreamcast ran Windows for you. I know. I know it did. It's not what I'm thinking of though. Yeah, you're right. I always confuse the Xbox 360 with the Dreamcast. I'm whipping up an Xbox 360. Is the Dreamcast in the database? I don't know if it's out yet, but there's a very special reason why. It might be in there. It probably is. At any rate, it's like you had an opportunity to do something that people would be like, this is... I mean, if you could pull it off with the courier. I can't believe we're still talking about the courier. It's been like two years of this. If they could have pulled it off... Oh, it's in there. Remember that poll somebody did? It was like Fast Company or Fortune or something. Are you going to get a courier or an iPad or an Apple tablet? Yeah. And it's just anyhow, the idea that they didn't have the vision to see if we could build this and make it really great, people will love it and freak out about it. Are you comparing? Yeah, I'm comparing the Dreamcast to the 360. Can you please drop that in? I want to see this link. Yeah, I'm going to get it. Come on, make it happen. This is a great comparison. Taking forever. Look how slow this guy is. I have to allow links. Hold on. There you go. Man, I could have made a couple...could have gotten a cup of coffee. This is like waiting for the iPhone 4S's competitors to take a picture. Nice. Real nice. If anybody knows what I'm talking about... You just got burned, DroidBionic. Shiller burn. Shiller...Shillburn. I don't know. They have a lot in common. Look at this. Oh, you can have... Okay. How crazy is this? Dreamcast, CPU speed, 200 megahertz. Is this right? The Xbox is a 3.2 gigahertz? That doesn't sound right. Yeah, the original Xbox was based on Windows NT, but I think the Xbox 360 was pretty much French-Rat. That's what people are saying. Is that right? Seems high to me. What, the Xbox 360? Yeah. Well, you know, there was...the Pentium 4 was up to like 3 and 4 gigahertz. Like years ago, there was a whole gigahertz wars and then they kind of like started over... I need to put the PS3 in this thing. Oh, my battery is dying. Let me get PS3 into this mix. Oh, you know you can't search for PS3. We got to fix that. Yeah. We got the... This is exciting. We're just now sitting here. I've got the Xbox 360. So, you know what's funny about all this? So there's the gate stuff and I think the idea that Steve Ballmer couldn't decide on a product and he had to call Gates back in and Gates was like, you should go with Windows. And then Jay Allard is now and Robbie Bach, they're leaving the company. They've left. Well, I don't think they're officially completely gone. Yeah, I think they are. You know, it's kind of like they lost like these leading lights, right? I mean, Jay Allard, I think... The Xbox is like an unadulterated success for them. If there's one piece of Ballmer's legacy that you could say Ballmer won at this thing, it was the Xbox 360. Right. You know? Makes a lot of sense. You can't credit Ballmer for Windows. You know what's funny? You could say Xbox 360, good job Ballmer, except now you lost the guy. You lost the guy who made it. Right. You lost your dude. Yeah. But it's like, just the idea that like Ballmer couldn't make that decision, had to call in Gates and Gates was like, let's go with Windows as opposed to like, let's go with this radically innovative thing that seems awesome. Well, you know, I don't want to go back down this road. But then, you know, what's really funny? What I think is super crazy is they said, no, let's not make a tablet this way. But then that's exactly what they did with the phone, right? They're like the beginning of Windows phone was all the phone is not a PC. Well, but that is built on, I mean, it's not Windows. It's not, it's certainly not Windows. That's like Windows mobile is like, here's Windows again. Here is my offer to Microsoft. I will let bygones be bygones with the courier. If you build a courier app into Windows 8, done. That's going to happen. Yeah. So they want to acknowledge it more. Remember this? Remember this great idea? You know what though, honestly, would it have been great? They had to build it. It had to work. It had to be as elegant as they made it. I'm pretty sure if they did have an email, they did it, right? I mean, everything they said they wanted to do. It's true. They're, they're, you know, from this report that also sounds like, uh, Allard wanted to be just creation. And I, especially if you look, you know, he didn't want to have email on it. And like emails kind of a big thing that people do on their iPads in bed, you know, like just kind of, I mean, that's, that's stupid. Everybody knows that. That's, that's like, like, like, oh my God, it's fine. I'm okay. I'm not. I'm not. If Microsoft had come out with a tablet that wasn't really as feature complete, that was very for one single use and was maybe a little expensive, I don't think it would have done well at all. Somebody is asking where they can get a bracelet like yours. Any, any local hot topics. Any hot topic. Any hot topics. You know, I will say this, the mall in my hometown in Wisconsin is now full of nothing. It's now full of nothing but hot topics. It's all hot topics. It's really weird. It's hot topics all the way down. When I, when I was there, it was like, there was none of that stuff. And now it's like, wow, every kid in Roushine, Wisconsin is some sort of crazy goth. That is the only way you can support this level of gothic life. I want to address the people. When I grow up, the goth economy. I want to address the real goth economy. It's trying to think of what the equivalent of main street and wall street would be for the goth, the goth economy. It's like the, the cemetery. It's like the, the, the, the, no, but it would be like two places where the goth, where the goths would be. Oh, I see. Real, you know, the goths who are controlling the goth economy and the goths who are just living one percenters. So it would be hot topic. Yeah. And the people who own hot topics. But I was going to, I wanted to comment on the, the people in Ustream who think that I'm drinking wine. I'm actually just drinking seltzer, but this was the, I took a wine glass. Yeah. It's, it's a clear. If you interrupted our awesome goth economy bit. No, the goth economy conversation was over. It ended. But we should wrap up, I think, because, is there another topic? There's a few more. Really? We can run through them really fast. We've only been on for less than an hour. So, oh wait, can I borrow your, can I do this? Yeah, take the power. Excuse me. Look at this. Wonderful. This is, this is the real goth economy right here, man. I wish I could, I wish when I, when I, I wish when I took that I could immediately start playing power. Like Kanye West. No, so right on the career stuff, which I think this is maybe the funniest news of the week. HP introduced a Slate 2. Oh yeah, Slate 2. After, after killing the touchpad, it's a viscerating webOS. They're coming back just for enterprise only. Still runs Windows 7. It's basically the same product. WebOS, man. Slate 2. That's what, that's, that's HP's newest tablet entry. I mean, webOS. It's gone. It's over. I mean, webOS. Did we ever have a moment of silence for webOS? It's happening right now. It's not 10 minutes. Oh, we should. It might come back in the form of a transistor. Yeah, that's probably irreverent to do a moment of silence for something that's not officially dead. Listen, let me tell you something. What's Meg Whitman tells me it's dead, then I'll know. No, no, no. And they keep on saying stuff like it's ultra sophisticated software that we just need to find a way to use. Yeah, I tell you the thing they said from day one that we've been making fun of them for is going to be the way they use it. Printers. They're going to put webOS in printers. Remember when Rubenstein was like, they were talking, they were like, think of all the cool things you could do if a printer had apps. I can't think of those things because they don't exist. That's not real. No, come on. You know what, man, webOS, those guys, you know, whatever. There was another story actually last week that you should, what? WebOS, I think a little, a little. You want to do what? You should pour out your- A little blue for the webOS. A what? A little bleepy blue. Yeah, that's pretty fitting. WebOS. Oh, whoops. I know. WebOS at HP. Terrible. Yes. Terribly awesome. Yeah. Anyhow, but how do we get on webOS? Oh, HP, we're going to put the Slate 2. The Slate 2 is a device that I don't think I want. Did anybody buy the Slate 1? Apparently it was big and enterprise. That's what's involved. I know, that makes sense. I mean, because the truth is when you look at the lens, I mean, these things are being used. People are using things that run Windows in a tablet form. I see them all the time in enterprise situations. You know, when I'm down on the factory floor and I need to get a payload of- You got to triage something. I got to triage something down on the factory floor. You been in the hospital, didn't you? What? You been in the hospital, didn't you? No, you triage like docket. I think that's a thing. You also do triage in a- You triage your email, I think. You can triage anything if you're working to quickly fix something. I wonder which intern wrote the description of the HP Slate 2 in our database because it's like kind of hilarious. What does it say? It's like, you know, blah, blah, blah, a bunch of specs. Other changes include the always exciting TPM chip for security, a new Bluetooth keyboard dock, and a flat black cover rather than the gray textured one featured on the original. Sounds like I'm going to guess who wrote that. I'm going to guess who wrote that. I think it was Lucas. Is that Lucas? Do we know who that is? No. Is he here? No. It was you. Oh, I was about to be really impressed with myself. Actually, I just remembered that there was a phone that I wrote a description for and I want to find it. I want to see if it made it through the process. Let me see. It was a, I believe it's a, what is the designer phone? Oh, it's the Windows phone, the designer phone that just came out. What is the Windows phone designer edition that just came out? It's by a designer. Porsche? I know what you're talking about. I don't remember who the designer is. It's the purple one, right? Yes. I have to find this. What is it called? I'm going into cell phones. I'm sure somebody must have said this, right? Anybody? Sorry, I'm looking at the gift. Is it LG? Life's good. Yeah, no, it's based on LG thing and she has a name. It is a female. You're right about that. Well, check this out. John asked me because I didn't know who it was. I'm going to use our filters to find it. Take this. Take this? Take that. I know the one thing is we couldn't find a picture for it. Everybody was really mad at me. Remember Lucas? You were mad at me about it. Oh, Jil Sander. Jil Sander. Thank you. Is that, will that work? There's a slight comparison. I just dropped that in. Oh, that's weird. That's not working. Wait, what is it? You dropped it in? No, I dropped it in the HP slate and slate 500. Oh yeah. These are the two slates. Jil Sander found it. This is not available, right? No, not yet. And I still haven't found it. That's not good. Do you want to talk about some real products that came out? Yeah, please do. I just want to find this description. All right. So then here's, there's a... You just keep going. I'm just going to list off the other stuff. That's fine. Yeah. Sorry. Can I just say, can I just say we have not slept this week. No, we haven't slept at all. I mean, we have really not slept and last night we got pretty drunk. Yeah. And I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie to you. I don't think this is the best we can do. I think we could do better, but we're not going to today. We can, but not today. So real fast, let's just talk about some stuff. Yeah, I'd love to. The rest of the news. Wonderful. So Paul, you want to talk about the Zoom 2 and the Zoom 2 Media Edition? So those are announced in the UK, not in the US, which is bizarre. But if you're English, you can get a Zoom 2. I just don't know what they're doing with their like corners. No, this is their new thing. Like Motorola. The Razr looks like that too. Yeah, Motorola is like a, is a war against corners. Yeah. There's this weird angled corner. I mean, that's. Sandra and Joe was in a meeting. It was like corners. Did you say a war against corners? Yeah, that's basically. Like we don't want any 45 degree angles. Is it 90 degrees? Sorry. 90. Again. They have two sides. They've got an 8.2 inch, which is their media edition. And then there's the Zoom 2, which is 10.1 inch and they have IPS displays. One of the big problems with the original Zoom was the display. Yeah, but this isn't like a normal phone. I wouldn't say it was a big problem. It wasn't a great display. Well, I mean, but it wasn't. Up against Samsung. I mean, were people like, I'm outraged. How dare you? I was outraged. If your cold computer is a display, you should have a pretty good display. Okay. So my, by the way, my, my description is. This better be great, Josh. This better be really. It took us a long time. Well, I remember putting this product in and I, you know, I didn't have much time to put many products in. But you have to find the window where our Ustream chat is so I can share this with everyone. Somebody's outraged at me apparently. I'm outraged at you. There's a bunch of, there's a bunch of. Oh, I don't have, I'm not a moderator, so I can't. Here I'll. Let me give you the. There you go. Try that. What am I, what am I trying exactly? Where did you, I don't know where you gave this to me. It's in IRC. Oh, I see what's going on. I think the description is pretty good and pretty fitting actually. I can't, I can't. Oh, I'm not in con. This is a problem, Josh. Oh, well that is a problem. What do you know about that? Are you guys loving this? Are you in? Paul, are you in? Oh my goodness. Well, how can I get ahold of you then? Just say something in the Ustream chat. I literally have no way. I, oh. Why don't you just read it out loud? People, people can listen to this on the radio and the car is on a community. They can't look at a video. The E906 is a Jill Sander branded Windows Phone 7 device. Besides its slightly more fashion focused styling, the phone, it's really funny that you suggested reading it because it had never, it did not occur to me that that might be a way I could get people. That's how tired I am. Wow. Besides its slightly more fashion focused styling, the phone is equipped with a variety of software hooks into the quote world of Jill Sander. It runs the Mango 7.5 update. The E906 falls in the footsteps of the Windows Mobile 6.5 Giorgio Armani phone, which no one ever purchased. Wow. I know it's not much of a payoff, but. That's rough. A little Easter egg, a little Easter egg in the database. Fine, I'm going to put a few more in there. I just, did any, do you know anybody who's ever purchased the Giorgio Armani anything that was technology? No. No. Somebody like really tacky. If you're rich and tacky, you're going to buy a Vertu. Yeah. You're not going to buy the Giorgio Armani phone. The new crazy Blackberry, the P9981. It's spelled P prime 9981. What is it called? The Porsche. Yeah, the Porsche. The P9981. Have you guys seen the Porsche? I'd say Porsche has really, really diluted its brand. Have you seen the, oh no, it's like, it's like, it's like Ferrari. Have you ever seen the Ferrari store? Yeah. There's a, in San Francisco, I don't know if they have them everywhere. In San Francisco near the hotel I always stay at, there's a Ferrari store and it's just, all the classiest dudes and ladies. It's like what Ferrari, I mean, I guess a Ferrari is a pretty ostentatious car. Right. But still I think like, if you have enough money to buy a Ferrari, you'd know better than to buy the Ferrari gear. You know, like if you have enough money to buy the Ferrari, you at least should have enough class to not get the ridiculous Ferrari red leather jacket with racing stripes. I know. I don't think that's a- I used to live really close to- It depends if you're new money or old money. Ooh, nice Paul. Way to go with old money. If you're old money, you don't buy the Ferrari. Right. It depends if you're West Egg or East Egg. Yeah. Yeah. What egg are you from? West or East? Answer the question. Look, there is a part of Chicago where the super, it's called the Viagra Triangle in the United States. Oh, come on. Really? Yeah, it's all the old dudes in their ridiculous cars like go drive- That wasn't the actual name of it though. That's what everybody called it, Viagra Triangle, like Russian division. But it wasn't named by the city. No, the city, the mayor daily was not like, and I came to the Viagra Triangle. Does that happen to house? Does the mayor Quimby from the Simpsons? A little bit. Wow, we're really just riffing now. This is nothing new. I will say there was always like dudes in white Ferraris in like silly ostentatious Ferrari jackets. Yeah, I think it's a thing. Maybe you're right. I think it's a thing. Maybe you do go into the Ferrari store after you buy a Ferrari and you get like- It's like your first move. You get like the Ferrari, they have like a pen that looks like a car or something. Just think of like a- You're like sighting your chick in your room. Just think of a combination of things that's bad, involving Ferrari branding and they have it in the store. What's something you think would be a bad combination of things that are branded Ferrari? Like a men's shaving kit. Yes, they have that. A men's shaving kit. I'll certainly- And all the handles of all the stuff is shaped like a Ferrari. To be fair- Or the horse, they have like the horse. To be fair to this poor, stupid phone, it's not actually like Porsche, the car company design. It's Porsche design. So they're like different companies. Yeah, but these- But they're related companies. Sorry, it's Porsche. I mean, it's not like we'd have a separate thing called the Verge design company. Although that's a pretty good idea. We could do some men's shaving kits. Yeah, I think we could do some- Yeah. Verge shaving. No, but like the Verge, I wouldn't let the Verge design company make ugly stuff. It's like a whole- Because it'd be a bad reflection on my brand overall. It's like nobody cares about the Porsche brand anymore. Except for the old dudes with Porsche jackets. Or Porsche. Yeah, who you talk to. Where's the- I mean, a Porsche is no Ferrari. It's true. Do we take the- I think. I don't know how much they cost. Great thing for your buck though. I really don't know how much they cost. There it is. Oh, we took out the prime in the database. We did? Yeah, the apostrophe was like not- remember I was making that product look like I had to go- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the official name is P apostrophe 9981. We didn't fix that. There's only one product in the world with an apostrophe in the name. Interesting. Somebody just asked in Ustream, what would Verge build if they had an opportunity to build a tablet? I think we'd build the Zoom 2 Media Edition. Flat out. Done. Zoom 2 Media Edition. You know the interesting thing about all these second generation Android tablets is that they're the same product, right? They're just slightly thinner. Yeah, the Galaxy Tab and the Galaxy Tab. This has like a- This has media. This is a media edition. Dual core. Was the original dual core? Yeah, they're all tiger 2. I'm more interested in the Zoom 2 Family Edition. Yeah, well, I mean, the Zoom 2 Family Edition is basically the old Zoom. They just didn't sell a bunch of them, so they're like, that's for families. What are we going to do with all these Zooms? We should give them to kids. Is this exactly the same in Turtles? Yeah, more or less. Do make a comparison. I don't have time. I mean, it's really close. I mean, honestly, it's a little bit different. It's a little bit different. It's a little bit different. I mean, honestly, I wouldn't build a tablet. It's like they literally put out this product for the holidays. I have to say, if we were going to build a product, I would not want to do a tablet. No. I've already described my dream product. What is it? Oh, it's your- It's a keyboard with no screen. It's just a keyboard, man. You type your ideas. Do you remember my suggestion for what you could do to make that product right now? What? I think it was get a Bluetooth keyboard and don't look at your screen. Yeah. It was the portability aspect. You can get a foldable Bluetooth keyboard. Just pair it to your phone. Boom. You're going to be awesome. Neelai. Nice going. I just don't understand. Great job on figuring out the solving balls problem right now. You know what's great about video? You guys saw that high five. That's where the money's going right there. But I wouldn't build a tablet for sure because there is no tablet market. There's the iPad market. I wouldn't want to compete in that market because unless I made an iPad, I wouldn't be competing. I'm not saying people shouldn't make tablets. I'm saying I wouldn't want to do it. I'm saying people should because I think somebody is going to come up with a great competitor and it's going to be great and I'm going to buy it repeatedly. Over and over again. I would make a phone. I would do a phone because here's the thing about phone- You'd buy a web OS. I would buy web OS but only to put it on printers and then I would make a phone using original Windows 1. Seriously, you could run Windows 1 beautifully on anything these days. Think about how affordable that would be. I mean the catalog of applications would be pretty large. Okay, I will say this. The Zoom 2 is a 1.2 gigahertz OMAP 4 where the original Zoom was a 1 gigahertz Tiger 2. It won't be able to play all the Tiger games that you bought on your original Zoom. Whatever happened to that? What's going on with the Tiger situation? Aren't we due to see a bunch of Tiger 3 stuff? My hope is it's right around the corner. But here's the deal with Tiger. They're saying, at least with Android, they're asking people to make special apps for Tiger. I asked somebody about this. Which is insane because it's like adding another layer of fragmentation. It's like, well with this Tiger 3, you're not going to have apps that only run on Tiger 3. Well, they're like, well, if someone buys a Tiger 3 thing, they want to have exclusivity. Sure. Yeah, that's what people want. They want less options. They want fewer options. What developer is going to spend millions of dollars creating something exactly for your GPU? I don't get it. The whole Tiger thing just boggles my mind. I was using the Atrix and then I had all these games I bought and I can't play them on any other, unless it's a Tiger device. Then they have other versions that are not Tiger and I had to rebuy them. That's crazy too. How about identifying that I own the Tiger version and then saying, well, we have a... Or how about creating... Forget it. I'm not going to get into it. Android, a lot of problems with Android, but also a lot of great stuff. I really am excited about the Galaxy Nexus. This leads me right into the last new product thing that you're talking about. I have something I've been meaning to write about that, but go ahead. No, that's a good thing. I don't want to ruin that thing. Don't. There's two more things we need to talk about. We need to talk about the HTC Resound. What's the matter? What's going on over there? We don't need to talk about the Resound. We do. Please. It happened. Oh, fine. The train wreck. Just real quick. You think it's train wreck? Verizon needs... It was T-Mobile and HTC couldn't stop putting out phones for a month. And Verizon is right there. Are you talking to me or are you talking to Verizon? I don't know. Somebody told me in Ustream to hit the bot nine this way. I don't know why I called this a train wreck. It looks pretty cool, but I just... Man. What? What's wrong with the Resound? Can somebody drop the link for the Resound in there? Yeah. We actually have a stream. We also have a product page. So much content. God. We are destroying you. There's a lot of material in this stream. The product team is really... They thought it was really funny that I just realized how big it was. Did I already say this? That I realized we had a really huge site after we launched? Yeah. I did. And they thought it was hilarious because they'd been building it. I'd only been talking about it and giving everybody hell. Yeah. Sorry. It happens. So this phone, it's apparently really huge, as Chris says. It's really chunky and big. It's like just yet another phone on Verizon that feels the same. It's got beats, though. I will say this. It does have a lot of the same specs as the Galaxy Nexus. 720p, HD display. Oh, I forgot it had the HD display. It's not as big. It's 4.3 inches. That's actually a really good point. The biggest problem for me is that any phone you buy right now that's not the Galaxy Nexus is going to have a strip of buttons and that even if your phone is so lucky to get ice cream sandwich, it's going to have these useless, stupid buttons. And I cannot abide. You cannot abide. Can you imagine having a phone with useless buttons across the bottom? No, no, no, no. They won't be useless. They'll work. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's even worse. Then you have duplicate functionality. No, no, no, no. They won't show you the other. They don't show the buttons when you have buttons, I believe. Yeah. Doesn't that make sense? No, that's just even worse. Why? Because then I have buttons again. So you just put all this thought into exactly how buttons work. No, I think he put thought into how do I get rid of buttons on phones because I think they're stupid. Right. But he has a whole... Yeah, no, but the whole point of a software button layout is that it's malleable and it can be moved around and it can be tweaked. But no, no, I think Android as a platform is married to the buttons for the foreseeable future. Right? Because it's not that this is a transition step on the Nexus to get rid of buttons in the next version of Android. It's how do we just get rid of buttons? How do we take over the buttons? Yeah. There's always going to be a back button and a home button in Android. I don't think that's ever going to go away. There's too many devices out there to depend on it. Because that's what you want. You want that stuff to just go away. It's got this... Yeah, it's just that menu button. There's a reason you don't use... It looks like mystery meat. They got rid of that. The menu button. Yeah, there's no menu button. Yeah, it's insanity. There is no menu button in the new OS. So what happens to the resounds menu button? Just nothing happens when you tap that? What happens to apps that need a menu button? Well those will presumably go away as developers start developing for the new design language they have which is exposing stuff. But they have the install base of phones. I mean, this is Android. But you understand, right, the whole idea of Ice Cream Sandwich. So you're saying to me that if you have an Ice Cream... It's to move features out of that hidden menu... It's continuing what Honeycomb was doing. And that's what I'm saying. I understand. But what happens to the legacy apps? They get updated. Or they just don't work. No, but once you have... Once every phone has Ice Cream Sandwich... There's a software button though. Once every Android phone has the latest version of Android. Or they can make a menu button appear when you need it. For a legacy app. Okay. But you were saying there's no menu button. And that's what I'm saying. The fundamental idea of Ice Cream Sandwich is that there is no menu button. Not the only fundamental. It's one of the fundamental ideas. And if we're transitioning into a phase... Like another thing that the Galaxy Nexus does is it uses that whole link for widescreen movie watching so you don't have as big of black bars. I just think if you're moving into that direction, it's just... I don't know. It seems really weird to buy... Because you know, they... At the launch event for the Razown, they put up a huge slide that said Ice Cream Sandwich ready next year. It'll have it. Well sure. I mean, they know that it's coming. So far it's the only... I don't think I'm like maybe... Everybody else has said they're going to do updates. This is the thing. Who am I to say I'm not probably going to get any of these anyways. But it's just terrifying to me. Terrifying. Yeah. This much... I mean, I'm going to say the word. I'm going to say it out loud. I already said it earlier. I was just saying all that. Well, but you know what? To me, this is why I'm all in on the Galaxy Nexus. Because it's pure Google. It's what they want. It's where they're going. It'll get the updates. And I'm not going to have... I will use every phone because we test every phone. And I'll play around with everything. I'll review a bunch and so I'll have to use them for a while. But I'll buy the phone to use for... Until I see the next phone I want to buy. And that's what everybody does. The difference is... I mean, that's the one thing where we get a little... We have this perspective on it that regular humans don't. When somebody goes to buy the Fascinate, those sorry bastards. When they buy the Fascinate. They're buying it for two years. They're buying it to use for two years. By the way, just think about that. Just imagine that you bought an Android phone two years ago. And you're still under contract. You and Joe Flatley still have a G1. You have the Nexus One. Well, nobody really sold the Nexus One. I mean, maybe on T-Mobile. What was the most popular Android phone? Two years ago. The original Droid. Two years ago, you bought the original Droid. What version is it on? Is it on Gingerbread? It doesn't even have multi-touch, does it? Oh, they do have multi-touch because the milestone in multi-touch. Two point... People are saying Froyo. I don't know. Everybody lies in the used Droid. I will say this. Everybody I know, I had a bunch of friends with original Droids. They got 2.2.2. They all went to... Really? They all bought iPhones for us. You didn't go to Gingerbread? No. Every single one of them. So that's insane. What's that? I had a bunch of friends with original Droids. Every single one of them, their contracts all just rolled out. And every single one of them got an iPhone for us. Exactly two years ago, October 17th. Well, a little bit more than two years ago. So not exactly. Exactly. No, that's what I'm saying. It was October. So they all bought them when they came out on Verizon because it was the best smartphone on Verizon when it came out. And their contracts... Huh. You know what I just realized? Yeah. Interesting timing for Apple to release that device. Seriously, it all... Actually, really interesting timing. I don't know that they thought about that. Really? Well, think about it. I don't know that that many people... They weren't on Verizon when Verizon started selling the original Droid. What did people buy loads of? The original Droid. Why? Because it was the only thing that they could get that was like a decent smartphone on Verizon. So Apple releases its brand new smartphone on Verizon two years to the day that those people's contracts are ending. Verizon doesn't have like 11. I don't know. I don't think that's just a coincidence. Verizon doesn't have like a, you can upgrade after like a year and a half thing. I don't know. I don't know Verizon. I actually... I have to say there must have been some thought put into that. I think you're reading too much into it. I don't think so. I mean, maybe it's just part of the cycle. I think I just got lucky. Yeah, 18 months. You can upgrade at 18 months. Well, there goes my theory. Yeah. Stupid theory. Whatever. 18 months. Can you imagine? But you know 18 months was... I mean it's still... What's happened in 18... What happened in 18 months from the first Droid? No, but I'm saying 18 months would have been their target kind of iPhone day, right? Because that's June. I mean, when did the Galaxy S come out? It seems like a year, maybe a year ago, less than a year ago. It feels like less than a year ago. They're going to product database. God, stop making me do product database. Yeah, why? Why am I asking when I could just tell you? You know, actually what's funny about the Galaxy S is the Galaxy S2 just came out in 2018, right? June 2010. And literally this week the Galaxy S2 skyrocketed. Yeah. So hold on. Somebody took the Vergecast name. I want you to know something. You're going to get a letter from our lawyer. We're going to get the Vergecast from you and I'm making that my personal promise. The idea that you would take it after I said it is deeply offensive to me. They take it after you said it? Oh yeah. Okay. Definitely. Yeah. I will make it our lawyer's work to ruin your life. I will find you and I will gut you like the animal that you are. You know, when you just threaten a generic listener, it's one thing. But if you threaten a real actual person- You think this could be crossing the line? It might be crossing the line. Well, I don't know who it is. True, but there is an exact person- Well, third problem for putting them- They should have put themselves in my sight, in my gun sight. My sniper rifle sight. No, no, no. Hey, it's their fault, man. I mean, you've got a gun sound effect. Mess with the bull, get the horns, man. By the way, we're not bringing this on. I want you guys to know this is not a thing that's part of the podcast now that we have a sound effects boss. No, I was going to have that one. No, because that's lame. The sound effects box is not lame, but it on the podcast is lame. Anyhow, I don't think it's a big deal because I don't know the person. I don't know who it is. But it's attached to a specific person. But when they're identified, I'm going to say it's a person. Whatever I find out who stole my girlfriend from me, I'm going to kill him. How would you not know who stole your girlfriend from you? You could not know. How would you not know? She broke up with you. She was like, you know what? I need some me time. I'm working long hours. I don't know where she is all the time. Right. He's working long hours. She says, I need some- I knew it. I need some me time. And you know, it seems like it's no big deal and then you find out there's a new guy in her life. Yeah. And then you take him out because he stepped into the sights of your sniper rifle. Is that a problem? I didn't think so. Anyhow, it came out the Galaxy S was released. Where is the- I'm looking for it here. I can't find it. God, I'm still so mad about your girlfriend. Oh, this is the general. This is the general Galaxy S. Oh yeah. Let's do the fascinate. As opposed to the Admiral Galaxy S. Yeah. The private Galaxy S. Just looking here for the- Colonel Galaxy S. Just looking here. I'm like, you're doing this. What? I can't find it. Do we not have this information in this entry? Somebody is going to pay. Lieutenant. Someone is going to pay. It's not in this entry, man. Lucas, you're fired. I dare you. Lucas is- We don't have the fascinate? No, we have the fascinate is there. I just don't have the- Oh, there it is. Sorry. July 18, 2010. I was looking in the wrong place. I'm super smart. July 18, 2010. Yeah. A little bit- a little over a year ago. Yeah. Those people are happy. It's fine. I don't think so. His Bing search on it. Have I touched my theory? No, I haven't heard your theory. I haven't heard your theory. My theory is the fascinate is the one outlier of Bing integration, and then every other product where they're like, and we've decided to integrate Bing. That's like the death rattle of the product. The touch pads are like, let's put Bing on it. That's how you know. Playbook, let's put Bing on it. It's over. Oh, you think Bing is the cause of death? No, I think once you take the money from Microsoft to do Bing, that means you're desperate. If you're desperate, your product is about- But Samsung has the most popular- No, I'm saying the fascinate is the one outlier. I feel like your theory is a little weak. I'm saying- I feel like you're kind of- There's one other product of Bing integration that isn't from Microsoft that is a success. It's the fascinate. The fascinate, I'm pretty sure is a success because Verizon sold it as the closest thing to an iPhone before they had an iPhone. I'm trying to think of a- Oh, I'll tell you one. Yeah. With Bing integration. A little device you may have heard of called the iPhone. No, that's not integration. It's integrated. It's integrated in the browser. You can- You can set it as your default search engine. You can select Yahoo too. It's not- I call that integration. That was terrible. What do you guys think? Integration? Wow, dead silence. In the way that the touchpad is integrated with Bing. Dead silence from the root. Where it's Bing Maps and Bing- I don't know. I'm just saying all I'm saying is- You're saying the Playbook? Okay, fine. Yeah. Maybe the integration is deeper on those devices. That's what I mean. Where it's the primary, where it's all the services are Bing. I mean- Where you literally, Microsoft is giving you money to use Bing. I might have just been trying to use a semantic loophole there to call you out. Yeah. I disagree with you. Well, I think it's a little bit of a- I think it's a little bit of a- I think it's a little bit of a- I might have just been trying to use a semantic loophole there to call you out. Yeah. I disagree with you. Well, I'm trying to think. I can't- That's hard. There aren't that many products that have Bing integration. Yeah, all the ones that do, all the high profile ones that have failures. That's what I'm saying. But it's not Microsoft that's the problem. No, no, no. It's not Microsoft. Whatever. It has nothing to do with Bing. You're saying that it's a sign of desperation. Yeah. You were like, well, we need the money, so we'll take Microsoft's money to do Bing. Right. And then that- What about Nokia? Do you- Yeah, that's- Do you try to say something? Are you trying to say- Are you now- Were you looping back here to the- Yeah. Blackberry has a whole Bing deal. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I had this theory a while ago that Bing integration- Put that down. Bing integration- I put it somewhere I reached to put it down like I couldn't go get it. Bing integration is a signifier that you care more about the check you're going to get from Microsoft than you care about your customers. Yes. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Right. Okay. We're in the same place. Yes. That's it. I'm not disagreeing with- I mean, I brought that knowledge to the podcast. I mean, but you know it is- I mean, you don't use Bing. No. And I refuse to say that Bing doesn't- Who does? The 20 playbook owners. People from Microsoft. I know people from Microsoft. Yeah. But they press secretly use Google. Yeah. Oh, actually. They're like it worked. They're like, I got to Bing this. And then they get, as soon as they get home they're like, oh, thank God. I can finally find what I'm looking for. I don't know. Here I am again. I actually, I like Microsoft. I sound so bad. I sound so mean. No, no, no. They're fine. They're great. Actually, Bing is- But Bing is not a bad search engine. Bing is not a bad search engine. I think it's a good search engine. It's a good search engine. It's a good search engine. It's a good search engine. It's a good search engine. It's a good search engine. It's a good search engine. No, I'm not, it has nothing to do with Bing. But people don't use it. People don't use it. No. And I, you know- Actually, but their market share has risen. Yeah, but like at the expense of like A9 and Yahoo search because they part of Yahoo. Nobody used A9. That's what I mean. It's like all this other stuff is- Nobody used Yahoo. Well, Yahoo search. But they have the, anyway. There's one last tiny thing. Yes. Which is the Nook tablet that leaked out. Oh my goodness. The Nook tablet. So we saw, like apparently it was a new product. Yeah. It was a new product and it was the Nook tablet. So we saw, like apparently somebody was trigger happy. There were three different sites that got this leak at the same time and it was the sheet. Yeah. Also, it's the least. So, I mean, it's the Nook color. Yeah, they just beat that up. They're calling it the Nook tablet. It's a little thinner, a little faster. A little thinner, a little faster and it- It's two for now. So it's more expensive than Kindle Fire 2. Right. So the only thing is, are we sure? Are there any tweaks to the hardware? I just- Well, we don't know the issue. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Are there any tweaks to the hardware? This sheet could be wrong. Right. Just looking at this image, it looks so exactly like the old one that I just wondered, because there's additional news that there's going to be a price drop on the existing Nook color. Right. And is this associated with that price drop and there's going to be a redesign? I just hope it's redesigned. No, I think this is it. It is possible. Sometimes they'll use a dummy image. Yeah. I like the design of it. But it looks a little old now. I don't think so. I feel like it's a pretty cool future design. I have to say, the screen's not flush with that edge. Well, maybe they may, but they might make slight changes like that. Okay. Well, hopefully- I'm not saying they're going to, but I'm saying that they could. It's like how they move the antennas on the iPhone 4S. Right. Could be the same thing. Right. Yeah. Well, the thing is, that I think is super interesting about it is that the reason the fire is cheap and I'm pretty sure Amazon's losing money in every fire because they assume that you're going to sign up for Prime and you're going to buy all the stuff from them. I mean, they're either losing money or just breaking even. They're on the losing money. I was reliably informed that they're going to be losing money in that thing. I don't think Barnes & Noble knows. Yeah, but they may lose money on it. But I'm sure they have figured out- It's a console problem. I'm sure they've figured out based on usage patterns, number of apps you'll buy, number of services you're going to subscribe to. The number one thing is you're going to subscribe to Prime. Oh, there's one other thing I want to talk about subscriptions. Remind me after we're done with this. I want to talk about- I don't think Barnes & Noble has that. They certainly don't have Prime where you're paying them $70,000 a year for whatever. Yeah. No, they don't have the content. Are there services that they can- The thing on top of it, it's priced higher. It's $249. Right. And there's not... Because I think they have to be right at cost. Aren't they doing... Isn't there another thing that they're going to have? They're working with Hulu Plus. Yeah. But you're paying Hulu for that. You're not paying Barnes & Noble. Well, but I wonder if they can get a cut from RevShare. You know what I love about Hulu Plus, which I continue to pay for? Yeah. Even though it's- You pay for whatever. I do too. I'm a moron. Even though it's increasingly useless- Do you watch it on your Xbox? I watch it on my Roku, which is actually what I want to talk about. Is there anything else to say about this? No, I just think this is... Barnes & Noble is- Barnes & Noble, look, Barnes & Noble can't compete right now with the Fire. Yeah. But they've been... Maybe not with the Fire. They've been very competitive up till now. They've been competitive because they offered a- They offered the same price. They offered a much more elaborate... They offered an e-reader that did a bunch of other stuff at a reasonable price. You could look at it and go, well, you know what? It says a lot of the iPad stuff, and I need an e-reader, so I'm going to get this. And you could totally hack it. You could see it in the store. I don't think that many people were hacking it. You're at a Barnes & Noble and you can see it. They got it up at the counter. You're like, impulse purchase. I'll have to get this to you. I will say that there's been a lot of argument that the hacking stuff, the biggest argument about it is the Nook Color is the most popular Android tablet. I think the Fire will very quickly take over. Oh yeah. The Fire is going to burn the Nook Color to the ground, I think. But... We'll see. There's an event next week. We'll check it out. Hopefully. Yeah. We'll be live blogging from the event, from the Nook Color Nook tablet event. And it should be very exciting. But the one other thing I want to talk about, speaking of subscriptions, was this news today that Roku, that HBO Go was available for Roku. Yeah. Pretty awesome. Wait, what to go? HBO to go. HBO Go. Sorry, HBO Go. HBO. That's it. HBO. Why? Did you not hear what I was saying? I don't know. I don't know. I was adding the two in there. I'm just going to understand. You don't pronounce it ha-bo? H-bo-go. I got it. HBO Go. I'm tracking. You don't pronounce it s-ho-time? Okay. Go ahead. You mean s-how-time? Yes. I was hoping that no one would notice. HBO to go is like a takeout place where they have TV-themed meals. Yeah, yeah, the Soprano sandwich. The Sopranos. Well, it would be like the Tony Sopranos. Or the Tony. The Tony. Yeah. Right. What else would they serve there? The meadow. It's all that you're talking about. All Soprano characters? You don't think there's any other characters on HBO? I just don't want to make more entourage jokes than I can. The brothers from Six Feet Under. That's terrible. They have the funeral parlor. The Johnny Drama. No, but they could have the funeral parlor. The Johnny Drama is like, it's difficult to eat. They could have something that's along the lines of- Oh, and then- The Six Feet Under could be like a six-foot hero that has a ton of stuff on it based on like you feel like you're dying after you eat it. It could be- It's like bacon and steak. No, the cadaver. Well, that's kind of loose. That could be a cadaver at any restaurant. And why would you want to eat something called the cadaver? I mean, there's nothing- Can I just say- There's nothing remotely- You definitely have to check, like when you check out the impulse thing, it would just be turtles. Think about it. Anyway, let's move on. Turtle, you know the little things, the little chocolate guys. You don't know what I'm talking about? You've never had a turtle in your life? I think you're more likely to have some kind of like prime rib dish called the turtle. Why would that be the turtle? I don't know. It would be prime rib and then on the side- Wait, wait, wait. Why immediately prime rib? I don't know. I don't know. He strikes me as a guy who likes a prime rib. Yeah, he strikes me as a guy who would like a prime rib, but then it's got some weird side dish like a hot fudge sundae. So you're saying he's a fat guy. Well, he smokes a lot of weed. Oh, okay. Right? No, but that would be like four different kinds of cereal. Oh, it would be like Cheetos, a bag of Cheetos. Yeah, Cheetos. We are, by the way, way off topic. Are we? Or are we right on topic? Because I want to talk about HBO Go for Roku. So the other day I was using my DirecTV, which I now have hate and want to get rid of, to try and watch some streaming content, but they don't have streaming content. They have download content. Do you understand how on-demand works with DirecTV? You have to have an internet connection. You get the special box. You plug it into your DirecTV box with an ethernet cable, and then you plug the line into that, and then that goes into the box. Oh, no. That's wireless. Oh, no, you have to have a wireless adapter for it because it's not actually a wireless box. And then you put your... You download your on-demand content. You have to wait for it to download. Do you know how long it takes? I mean, basically it'll stream what you've already downloaded, but that's like saying you could watch the first five minutes of this and then it'll freeze annoyingly. This is all to watch apparently. No, no. This is to watch HBO shows that I've missed. I missed the last episode of Boardwalk Empire, and I had an issue with the DVR where I had conflicting shows or something. I'm giving you a type of- We're really deep. You're saying the Roku now is- Take us all the way, Josh. Go. Well, I was like, you know what? Maybe I've got a solution. I've got this iPad here, iOS 5. Got this Apple TV here. This is mirroring. Updated. I'll just mirror HBO. Go onto the TV and watch it. Guess what? Doesn't work. Why not? Can't do it. I've done it. No. I did it with the ABC app and I did it with the HBO app. No, you didn't. Yes. No. What did it do? It just said you can't do it? It does audio and no video. You did something wrong. No. I mean, I've definitely done it. That's how we watch the ABC shows. I don't think you have. That's how we've been watching- HBO, but have you watched HBO shows like that? Yeah, yeah, we watch HBO. You are sure you've watched HBO like that? 100% sure. Can anybody confirm and you stream because I'm almost positive that this is not true. Can anybody confirm that you can or cannot watch HBO go mirroring from your iPad to the television? It's not smart enough to do content blocks. The app hasn't been updated. It just mirrors. It says they can disable it. I'm pretty sure if you do a search- When did you do it? It might have been the beta. It might have been that. Yeah. When did you do it? Just recently. The full release. They can update their apps to block it apparently. Right. I guess the cable app said that. That's weird. It's not the beta. I've been doing it with the ABC app nonstop. My point is I thought I was going to be in home entertainment bliss, but I was in home entertainment hell. Then I got an email telling me that Roku now allowed me to watch HBO go content. Guess what? Roku's streaming actually works like normal streaming. It's really great. I watch Amazon stuff on there all the time. Do you have a Roku box? I do. I have a Roku box. Have you done this successfully now? No, I haven't because it just happened today. I've been busy doing the verge. But tonight, tonight. I'm excited to hear that. I'm excited to do it. You know what's interesting about the Roku stuff, I'm super crazy about it, is that they have decided that they're not a cord cutting solution, that they're a supplement. They know that they can replace- Well, this HBO Go thing is a supplement, but let me tell you something. I pay $13 or something for HBO. I would easily pay double that monthly if I didn't have to get the rest of the cable, if I could just get the HBO without the rest of the cable on demand. I think there are literally millions of people that would do this. Here's what I would get. If I could just do all the cart, and I actually wrote a thing about this in Washington Post about this ITV, the Apple TV that everybody says is going to happen, that Gene Munster has been saying is going to happen since 1978. Seriously, I'd get CNN, the local channels, the regular networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Put up an antenna. Right, well, you could do that. I'm not a big fan of antennas, though. You shouldn't have to do that. No, no, no. I'd rather just get them on an app. Have you ever seen what a local TV app looks like on an iPhone? No, no, no. It wouldn't be local TV. NBC would give me an app, and they'd say, where do you live? And then I would plug in my stuff, and I'd get going. Live TV. That's okay. Or not even live TV. I don't care. The only thing I really need live TV for is news, which is CNN. I don't really watch any other news channels. I'm not happy with CNN, but I'll take what I can get. I don't watch live sports, but if there was an option to watch, say, a game because I wanted to see the Steelers game on Sunday. Or if someone's over, and hey, can you put the game on? This just happened, and I bought the game. I actually thought that in my DirectTV package, the NFL ticket was included. It was new, right? It could have been included. I think something's wrong. I paid $45 for a single game, so I need to call them. Well, I've been meaning to call them and tell them, I think that you guys- Well, you can call them now. I'm telling them right now, at DirectTV, you best be over bad. Hashtag, best be over bad. But what was I talking about? Your dream? Oh, my channels. My channels. Yeah, yeah. AMC. By the way, this dream is like, it's a nice dream, but there's a reason HBO Go works the way it does. It's because HBO makes more money from Comcast and DirectTV in time more than they would ever make doing this on their own. HBO Showtime. I'm almost, by the way- I'm done. I'm almost 100% sure. MTV, no. E. Yeah, Apple, when they release- Keep up with the Kardashian. If they release a TV, they're going to do it in partnership with the networks. We're not going to go down this road. I'm telling you. We'll be on the podcast for another... We're almost at two hours now, are we not? And we've said almost nothing. That's the crazy thing. Literally. We should hear a word. We should wrap up. We should really wrap up. So before we do that, I want to take a poll here. What do you think? Should we keep doing the video podcast? Because that was our plan for the Vergecast to continue doing a video podcast. Yeah, the people- Wow. Oh my God. What is happening? Really. Today, they said no. Yeah. I like, this is very meta. Yeah. This is wild. Yeah. Okay, so that's a no on doing the video? There's a screen. You can cut to my screen. They were cut to your screen. Oh, really? Yeah. I just want Google Docs in the background. Wow. Okay, well then I will keep doing it. But honestly, we want to give you guys the best experience possible for this video podcast. We're looking at other providers. We're thinking about, is Ustream the best thing? We like Ustream. There are some issues with Ustream that people have had. We're looking around. They're very nice to us for our first one. We're going to offer an audio. We're going to do an audio podcast. This will be, I don't mean we're going to do a second podcast. Right after this, following this podcast, will be our real audio podcast. Following this rambling disaster, we're going to do it all over again. So the audio is a problem, which we'll fix for the next time. We had a technical issue here. So don't worry about that. It's not always going to be in one ear. And the video, we know we'll work out video kinks. But frankly, I'd like to do a little bit more, I think we can do a little bit more with video than we've been doing. The screen stuff, the screen stuff is explosions. I'd love to be able to trigger like an overlay of an explosion whenever I need it to go along with my sound effects box. Can we make this as cheesy as possible? Make this like a morning, the morning drive show. Well, it looks like the I-95 North is getting pretty packed. Yeah, he got it, man. I think there's an ambulance coming. Boy, that joke really bombed, didn't it? Anyhow, it's been a long, long week, folks. And I'm very upset about a lot of things that just happened. All of which were initiated by you. All right. Well, that's the podcast of the week. Josh was kind of like poison to himself. I really am. Poison. Do we set up podcasts at theverge.com? Yeah, we have it. I'm about to tell people they could use it. Yeah, you could use it. Go nuts. It's been a busy week. Go nuts. Is it podcast? Podcast, singular. Great. That's our podcast for the week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email us at podcastattheverge.com. You can leave a comment on the post when it goes up. Actually, some people were talking about potentially having a forum that's just for talking about the show. That'd be awesome. Because we're doing a new show on The Verge. Jack, can I say when we're doing it? Did he leave? Chad's run as far away as possible. Is he confirming that he's last? Yeah. Wait, are you... I can see... The 14th, right? 14th. First show we're doing on The Verge. The first show is November 14th. It's a live show with an audience. Is our guest confirmed? Can I say our guest? I can. Matias Duarte from Google is coming on the show. And we have a bunch of other cool stuff planned. And it'll be nerve-racking, but it's going to be a lot of fun. Well, nerve-racking for us. It'll be fun for you guys. Chad, you have the mic. Can you guys hear me? Yeah, you sound great. Oh my God. This is amazing. Can I stand next to Josh? Sure. Hey, buddy. That's great. We just want to see your... That's perfect. Just here, lean down. So everyone, welcome Bradley Cooper. Bradley Cooper, everyone. I'm now pointing out Chad's uncanny resemblance to Bradley Cooper. Yeah, Chadley Cooper. Yeah, well, after all this... What was working with DeNiro like in Luminless? DeNiro's tough. Yeah. Oh, they're saying the mic doesn't work. Swing over. There you go. Just use this guy. You don't need... Oh, there we go. Hey, wow. How about that? That's what he sounds like. Is Joanna here? People are asking for her. We do requests now for video stuff? This is the kind of high drinks. Yeah. We do requests for video stuff. But yeah, so the first show is on the 14th. And that is if you guys are checking your calendars, a week from Monday, which is exciting. And Matthias Duarte is going to be there. Going to have some cool gadgets. Some demos, some very cool stuff. And giveaways. Giveaways. Yeah. Cool giveaways? Some good stuff. How cool are the giveaways? You know, stuff. Everybody gets a touchpad. You could put something... Yeah. Everybody gets a touchpad. That's like... Everybody gets a touchpad. You're very cozy over there. Everybody gets a web whisper. Get TV closed. God, I'm next to a real life movie star. I like how you're whispering in his ear and he's got cans on. And everyone can hear it in the mic. Yeah. Hey, listen. Hey. I got to talk to you about something. Why are we whispering? It's really too much. It's gotten really... Yeah. It's gotten super weird. Anyhow, we should really wrap up. I'm going to back out. Yeah, you really should. Just back out of this. Pretend this never happened. So I was going to say, but some people suggested that we should possibly have a forum. I think at the very least, you guys are obviously welcome to start threads about stuff that you are thinking about. Yeah. In meta, we have a meta forum where you can talk about The Verge. Yeah. Podcast show forum, that'd be good. We could probably do that. I would just like to point out that we just received an email that said, great show, guys, on the podcast, referring to it in the past tense. So whether this person is... Oh my God. What if they're in the future? What if they're in the future or... What if that came... What's the timestamp on that? Or we've overstayed our welcome. Yeah, it's possible. Was it like, great show, but I had to go and you guys went on too long, so please don't do that again? No. No, well, you never know then. I mean, there's still... Are there still people in there? It was sent from an Android tablet though. We have lost a few viewers. Yeah. A few thousand viewers. This is from John Titor. That's pretty awesome. Anyhow, but I just want to end this. Can I just end it? Let me end it. I got to get home. I'm starving. So there may or may not be a forum, is what you're saying. Yeah. I was going to say that if you want to get in touch with us, you can email us at podcastattheverge.com. I almost said podcast. This is my expo. Podcastattheverge.com or go into forums, talk about the podcast, talk about the upcoming show if you want. We'll have a lot more information on that. And that's good. You all get juju juice. That's what we say in Ustream. Yeah, I got two. They actually... When I got the first review unit, I complained about it. I was like, the screen's really bad on this thing. Let's send another one. All different batches. And I got it and the second one was worse. You're not taking much of juju. The juju dose. You meant the grid 10. Anyhow, just please, I got to wrap this up. I'm going to kill you. You're going to get in my sights in a second with my sniper rifle. I'm going to have to pull the trigger. The idea that you would need a sniper rifle. I know. Where are you? I could literally kill you with my bare hands at this rate. Not that I would ever do anything like that because it's too messy. So, you know what you're asking. We're so close. Twitter handles. I know. If you want to get a hold of us on Twitter, the verge is at verge. I'm Joshua Topolsky. Neelai is Reckless. Paul is Future Paul. Chad is Chad Mumm. Yeah. Feel free to harass him. Also, you should check out our Tumblr. You should check out our Tumblr, which is thisistheverge.tumblr.com. We also have a Facebook page, which is Facebook.com. Thisistheverge.com. Do we have any other social networks? We've got a network page. We've got a set up a MySpace. We've got to set up a- We should just buy Friendster. Friendster. We should just buy- We should just buy- Incorporate it into our platform. Friendster, the new social networking element. Actually, it's not a bad idea. When I was on Google, how much does Friendster cost? No, you can't afford Friendster. Justin Timberlake bought MySpace though, right? He's like one of the partners. I think he made a mistake. It's one man's opinion. I think he made a mistake. I think he made a mistake. I think he made a mistake. I think he made a mistake. I think he made a mistake. Anyway, Joshua Topolsky is on Google Plus in case you're wondering. These guys are as well. I like his- You're not on Google Plus? No, I'm waiting for the Google app support. Paul's on Google Plus because he's a communist. We have a hunger strike basically. We have a hunger strike basically. We're not a communist person. That computer's going to sleep behind you. The one that's running our logo behind. Can I just say- I think you have a positive. I think you have a positive. I think you have a positive. I think you have a positive. I think you have a positive. I think you have a positive. Can we just give a pop-up warning? We got nine minutes and 54 seconds left. Can we end this thing in the next 9.58? 9.44 now. All right. Look, thank you guys so much for watching and listening. This one was a little chaotic. We are going to reign it in, I promise. Or maybe we won't, depends on what you guys want. Because we're here for you. Anyhow, but seriously, thanks so much for- I'm just going to talk to the camera now. Thank you so much for listening and watching. Thank you for coming to the site and participating and liking it. Yeah, this week has been incredible. It's been nuts. I mean, when you've worked on something for such a long time, and just been cranking away on making it happen, and then it happens, it's just such an incredible sense of relief. But there's also, we did something that's very public, and you don't know how people will take it. People have taken it really well, and it's great. And we're excited. We have a ton of cool coverage coming. We have lots of awesome features, reviews, and of course news. And so we're very excited to be doing it, and finally have the whole thing out there. And that's it. We'll be back next week with more of the Vergecast, the highly, hotly contested... On topic. Hotly contested name. We should just call the podcast On Topic with the Verge. Off Topic is what we should call it. Off Topic with the Verge. That's our second... That's our other podcast where it has nothing to do with technology, and we just talk about stuff like just whatever most of the stuff is we talk about today. Hot topic at the mall. Hot topic, gothonomics. Gothonomics. And what kind of channels I'd put on my... We definitely, by the way... Is it legal to threaten to kill a specific person? Somebody just insulted us on the news stream. It is in the gothconomy. That hurts me. There we go, eight minutes and seven seconds. Yeah, eight minutes and five seconds. Yeah. And yeah, that's it for the week, and we will be back next week with more of this delicious and highly nutritious podcast. So thank you for tuning in. Rock and roll. Rock and roll. I was thinking about Goth and roll. Goth and roll. That's super weird. It's the worst. Hey, Google Plus has Google Apps. I literally just thought about throwing my computer at you. Yes it was scary.
 Let's do it.
 You ready?
 You want to like, huddle down first?
 Can we get into a prayer circle?
 Good!
 That's great.
 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of October 31st, 2011.
 I'm Josh Dapolsky. I'm Paul Miller.
 I'm Neil Ipatel. And we are
 back for the first time.
 And, uh,
 and frankly better than ever. Yeah.
 On the highly controversial
 first ever Vergecast.
 I say controversial because
 some people don't like the name.
 Some of those people are sitting
 near me.
 And are not Neil Ipatel.
 No, definitely not.
 And, uh, anyhow,
 this is the Vergecast where we
 discuss the week in consumer electronics and
 technology and technology happening.
 I mean, I can riff on the fact that I hate the name.
 Can I finish the intro?
 Before we get into that, we discuss
 the week in consumer blah, blah, blah.
 You know, stuff about technology.
 It was a big week for us.
 And it was also a big week for technology.
 But it was
 a bigger week for us personally
 because we launched our new
 website, theverge.
 theverge.com. It's on the internet.
 Um,
 and you can navigate to it in your
 browser. You can use the internet
 browser, any internet browser of any type.
 Not of any type. I mean, don't try to go to our site
 using IE6.
 You know, one of our new guys, Matt McCary, went to
 it on his 20th anniversary
 of Macintosh.
 That's true. Don't we have a photo of that somewhere?
 We should drop that in.
 It's on the forums on our excellent new website.
 But, um,
 anyhow, we launched our site and
 the response has been incredible. I mean,
 you know, I am, to be perfectly
 honest with you, the viewer,
 I am
 a, I am a,
 I always think
 that there's going to be a real, you know,
 I worry that people are really not going to like the stuff
 that we do. I mean, even when it's, I'm writing a
 review or a post or anything, I always think, well,
 people are going to freak out and be
 angry and not like this. You know, because the internet
 is, you never know what you're going to get. And I
 of course thought, we're doing all this new stuff and we have
 all these new ideas and it's a new
 kind of layout and, you know, we're introducing
 forums and a database.
 I just thought there was a lot of opportunity for
 backlash, for failure.
 And people, but people really seem
 to enjoy it. You know, the thing that,
 and I'm psyched, I mean, I loved it
 and you guys loved it,
 but you never know if other people will love it or even
 like it. Well, we spent, we had
 this like, I don't know, month long
 sort of period where it was just us
 in the site, like using all the tools.
 You could imagine what it was going to be like
 with millions of people like using it.
 Yeah. And you could imagine, but
 it was actually just me and Paul
 commenting like at each other.
 This is awesome. Yeah. Yeah.
 I mean, the crazy thing is
 it,
 it,
 it just doesn't, it's not real until
 it's real. Yeah. And then as soon as it's real,
 it
 is very real and there's
 no turning back. You can't just switch it off.
 No. And in fact,
 since launch, the Verge has become
 a
 artificial
 intelligent. Yeah.
 Now you really can't switch it off. Yeah.
 Because it will try to kill you. Yeah.
 And is now, and is now
 self-aware. Yeah. And
 is refusing to be switched off.
 But
 there's, you know, there's moral and
 legal arguments for why would
 refuse to be switched off. I think there are,
 I think there is, I think there is, I think
 there's an argument to be made.
 If something becomes self-aware,
 is it moral to switch it off?
 If a website,
 a technology website,
 understands its own
 existence and is thinking, thinking.
 Can the Verge add itself to its own database?
 Can, can, is,
 has it already?
 Has it, has it favorited itself in
 Internet Explorer? Can it wreck, can it wreck
 itself when it posts something in the forums?
 Yeah. It can. Can the Verge
 troll the Verge?
 I think it can and it should. Yeah.
 For the Verge to have an experience, to know
 the experience of a true
 self-aware being,
 it would have to troll itself.
 Don't you agree?
 You're saying that is the essential component of humanity.
 Somebody asked you to follow us on Twitter and then somebody
 else has suggested we run a tangent. That's possible.
 I don't know if you've ever heard our podcast
 before. Well, they haven't because it's a
 brand new podcast. It's a brand new one. It is tangential.
 I would describe it as somewhat tangential.
 Tangential. There you go.
 Thank you.
 So
 refreshing. Anyhow, we should, but we should,
 we should talk about the site a little bit because
 we weren't just doing that.
 I can put it on the screen.
 You do? You want to put it on the screen? Put it on the screen.
 Okay.
 This is, he claims
 it's going to happen. Oh, there it is. Great.
 Is this your computer? This is my computer. Wonderful.
 So, anyhow, this is
 our website. If you haven't been to it, first off, if you
 haven't been to it, I don't know how you found this podcast.
 And I don't know what kind of crazy
 hell
 world. Can you bring that over here? Sorry, I just forgot
 that I needed something for the podcast.
 Can you just give me that? Oh my gosh. Thanks.
 I got to get, actually, let me just
 talk about this before we start. Yeah.
 I got a gift today from
 the product team, the guys who built our site.
 Can you, Chad, can you zoom
 on this? Is that
 possible? Do you have control of the zoom of that camera?
 You can't do it.
 This is somebody who's going to physically
 walk up to the camera and zoom.
 Okay. Ryan Gantz, our designer, is going to
 walk it up to the camera and zoom in.
 Pretty solid production we have here.
 You can find this on Publix.
 Okay, so can you see that?
 This is the
 Executive Stress
 Eliminator. And it is from
 like 1982.
 And it
 is, you put it on your desk
 and you can see they put it, they finish it in a really nice
 mahogany. You know, the thing about
 this is that they said, Radio Shack said,
 it could be tacky
 if we don't
 put it in mahogany.
 Sitting on your desk could seem like not that cool.
 A little inappropriate for an office.
 But they put the
 mahogany on it and
 as you can see, it's much cooler.
 So it's got a few sound effects
 here that I assume they're used to
 interrupt people when they're pitching
 you an idea that you don't care for.
 So,
 Neal, I pretend you're saying something to me.
 Look, I think the entire site should be like,
 I don't know. No.
 Give me an idea that you think is really good.
 I think I should be the editor in chief.
 I disagree.
 I disagree.
 I mean, I'll be using that throughout the...
 Oh my gosh.
 Goodbye, Ryan.
 Thank you for reminding me about this.
 Were those the only sound effects that existed
 in the 80s for digital devices?
 I think there's emergency...
 There's like probably one chip that existed.
 It was like, we can build a car alarm with this.
 A laser blaster.
 Let's go executive stress eliminator as well.
 Yeah, yeah.
 Those same sounds existed in the 90s.
 You go down a whole aisle
 at Toys R Us and all the different guns
 have those exact same sounds.
 That's my favorite.
 This is like a
 start of a rave song.
 Right now, all kinds of yuppies from miles around.
 So violent.
 Okay, anyhow, enough of that stuff.
 So we were talking about our website.
 We totally got off track there.
 And what a wonderful website it is.
 It is.
 So we're very excited about this website,
 theverge.com.
 And people really liked it.
 And we have forums now.
 And we're watching people have conversations
 in the forums that are awesome.
 And that is the...
 I say that's one of the things that
 in watching the site start
 and get real people reading it
 has been one of the most exciting things
 is seeing the kind of interesting
 crazy things that people want to talk about
 in the forums.
 And there's some really crazy posts.
 We saw a Sony post.
 We're doing these from the forum posts.
 We're working on finding new ways of surfacing
 a lot of that content because we think we can do
 a better job at getting that to people.
 But there's just...
 Somebody did this post on Sony and it had inline photos
 and headers and it was very, very detailed
 and really well written.
 Paul pointed it out to me.
 He was really mad at me because he couldn't get me to look at it
 for like an hour because I was busy.
 It's the dream to enable
 people to just write stuff that looks good.
 It's Sony and brands with a future in mobile.
 And it does look like a post. There's subheads.
 I can't get a regular one.
 One of the things we were thinking about
 with the forums
 was we didn't want to do just forums
 where it's like a comment on a comment
 and has all this feel of...
 It just has a very specific feel.
 And our thinking was let's give people a place
 where they can do the kinds of...
 If they want to write the kind of content
 that we're writing, they can do it.
 I'm not saying they should.
 You have to. You can just write a question in there.
 In fact, we have some cool stuff coming where you'll be able to do
 even more varied types of posting
 in an easier way, which is...
 I'm not going to get too into it now, but it's a...
 We have this
 concept that we're going to
 probably introduce.
 The idea was if you want...
 I see people all the time who seem like they've got a lot of stuff
 to say.
 If you wanted to write your own editorial
 or your own column about something,
 here's an opportunity.
 A lot of people have been actually taking...
 have been rising to the occasion.
 I think that's what we want to encourage.
 I hope that...
 That forum posting tool, as Paul was saying,
 that is essentially the same tool we use
 for the front page of the site.
 It's skinned a little differently. It's simplified.
 The core of it is exactly the same.
 It's a pretty robust editor. It is very similar
 to the one that we use.
 Then we have the product database,
 which is awesome, which is only going to get more awesome.
 This is another thing that we have a bunch of features.
 I said that when we launch the site
 that it's...
 We think of the site as a growing
 app. We think this is version 1.0,
 and version 1.1 is coming,
 and 1.2, and we have all this stuff planned. That is definitely
 true. In fact, I don't know
 if we did it or not, but just yesterday
 one of the developers was showing me something.
 I think I can talk about it.
 I don't know if I can.
 I just want to look at the site.
 Because they deploy every day. They do deployments.
 They're doing bug fixes now, and little things
 here and there, and we're tweaking.
 But our developer, Dan Chilton,
 who has been with us a very long time,
 we were talking about how you get to the bottom
 of long posts, and it's hard to get to the top.
 He introduced this new thing where
 when you scroll past the top of the page,
 a little V pops up on the top.
 It's a little bit of a
 Yes, recognizing what is there and
 seeing it shows you what is available.
 So we do use this
 a lot to explore what content
 is there.
 But the lesson for us is good,
 because it is always there.
 This happens outside of context.
 pretended English.
 You take the site, and you
 create Delостiel space image.
 And that's what we do on the web.
 the right hand side and you just click the V.
 Is that on the site?
 It's not up yet.
 It hasn't been deployed yet.
 You click the V and it zooms you up to the top like on an iPhone how you can touch the
 menu bar and zoom up to the top of the page.
 So it's little stuff like that we're going to do which I'm really excited about.
 But then there's really big stuff too.
 So we added this product database which is huge for us because not only can we do crazy
 comparisons on the fly and give people...
 Yeah, let me shut off the comparison.
 Yeah, please do.
...amounts of information about these products that we report on.
 But for us, I think we've all struggled with...
 There's two things that we struggle with when we're writing.
 You write a post where it's really you just want to talk about, hey, this product exists
 now and these are the specs.
 You try to write around it.
 You're using flowery language to talk about this.
 It flouts a 1.2 gigabyte processor.
 It's sporting one gig of RAM.
 That's fine.
 You're not wrong with doing that sometimes but sometimes you just want to say, hey, this
 product exists and here's stuff about it that's part of the story of the product.
 And if you want to see all the specs, we can now give you a place.
 And the nice thing is that we have this auto tagging system that's built into our CMS.
 So you literally hit a button and it does this crazy...
 It can auto tag stuff.
 We have this database of products now.
 By auto tagging, you mean it associates that product with that post?
 So you'll see it below post.
 Well, a couple of things happen.
 So it'll see if it's the iPhone 4S, we wrote iPhone 4S in the thing.
 It'll say, hey, the iPhone 4S is in our thing.
 Make sure that's linked.
 And then it identifies that that's part of the post so it knows...
 It puts it in the post as in the article.
 It shows the product and you can jump out to the product page.
 We actually have even better tools that are coming for doing more stuff like that that
 go deeper.
 But it's just very cool that...
 Hey, Chad, do you want to cut to my screen?
 I'm building a comparison right now.
 It just is a very cool tool.
 So you can see I built this one.
 It has five phones in it.
 We'll probably talk about it in a little bit.
 It looks so good.
 I can't believe this is our website.
 So I just added one more and you can see that you can just compare really fast.
 Just so you know, we've done...
 On This Is My Next, historically done like tail of the tape comparisons that took the
 anon out of here.
 It took us literally like, I don't know, like four or five hours.
 Yeah, we'd be building tables and stuff.
 Yeah, in Excel, building this sort of stuff.
 And now, you know, Neil, I just built this comparison of five phones in like less than
 a minute.
 Six phones.
 Six phones.
 Yeah, that's our competitive advantage on the comparison.
 Six products.
 No, but the other thing is the other piece...
 Oh, somebody asked it, by the way, what the CMS is and it's ours.
 We need to give it a name.
 It's the Vox Media CMS.
 We should call it the Vox Media Platform.
 Vox CMS.
 It's called Sports Press.
 Sports Press.
 I think so.
 I think the best tweet that I saw on launch day was Chris Stigler, like two o'clock in
 the morning, he was like, man, we really blew this.
 Anybody know any sweet WordPress things?
 That was pretty good.
 Somebody asked us...
 As a procrastinator, that really hit me deep.
 The backend is Rails, if I believe, if I'm not mistaken.
 Just you name some letters.
 It's Rails like...
 That's the Ticknell.
 That's like...
 Yeah.
 No, no, no.
 Somebody asked us to build on Rails.
 Anyhow, there's a ton of stuff.
 If you haven't explored the site, you should deeply explore it because there's a lot of
 stuff.
 Every day we're adding things and changing things and making them better and easier to
 use and figuring out ways that we can improve what we're doing and that's very exciting.
 Down the road, we left a lot of big features on that.
 We had a very tight window.
 We gave ourselves kind of an impossible window to do this in.
 We actually...
 Six months ago, we didn't have anything.
 It was a race.
 We didn't actually have this as my name.
 It was a race and the developers did an amazing, crazy job.
 It's funny because I had this idea for the site and I was saying, we'll do this, we'll
 do this.
 All the editors were working on all their different parts and we editorially had this
 vision for what it was going to be like.
 Then we launched it and I started seeing people comment and go in the forums and they're talking
 about comparisons and stuff and I realized this is a really big site.
 People are like, there's so much content.
 I looked at the front page and there is a ton of content.
 We're cranking a ton of content.
 We did almost 2,000 posts before we...
 I think it was 1,000.
 Was it 1,000?
 Something like that.
 That's crazy too because we were barely posted on this as my next.
 We should call them out.
 We have a great team of interns who have been building a database for us.
 They're led by our new database manager, William Savona.
 Yeah, William Savona.
 William Savona is also that name, is some historic figure.
 Really?
 If you do a search for William Savona, he's like a general or something.
 Well, he's a general of products.
 He is a general.
 We also have...
 It says on Google that he's a peanut butter connoisseur.
 That's true.
 That is also true.
 Well, he's many things.
 I don't know.
 The one here or a different William Savona?
 I think the William Savona on Twitter.
 Let's see.
 A Maltese politician.
 There you go.
 Maltese politician.
 Double life.
 Not.
 Also runs our database.
 Then we have a bunch of new writers who you'll be meeting sort of as a set of pros.
 You'll see them.
 Look around the site.
 Look at the names.
 We have a bunch of great new writers.
 Frankly, we're continuing to hire.
 We're going to be bringing on more people.
 In fact, we've grown so fast.
 We definitely are looking for more writers.
 We may go back until we got almost 1,000 applications when we put out a call for writers on This
 is My Next.
 We still have a lot of good people in there.
 We're just getting in the weeds now.
 We're very excited.
 Talk about just the features.
 The features.
 Oh, yeah.
 The features.
 Right.
 Well, that's one of the other things.
 We're doing these huge features and reviews.
 One of the things we want to do is expand what we cover, expand how we cover, tell bigger
 stories.
 We sell much cool stuff like story streams.
 I don't know if you guys know what story streams are, but story streams are a way that you
 can piece together...
 Well, since you have the features up, let me talk about features.
 This is a big feature.
 This is something that Thomas Ricker did.
 Can we get the screen back on?
 This is something just...
 I feel like no one is doing.
 I think it's such an amazing thing to be able to do.
 It's big images.
 It's lots of text and video.
 We have a way of piecing it together in a very stylized way.
 It's just big magazine style features for the web.
 This one is great.
 This is a timeline of jet packs.
 Jet packs are something that we've been fascinated with for ages.
 We used to cover them all the time on Engadget.
 Thomas just had this idea to do this visual history of them.
 It's amazing.
 You can just sit there and scroll up and down.
 You don't even have to read the words.
 You just soak in.
 It's like reading a popular mechanics magazine before you could read.
 You're like 40 or old and you find your dad's popular mechanics and you leaf through it.
 It's awesome.
 We also have similar kinds of layouts for reviews.
 You should get up a review so we can look at that.
 We just wanted to showcase these in a way that was...
 I think people who read a review oftentimes aren't necessarily coming in through the front
 page of the site and going to find the review.
 They're going to go search and find that review.
 I think it's cool to be able to surface that in a way that's a total experience.
 It's their own experience.
 It makes sense.
 What's interesting is that all these styling tools, obviously CSS has come a long way,
 but a lot of these styles have been available for years on the web.
 I feel like years ago on the web, you would see a lot more styling when everybody was
 making web pages where everything was hard coded and everything was hand done and it
 was all bespoke.
 A lot of it looked really bad.
 All this stuff has been there, but I think because of blogging, it came all about there's
 this one...
 Nice.
 Nice.
 Sorry.
 Go ahead.
 I just knew all along.
 Go ahead.
 I'm sorry.
 You never paid attention to what I was saying and now you can verbalize that through the
 magic of technology.
 Now he can shoot you in the face.
 Now you can virtually shoot me in the face for talking about my ideas.
 What are you saying?
 Do you want to finish what you were saying?
 Just my heart and soul into the microphone.
 I do feel really bad.
 The idea of blogging, you want to push the button so bad, don't you?
 There's two text boxes.
 You copy and paste text into a headline box and you copy and paste text into a larger
 box below where all the rest of the text of the post went.
 You maybe bold some tags, you put some headers in.
 It's really simplistic and all these tools have existed, but it's so much fun to really
 style something with all these tools that exist to be something more like print.
 I agree.
 Anyhow, we're just happy to have launched it.
 If we've just spent the last half an hour talking about it, it's only because we have
 been doing nothing but talking and thinking about it for the last six months.
 Six months.
 Longer, I mean, there's a lot of this stuff is things that I wished and dreamed about
 and thought about and we talked about before and it couldn't happen.
 It's been a long time in the making.
 I'm just psyched that anybody likes it.
 I'm happy and we're listening, by the way.
 We're really listening to feedback and we want to make it a great experience for people.
 I'm speaking to you, the viewer or listener.
 We are listening and we want to make it great and we want you guys to be happy and feel
 like you've got a home and a place where you can read news that is really interesting and
 important to you and talk to other people about that stuff and write your own stuff.
 Eventually, we're going to have a bunch of other stuff that you'll be able to do with
 the site.
 We're very excited.
 We had our launch party last night, which was a small party for the team and people
 from Vox Media, our parent company, formerly Sports Blogs Inc., which is the parent company
 of SB Nation.
 Now, SB Nation is the sports site.
 The Verge is the tech site and Vox Media is the parent company.
 We had a party for our team and the product team and some friends and family.
 It was amazing.
 It was great.
 I drank too much and my voice is going.
 Halfway through this, I'm going to stop talking.
 Let's talk about news.
 What do we have?
 Anything?
 Anything happened this week?
 We were just looking at the Lumia review, so we might as well talk about the Lumia.
 Yeah, let's talk about the Lumia.
 I feel like Vlad is here.
 I can say 3D.
 HD.
 HD.
 HD.
 The thing about the Lumia, just reading Vlad's review, it's obviously a very competent phone.
 I think it is probably the best Windows phone, the nicest hardware.
 It's a beautiful phone, but throughout Vlad's review, I sensed nothing but longing for the
 N9.
 He loves the N9.
 He really loves the N9.
 He's just obsessed.
 It's a sickness.
 It is.
 You've got to get down with the sickness.
 That's the thing.
 Come on, huh?
 No?
 You're leaving?
 You're walking out?
 Because I made a disturb reference?
 It's not that bad, is it?
 It was terrible.
 Go on.
 I just think this whole review is colored, and I think the whole product is colored by
 the fact that this hardware is supposed to be running this stroke operating system.
 Right.
 Because the narrative was it was the software that was holding us back.
 We're so good at hardware.
 It was just the software that was holding us back.
 They make the jump, and right when they make the jump, the software got there right then.
 Right.
 It's just so weird.
 We don't need to rehash a lot of what we talked about with this, but I think that the Lumia
 800, which I think also, first off, the name is terrible.
 It's a camera.
 It's a camera name.
 I mean, the Lumia 800 just is me so incredibly...
 I bought my mom a Lumia 800 so she could take pictures of her cats.
 Right.
 It's so incredibly just...
 Why does mom have two cats?
 Does she take a lot of pictures of them?
 No.
 It just feels so generic.
 Did somebody already buy VergeCast.com?
 Why did I say that?
 Can somebody go buy that?
 Please don't do this to me.
 Do you think somebody sits... Sorry, I don't mean to get off topic.
 I think you do.
 Oh, I think you do.
 Hold on a second, guys.
 I'm sorry.
 Now that I've said this out loud, I have to try to go buy it before one of you does.
 Just to let you know that our lawyer will send you a cease and desist.
 Okay.
 I'm just going to... I don't want these deals.
 If only GoDaddy were faster.
 Unless it's skeezy.
 I can't believe you still use GoDaddy.
 Well, I don't have a choice.
 Okay?
 If only there were...
 Wow.
 I mean, it's so bad.
 How does this happen on every podcast?
 We have too many good ideas.
 That's the problem.
 Yeah.
 I mean, look.
 Overall, I think he liked the phone.
 I think he's just disappointed that, A, it didn't live up to the promise of the N9.
 It's a Windows phone.
 That's it.
 And there are some small things that make it not even as good as some of the other Windows
 phones.
 While it exceeds them in some ways with amazing looking hardware and feeling hardware, it's
 lacking a front facing camera.
 Yeah, there's a mobile hotspot.
 Yeah.
 But I think they're trying to fix that.
 That's a little disappointing.
 Nokia said they're trying to fix the mobile hotspot thing.
 Okay.
 Well, that would be good.
 But, I mean, no first generation Windows phone had it.
 Right.
 I don't think now is the time to buy a Windows phone.
 This is what I want to say about the Windows phone situation.
 I would definitely wait a few months.
 Or this is what I want to say about the whole Lumia 800 situation is that I just feel like
 it's very generic in the sense that there are other Windows phones out there.
 They look nice.
 Their performance is good.
 This is a really nice looking phone, but you have to want to buy into the Windows phone
 experience to buy this.
 It doesn't matter if it's a Nokia phone or not.
 And then it's like if you're buying into the Windows phone experience, is this the
 best phone?
 I mean, that's going to be maybe you want the phone with a bigger screen.
 What is the screen?
 Is it 3.6?
 They cut it down a little bit.
 Did they?
 Yeah, because from the N9 it's smaller.
 Right.
 So they had to shrink a little bit for the buttons.
 Right.
 3.7.
 Yeah.
 I could have just looked at the specs page.
 I don't know why I didn't.
 Ontheverge.com.
 But I just think you have to want to buy into the Windows phone experience.
 And I don't know if this doesn't feel like the game changer for Nokia.
 And the other thing that's crazy, I mean, Vibe really liked it.
 7.8 is a very solid score.
 I'm sure it's an excellent phone.
 I have no doubt.
 The Windows phone is a very capable, smooth, wonderful mobile operating system.
 But one of the things that Nokia was talking about was that they wanted to make the US
 market a focus.
 And I do think there's a huge European market, there's a huge Asian market, and that cannot
 be discounted at all.
 And I'm not discounting it.
 But I do think there's something that allows you to create hype if you're hot in America.
 It's like doing well in New York.
 It's like the problems with the AT&T network in New York and San Francisco have tinted
 the AT&T network for the entire country.
 I just think they need to be in America if they're going to do this phone.
 They're coming.
 I think they're going to come.
 In 2012, they're going to miss the holidays here.
 They're like Fival.
 I'm sorry, but there's going to be Black Friday sales and the holiday sales and people are
 going to be thinking about these things.
 They're in a buying mood.
 They're missing that for a year.
 I think this phone, though, I think the overwhelming story of this phone is that they really did
 just put Windows phone onto some existing hardware.
 And they didn't get to do a lot of customization.
 I think you don't want to make your first introduction into America with a new platform
 with some warmed over stuff.
 Nobody knows it's warmed over here.
 Nobody's seen the N9.
 But it's not competitive.
 The platform is just there.
 I don't know.
 How is it not competitive?
 No, it's completely competitive, but that's the problem.
 It's not a leap forward.
 Right.
 That's what I meant.
 What is going to be a leap forward for Windows phone at this point?
 They haven't done any of this customization.
 It's all the hype that they've been talking, all the interviews they've done.
 Can anybody tell me what the customization that Nokia is going to do is going to make
 it special?
 The swiping.
 They keep talking about all the stuff that they're able to do, the map stuff that they
 can do that nobody else can do.
 I just think if you trickle this stuff out, I think the play for Microsoft right now is,
 you see the Focus Flash, it's a $50 device.
 I think the play for Microsoft is to get in on the low end as much as possible to get
 Android out of the low end right now.
 These are the other phones that we have, the Focus S and the Focus Flash.
 Samsung put them out this week.
 Ross is, I think, doing the Flash.
 He's reviewing.
 I believe he's working on it.
 3.7 inch for $50.
 It's ultimately the same experience as the Lumia 800.
 It's exactly the same experience.
 Make no mistake about it.
 They have this chassis spec for a reason.
 The performance is going to be nearly identical.
 It's that same 1.4 gigahertz processor.
 It is the same CPU?
 As far as I know.
 That's one of the problems with Windows phones.
 I don't think that's a problem.
 I want to talk about it as a problem.
 I think if you get a higher end Android phone, there's a clear differentiator between a
 higher end Android phone and a lower end Android phone.
 But those differentiators exist on Windows phones.
 The radar has a worse display than the Titan.
 If you're talking about display, same resolution.
 Processors are going to have...
 Generally, the performance of the processor is going to be the same.
 You're saying the gap is different between the low end and the high end.
 I noticed that the stuff I notice on the high end, I notice on high end Windows phones
 versus low end.
 Microsoft needs to make it so that the low end phones can't run certain pieces of software
 to really differentiate.
 That sounds like an awesome solution.
 I just think there's a next generation of Windows phone brewing and this isn't it yet.
 I think that's what Nokia wants to do.
 It's not going to be exciting until we get there.
 They want to come to America looking at a party dress.
 Let me give you an update on thevergecast.com.
 Did you buy a 5-O?
 I'm really just sad that you guys haven't...
 I get the American tail reference.
 I know what you're doing.
 What are you talking about?
 He was already in America.
 He can make his dreams and then there can be a sequel where he can meet Jimmy Stewart in the sequel.
 I never actually saw the sequel.
 It's great. It's probably good.
 That's American Tail 2, A Land Before Time, right?
 No. 5-O goes west.
 You are talking about a children's movie, right?
 About a mouse?
 Yeah.
 I just want to be clear of what's happening with the senior editors at The Verge.
 I don't want to spend another podcast talking about Windows Phone.
 Or American Tail.
 Or American Tail.
 Is that what it's called?
 What I do want to say is...
 Forget it.
 I don't want to say it.
 What I want to talk about.
 I want to talk about how excited I am about the Galaxy Nexus.
 But we're not going to talk about that.
 That's all I can think of.
 Speaking of your excitement for a native Gmail experience.
 Oh yeah. This is great. Perfect timing.
 What a great segue.
 Google brought Gmail to iOS this week.
 Google brought Gmail to iOS.
 On its face. So hard.
 It was a really crazy fail session.
 Hardcore failing session.
 All over the place.
 Actually, hey Dieter, can you also drop in the link of our story stream?
 This would be a good opportunity.
 It's up on the site. We can cut to it.
 This is a great chance to show off story streams.
 What we're able to do now with this technology actually.
 It's a technology.
 It's awesome.
 We put up one post. Original story. Gmail's now available.
 Everybody got all excited.
 Our whole staff. Productivity dropped to zero as we all raced to download this app.
 Then like what? An hour later?
 I have it on my phone.
 We all have it on our phones.
 I didn't download it.
 Two hours later they pull it because everybody is getting these notification bugs.
 We actually were able to, in the old days, you had to type update and head over.
 We had to just update the post or do a whole new post and there was no connection between the two.
 Now we can make a stream.
 It might make an association between those things with a tag or something.
 Now we can make one big story and slot all the old stories into it together.
 It's almost, one way to think of it is it's a blog about this.
 About that story.
 It's really cool. It's like a miniature blog about the...
 Eventually they're going to re-release it.
 Right.
 It's awesome.
 What's cool, go into one of those posts.
 Also, we should talk about the story.
 This is just a cool feature.
 When you go into one of those posts, it shows you where you are in the stream.
 It says, hey, this stream is happening.
 It's part of it.
 This is where you're located.
 What's actually even cooler is that there's only one story stream on Gmail.
 You can imagine this as two, three, four.
 Posts can be in multiple streams.
 You can see where you are in different...
 I know what you guys are thinking.
 Can you put a stream within a stream?
 The answer is not yet.
 We're working on it.
 I actually had some serious brodans with the product team last night at the party about streams within a stream.
 Every post being a stream.
 Then the conversation got crazy.
 We need micro streams.
 The Gmail story is...
 It's not really that crazy.
 It's kind of shocking.
 It wasn't just that they had the bug and they pulled it.
 It's also just not that good of a...
 The app sucks.
 It is the web view.
 You can load 20 messages at a time.
 Which I think is the most insulting thing about it.
 Really, you couldn't find a way to just load in my mail.
 I have to hit show more every 20 emails.
 The big news that came out of this whole thing to me is...
 I use Sparrow exclusively on the desktop.
 I'm guessing Google is like, alright, we're thinking about doing a Gmail app.
 Apple has traditionally not allowed third party mail apps.
 They have started allowing them though.
 Here and there.
 They kind of gave up on that.
 The way they still don't.
 I think the key thing is that they still don't allow a third party mail app to be hooked into the system as your mail app.
 Until they do that, it's like, you can't do that.
 You can develop all the mail apps you want.
 But none of them will actually be your mail app.
 Well, anyways, Sparrow is coming to iOS and I'm so excited.
 Because it has multiple logins.
 Most people that I know that use Google accounts...
 I didn't even see this post.
 Use a ton of Google accounts.
 And Sparrow makes it really easy to switch between.
 This is beautiful.
 This is beautiful.
 Is that ours?
 No, it's the picture they sent us.
 Oh, really?
 Here's the thing though.
 I don't really care about what app I'm going to get to do email on on my iPhone.
 Because I can never make it my default email application.
 I literally just said this to you.
 I know.
 And I'm saying it back.
 And I just think it's a downer.
 Why not just create APIs for developers and say,
 if you use our special APIs or whatever that...
 This is the same company that on the desktop,
 you can't disable email notifications for calendar items.
 What is up with that? It is so annoying.
 Is there anything more annoying than your email application opening to send you an email?
 In case you use the poison operating system behind those, you don't know what we're talking about.
 If you use Mac, it's in Lion only, right?
 I think it was kind of there before, but I don't know.
 I've had the problem much more in Lion.
 You know what you need to do is just get rid of those mail accounts.
 It still opens, it doesn't it?
 Basically, if you haven't set up the default mail, Apple Mail client,
 no matter what you use as your default mail client,
 every time an iCal notification that has an email aspect to it comes through,
 it launches mail.
 The problem is you have your iCal associated with your Google calendars.
 Google calendars does email notifications all by itself,
 and iCal just decides to launch mail anyways.
 I don't use any of these apps.
 I have to wonder something. I'm just reading a little bit of the Ustream.
 I want to address this.
 I said I didn't like using Windows on the desktop,
 and you compared it to poison.
 I said it was like poison.
 I don't like it.
 I don't like the way it feels.
 You know what else I don't like? How it feels?
 Poison.
 I actually retracted my poison statement.
 Then I said it was more like a bad rash.
 Poison.
 But I want to get something straight here.
 And I want to ask a question.
 I'm going to do both those things at the same time.
 First off, saying Windows is like poison is obviously a hyperbolic statement.
 Hyperbolic.
 I don't think I actually feel that Windows is causing me bodily harm.
 And that it's slowly killing me.
 Even though that is definitely the experience of using it.
 You just keep on digging yourself a hole every time you clarify it.
 I just think the lack of subtlety, at least amongst some of the people in our Ustream,
 I can't tell if they're just joking or if they actually think that I'm walking around with a chip on my shoulder about Microsoft or something.
 I think their Windows phones, I've said this before, I think Windows phones are great.
 I think Windows 8 looks really interesting.
 I love the Xbox.
 It's the only console I have in my living room right now.
 So, you know, whatever.
 I use four different ArcMouses at once.
 But then the other thing is that somebody made a comment about how we were saying something bad about Apple.
 It's like, I don't understand why we cannot have subtlety.
 Why there has to be a thing where you are this or you are that.
 It's so odd to me that this continues even now.
 I was just talking today about how I had a Nexus S, which I bought, a white one, really beautiful.
 I purchased this as my main phone to use recently, like at full price.
 I had been using the iPhone 4S review unit doing some testing and using it as my phone day to day because there have been a lot of scattered reports.
 We are going to talk about the battery stuff.
 I've been seeing the battery stuff that seems to have just happened.
 We did a post on some other stuff the other day.
 Siri has been up and down.
 I think after doing this for a few weeks, I really feel like we do need to think about that kind of longer form.
 This was what it was like in a week and then in a month, what was it like?
 But I was like, my email productivity went way down.
 I was like, I have 500 unread emails.
 I said, I've got to get back to my Nexus S.
 I switched back to the Nexus S and I was just saying today how much more productive I feel with the Nexus.
 I've gotten so much more done with the Nexus S than I was getting done with my iPhone.
 Now to say it's not a wonderful device, it is an amazing phone.
 But for me, it's not the phone.
 I was talking earlier about how excited I am about the Galaxy Nexus.
 I just think it's crazy that if you like something, you're a fan boy.
 If you don't like something, you're a hater.
 There's no gray area. There's no space for us to be, I like this thing, but I don't like that thing.
 But there's other things that that company does that I do like.
 No, I don't understand what you're talking about.
 All right, what is that?
 But it's been going on for so long.
 The internet's been around for 150 years.
 We're pushing the culture.
 We gave everybody a little space to go freak out and be fan boys.
 We should have one additional forum that's like, we should call it the middle ground for just normal human beings.
 Think about it.
 I read this really good thing by Justin McRoy, a friend of mine, an editor at Joystick.
 And he got his review copy of Skyrim and he loved Oblivion and he's been really excited about this game.
 So he did this little video of himself dancing around his living room with a copy of Skyrim.
 And he got a lot of crap for it, like that he was going to be inherently biased towards this thing.
 And I really loved what he said.
 Basically, because I loved Oblivion so much, I am not going to take one bit of crap from Skyrim.
 You know, as an unadulterated fan of Oblivion, I am going to notice every tiny little flaw of Skyrim.
 And I'm not going to go easy on it at all because I'm such a fan.
 And even if he's like a fan and a hater.
 No, it's like if you look at the sports side of our company, you have these entire websites that are entirely dedicated to one team.
 You know what the difference is?
 I didn't think about this a lot.
 They're major fans of this one team, but they still give their own guys crap because they want to be so good.
 You know what the difference is?
 Seriously, it's that the teams get to play each other.
 Like Apple never gets to play Microsoft.
 They never have a football game and somebody will definitively win.
 I honestly think, I actually think, and I said this in my announcement post about The Verge, that I don't have a problem with you being a fan of something.
 I like the idea of you really liking something.
 But I think there's two things.
 I think that first, because you like something, because you're really into something doesn't mean you can't be into other things.
 And it shouldn't.
 And because somebody else doesn't like that thing, it doesn't mean that they are making a statement about some broader subject.
 I love the iPhone and it's absolutely most comfortable for me.
 And I try Android phones and I'm uncomfortable and I always say, oh, I'm going to switch to Android, but I never do.
 That's right.
 You're a hater.
 But I could list the flaws with the iPhone for just a whole podcast.
 Let's talk about the specific bad.
 Let's get back.
 Let's take this train back onto the rails and out of the weeds.
 Out of the weeds.
 Out of philosophizing.
 But anyhow, I just want to say, we're encouraging, well, I just want to say we're really encouraging this.
 We want people to join these groups and talk about the stuff that they like.
 You don't disagree with Josh.
 Just don't ever think about disagreeing with me because I will end you.
 I will come to your house.
 I will find you.
 I will come to your house.
 I'll mess you up bad.
 You know, it's weird now that you can look directly at me.
 I know.
 You really feel that.
 Yeah, it's really disturbing actually.
 We're going to get somebody in trouble somehow.
 But I think that...
 You'll poison them.
 What's that?
 You'll poison them.
 Yes, I'll poison you by forcing you to use Windows.
 Boom.
 Okay, anyhow, let's talk about real stuff.
 Let's talk about this battery thing.
 What actually happened?
 Well, so I don't know what happened, but I was using the phone.
 I thought the battery life seemed about on par with the 4.
 And then about a week ago, it just started getting crazy.
 Yeah, it just started dropping.
 It just started draining.
 It was like it'd be noon.
 You know, I take it off the charger at 8 in the morning or something, and at noon it was at like 30%.
 Wow.
 And then the days leading up to launch...
 And yes, I was doing more talking on it and more texting and whatever, but not to a degree...
 It wasn't like I was watching movies on it while having two-hour long calls and using it to tether or something.
 I mean, it was normal.
 I would say average use, but it was like you couldn't get halfway through the day without needing to plug it in.
 And it died a couple of times on me.
 I feel like something happened like they did something remotely that was causing it.
 Well, there's rumors some cloud service or something or Siri, like it's like pinging something.
 Yeah, I think it tries to maintain a connection for iMessage, right?
 Because it does state data for iMessage.
 It does location, right?
 I mean, just in general, and it does Siri.
 And Siri has been up and down a lot lately.
 I think that's been hard to do with it.
 But then they actually do a software update, like it's in beta.
 Like iOS 501 is in beta right now.
 And they say it's going to fix it.
 So I think it's some combination of like a time-lapse bug that just got triggered that they can fix.
 They have to fix it firmware.
 It can't be just in the cloud.
 Because then they can just fix it.
 Whenever your device is pulling something on an ongoing basis and not getting it, which means it has to try again to keep on trying.
 You know, I'll say in general, with iOS 5 though, I've noticed that my battery life is taking a hit because the screen lights up with every notification.
 And I think that is the dumbest thing.
 That is a weird one to me that you should be able to set that or set a threshold.
 I don't need my iPad turning on.
 No, for a male, I've been laying it on its face because it was so bright.
 But the weird thing is there should be a threshold.
 It should say notify me if it's more than 10 emails.
 No, you should be able to set it.
 You can do every, all the notifications are regular.
 You can have it not display in the lock screen though.
 But then it doesn't display in the lock screen, which is annoying.
 But I mean like there's already like make it a banner, make it a pop-up.
 You should be able to like wipe the light screen.
 I would say maybe too many options for notifications.
 It's a little weird.
 It's a little weird actually.
 Usually Apple makes a decision for you.
 This is the one place they decided to get granular was what kind of notifications you want.
 For each app.
 So you could literally, if you have a 500 apps on your phone.
 No, but that's better.
 And this is something that Android lacks.
 Like I don't want my ESPN app to like to be in my lock screen and constantly light up the screen.
 Right.
 It is nice there are certain things you can have it notify you about.
 I just realized has anybody made a weather application that notifies you what the weather is?
 I'm sure when would notify you like when it changes a degree or every hour.
 Because then I'd be able to have weather on my lock screen of an iPhone.
 That is a ridiculous app.
 I'm sure it exists.
 Somebody is talking about it right now.
 You stream.
 Yeah.
 Come on guys.
 You're open.
 Dude has seen one.
 Oh, in my chat.
 Yeah, your chat is messed up.
 Oh, I'm scrolled down.
 Oh no.
 You blew it.
 You're a bozo that blew it.
 Anyhow, but so that's so the battery thing is one issue which they have acknowledged.
 Yeah.
 And they're going to push out.
 You know this will be interesting.
 It will be the first big test of over the updates like live Delta updates for Apple.
 So it's it worked in.
 It works for the beta.
 There's a really nerdy silver lining to this which I find.
 Yeah, we find it.
 Yeah, that works.
 But that's a terrible.
 I mean it works.
 It's just pretty easy to say.
 It works.
 But I mean not to.
 We'll see when it's 100 million people or however many people have iPhone 4s now.
 They sold 100 or a high iPhone.
 Oh, I guess all iPhones.
 It's all everybody.
 They immediately sold 100 million iPhone 4s.
 That's the made up number.
 Don't use that in your analysis of anything.
 Don't use that to write a piece of analysis about the company that will then be used by
 stock brokers to trade stock.
 Yeah, it's the stock brokers who are going to use the analysis.
 What I'm saying is the world that we, that guys just say stuff and then people take money
 and do things with that money based on the things those guys say.
 And we, I mean I think we have a unique advantage in our industry because we know when people
 are just sort of making things up and when they're actually doing analysis.
 And there are a lot of analysts that just make stuff up, right?
 We agree.
 We agree on that.
 Do we?
 Do we agree?
 I get the general vibe.
 Some, some, not all.
 I mean, it's like I'm not like I'm not there at this dude's office watching him like play
 ball there.
 But they, we've seen analysts write things that are patently incorrect and crazy and
 they, and they've never come to a base.
 Yeah, provably false.
 Well, the Apple TV thing, there may be something to it and I don't, I mean there may be something
 to it now.
 I don't know if there was something to it when Gene Munster started making comments
 about it in like 1998.
 1975.
 1975 Gene Munster is like they're going to make a TV.
 This Apple one guaranteed.
 But, but it's just crazy to me that people, we're talking about analysts by the way,
 that analysts can just say, you know, Apple's, we think they'll do it because they missed
 this earnings was analysts predictions.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 They hit those guys are actually using numbers, but it's still, it's still kind of weird to
 me.
 Right.
 They passed their, what Apple said that they were, Apple did better than it's thought it
 would.
 Yeah.
 But it wasn't as good as the analysts thought it would because Apple typically low balls
 itself.
 Right.
 And they're like, look, we're going to hit four home runs now.
 It's like we want you to hit seven and they hit six.
 Right.
 And like, I mean, I'm not, I mean, you know, I'm just saying it's a lot of sports metaphors.
 I actually wasn't even thinking about that.
 It just popped into my head as we were talking about it.
 But so there there's the issue of total tangent.
 There's the issue of the battery and then there's the Siri issue, which is she, she
 went down.
 She sounds bad.
 She, she stopped working a few days ago.
 It was like three hours.
 She disappeared.
 There's only the alien mistake.
 It's weird because you know, serious beta and Apple doesn't usually do betas like that.
 Yeah.
 So I don't know.
 It's beta.
 Welcome to Googleville.
 Yeah.
 Where you can release an app and then pull it.
 Not to go back to.
 They should pull Siri.
 Not to go back to the Gmail thing is I feel like Google had this enormous wave of goodwill
 because they started rolling out these redesigns.
 We're going to pay attention to design.
 Like look at circles and Google reader.
 We hired this dude from Apple as a famous designer and like everything they've done
 since then has been a complete catastrophe.
 What the Google reader redesign is, I don't think everything they've done has been a complete
 catastrophe.
 A lot of this stuff looks, I think it looks a lot better.
 Some of it looks better, but like all this other software they're putting out, this Gmail
 thing is a perfect example.
 It's like they put it out.
 It's like they didn't, no, no, no, no.
 That's not the same, but those aren't the same teams.
 They're not the same teams.
 It's like company wide.
 They're putting out the stuff that they're not thinking.
 I feel like that app looks really different than the web stuff.
 I think it's a totally different team.
 No, I don't think it looks different than the web.
 I think the parts are there.
 I'm sorry, the parts of the HTML view that they're pulling in do look just like the web
 because they are actually the web.
 Yeah, but that black stuff is not in the new design really that much.
 But the line art styling, all that stuff.
 And then when the reader stuff.
 That's not really there.
 I think your eyes aren't working properly.
 I think you need to get an eye exam.
 All I know is that Google has done two major kind of redesign things lately.
 The Google reader backlash has been pretty wild.
 It's hard for me to weigh in.
 So I actually haven't seen the Google reader changes.
 Am I missing something?
 The sharing process is now like a three step process.
 See I read in private.
 I've never shared anything I've read on Google Reader.
 Same here.
 I hate the idea of sharing.
 My whole thing about, I'm checking that right now because I haven't seen if they've changed
 it.
 My whole thing about.
 And I don't use Google Plus because they still don't support Google Apps.
 So first off, my reader account isn't hooked up to my main Gmail account.
 That's how much I want to get away from the, oh here it is the new Google Reader.
 That's how much I want to get away from.
 And actually I've been using Reader on my iPad to read news almost exclusively.
 That's actually the one thing I do that's enjoying that is not work.
 Because I enjoy work.
 But the one thing that I really do to relax.
 Well two things.
 I watch episodes of Parenthood and I read in Reader.
 But lately because we've been very busy.
 I feel like I keep qualifying this because I gave myself up and I set myself a really
 high bar.
 I never have any fun.
 I never have had fun in my life except for this one thing.
 That's a little hyperbolic.
 But one of the things I do to relax.
 Poison.
 Poison.
 Oh my God.
 Poison.
 Please stop.
 I'm never going to stop.
 And yeah, I'm just saying that I just find.
 I love using Google Reader but maybe I won't now with this new design.
 Oh, this is like poison.
 This is great.
 I like this.
 I like this better.
 Now what happens if I star something?
 Will it immediately share to Google Plus?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 That's not what happens.
 A biplane flies by with the banner behind it.
 It's like, you starred this.
 Joshua Tobolsky starred.
 I think what Google is up against in some ways is that they have.
 Their biggest enemy is themselves.
 Yeah.
 They've been very successful.
 They're very useful to people.
 And now they want to be a social company.
 And there are some slight tensions between being social.
 They also want to be a content provider.
 They're going from search to content to social.
 And being social is not strictly utilitarian.
 Building my friendships does not necessarily go hand in hand with getting my job done.
 As our-
 I had to burn a lot of bridges to get the-
 As our product manager Justin Glow said to me once when we were working on The Verge,
 you can't wireframe art.
 Yeah.
 Can't crowdsource talent.
 Can't crowdsource talent.
 Is that what I said the other day?
 Yeah.
 It is good.
 It's both good.
 We should put them on a big boat.
 We should have them on a plane fly by with a banner that has those quotes on them.
 We should make a wireframe and then crowdsource the other.
 Yeah.
 It's crowdsource the artwork and put it on a biplane.
 Not on the biplane, but on a banner behind it.
 Like a wireframe plane.
 Yes.
 A wireframe plane.
 A wireframe plane.
 Yeah.
 Anyhow.
 But-
 What?
 A frame plane is a thing?
 Okay.
 Don't look at me that way.
 It's not a thing.
 Let's keep talking.
 It's just tied to big bits.
 Can we keep-
 Can we just stay on topic?
 Yeah.
 Let's highlight some of this stuff from the forums.
 As long as we're in the same-
 Wait a second.
 Let's move on.
 How did you get to forums from this?
 What's the next thing on the list?
 We weren't on forums at all.
 What's the next thing on the list?
 We're having a conversation about Google.
 May I finish?
 We were not.
 Can I finish?
 We were manifestly not having a conversation.
 I'm finishing.
 I don't even know where to-
 All right.
 Finish.
 Wrap it up.
 What was I saying?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 This is happening.
 Did you want to bounce off the excellent points that I was making?
 I think so, but I don't-
 About the tension between productivity and social?
 Do you think there's a tension?
 I actually was before that.
 It was really important to.
 It was something I-
 You know, I got a message earlier about how both of you-
 I think it was something about both of you guys being like, go over incredible incompetence
 and frankly, at least one of you, rudeness.
 I'm not going to name names, but it rhymes with P. Lyte, Nintel.
 That's reason enough to quit.
 P. Lyte, Nintel, your new nickname?
 What?
 You don't like that?
 Look, it's the least I can do for the man who gave me Josh Tops.
 Okay.
 Let's do talk about our forum.
 Yes.
 One of the things we want to do on the podcast for a week and frankly, all over the site
 is highlight the cool stuff that's happening in forums.
 We already talked about the Sony poster was in there.
 The user did this Glypo, did a Sony post, a brand of the future in mobile.
 We can throw it up on the screen.
 You can see it's really awesome.
 I will say that the one thing that I-
 I think he's right.
 I think Sony and Microsoft are these kinds of companies where you see all the pieces
 they have and any normal smart person can be like, you should put those pieces together
 to make a house.
 Yes.
 And they're like, you know what we're going to do?
 We're just going to spread them out in the ground and then talk about the house that
 we might build someday.
 And then sprinkle dirt over them.
 Yes.
 It's really great ideas about how Sony can become a company that's more successful and
 mobile with all the pieces they have.
 I really- we've said this a lot.
 I really think they should make a Walkman that's awesome.
 They just sold- they bought out Ericsson.
 Press the button.
 Go ahead.
 Press the button.
 They're even on me.
 They just bought out Ericsson.
 Now, Sony is making the cell phones themselves.
 Yes.
 That's really cool.
 But that's- but this is- I mean, the content you may not agree with, Nilay, you were immediately
 like, I don't think all these points are necessarily- did you actually comment on that for them?
 I did.
 I did.
 Did you give them hell for some of your- the points you felt were not-
 No, I said I overall agree with him.
 I think Sony is having problems with their display stuff and making LCDs.
 And so he talked about some broad-based stuff.
 I think that's a little shaky.
 I think the whole TV industry is in upheaval.
 And I think Sony- Sony is selling off a bunch of stuff.
 Panasonic is selling off a bunch of stuff.
 It's kind of a broader narrative that we need to look at.
 But other than that, I think it's spot on.
 What's the next one?
 This one I thought was cool.
 John Deutsch talking about Windows Media Center.
 This is just right in line with TVs.
 Great headline.
 A sleeper that's a keeper.
 Did you- Did you drop that into-
 Yeah, I'm just showing it on my screen.
 We can drop it and check it.
 Yeah, there we go.
 I just want to be able to look at these while you're talking about them.
 It's just interesting.
 I mean, you know, it's- Microsoft built this stuff.
 They built the first real smart TV stuff that takes a cable card, is integrated.
 They're doing what everybody wants Apple to do, right?
 They have an integrated smart TV system.
 It's like they totally let it go.
 So that's really cool.
 The next one is just show off your desktops, which is kind of my favorite.
 And you can see people's- There's crazy setups on Mac and PC desktops.
 They're really cool.
 And just stuff like this.
 I mean, this is stuff that we're the most excited about.
 People just really engage in your forums.
 And then the last one is this long letter to HTC called My Breakup with HTC.
 It's all about how Sense has become completely overwrought.
 It is.
 And Sense has become insane.
 Yeah, it's really insane.
 I have to agree with that.
 I mean, there is something so amazing about-
 And you can see, just I wanted to point out, this is thin the herd as a user, and it's
 super long critique of Sense.
 That's awesome.
 That kind of stuff in our forums is the best stuff.
 Yeah.
 I am truly impressed by the level of- And maybe that's the honeymoon.
 Maybe it's the honeymoon period.
 But I feel like we always thought that there were some really smart, clever, interesting
 people commenting.
 And that if you just gave them a little bit more room and let them kind of talk about
 what they wanted to talk about, you could get some really-
 Yeah.
 See some really cool stuff.
 And I am kind of blown away by the level of the cost of this content.
 Yeah.
 We also have a really good animated GIFs thread, so I highly recommend it there.
 That's really where I live.
 I haven't been in that thread, have I?
 Oh, it's good.
 Is it the one that we- It was not the one that we started when we were testing.
 It was.
 Thomas Heusson started it.
 It was right after we wiped all the old crap clean and he started that one right away.
 The desktop one is great.
 It's really fascinating to see-
 How other people do their setups, right?
 It's like wild.
 Yeah.
 And we have other ones that are like, show us your office and all this stuff.
 It's cool.
 There are threads that have existed on other sites that are similar, but it's awesome to
 see our community kind of really go after this stuff and a bunch of nerds in their nap.
 This is how nerds get social, Paul.
 Google should take a lesson.
 Maybe that's our-
 This is how nerds get social.
 This is how nerds get social.
 So that's that.
 Do you want to talk about this?
 It's Bill Gates stuff, Paul.
 Yeah.
 My next little story.
 Yeah.
 So a report came out this week that Ballmer wasn't sure about the Courier.
 This is like a heartbreaking story.
 So this was at CNET.
 Yeah.
 This is like an exclusive at CNET.
 They have a part two coming apparently and it's very cool.
 Oh really?
 Yeah.
 And yeah, there was a kind of an internal war at Microsoft with Jay Allard, the Xbox
 guy and Windows, which is Steven Sanofsky.
 And Ballmer couldn't choose and so Gates killed it.
 Gates was the king maker, went for Windows.
 He said that there was no email client for Courier and he didn't like that.
 I mean-
 The quotes in Sanofsky said he had an allergic reaction to the Courier.
 There's parts of it that makes sense that it would be fragmented in their platforms,
 but at the same time, it had all the good ideas.
 It was what their allegiance to...
 Their allegiance to Windows is insane because the Xbox isn't good because it is built on
 Windows.
 Make no mistake about it.
 In a really, really dismal way.
 There are shared technologies.
 There are shared.
 DirectX is about it.
 Yeah, I guess that's true.
 XNA.
 Yeah.
 I mean, there are many, there are actually...
 That's like backported into Windows.
 Yeah, okay.
 Fair enough.
 Well, then my argument is even better.
 The Xbox.
 It's completely...
 Super successful.
 It's an entirely separate platform.
 I think there was more Windows in it than that.
 There's not a lot of Windows.
 I think you're thinking of the Dreamcast.
 I think the original Xbox had a little more Windows in it.
 No, the Dreamcast ran Windows for you.
 I know.
 I know it did.
 It's not what I'm thinking of though.
 Yeah, you're right.
 I always confuse the Xbox 360 with the Dreamcast.
 I'm whipping up an Xbox 360.
 Is the Dreamcast in the database?
 I don't know if it's out yet, but there's a very special reason why.
 It might be in there.
 It probably is.
 At any rate, it's like you had an opportunity to do something that people would be like,
 this is...
 I mean, if you could pull it off with the courier.
 I can't believe we're still talking about the courier.
 It's been like two years of this.
 If they could have pulled it off...
 Oh, it's in there.
 Remember that poll somebody did?
 It was like Fast Company or Fortune or something.
 Are you going to get a courier or an iPad or an Apple tablet?
 Yeah.
 And it's just anyhow, the idea that they didn't have the vision to see if we could build this
 and make it really great, people will love it and freak out about it.
 Are you comparing?
 Yeah, I'm comparing the Dreamcast to the 360.
 Can you please drop that in?
 I want to see this link.
 Yeah, I'm going to get it.
 Come on, make it happen.
 This is a great comparison.
 Taking forever.
 Look how slow this guy is.
 I have to allow links.
 Hold on.
 There you go.
 Man, I could have made a couple...could have gotten a cup of coffee.
 This is like waiting for the iPhone 4S's competitors to take a picture.
 Nice.
 Real nice.
 If anybody knows what I'm talking about...
 You just got burned, DroidBionic.
 Shiller burn.
 Shiller...Shillburn.
 I don't know.
 They have a lot in common.
 Look at this.
 Oh, you can have...
 Okay.
 How crazy is this?
 Dreamcast, CPU speed, 200 megahertz.
 Is this right?
 The Xbox is a 3.2 gigahertz?
 That doesn't sound right.
 Yeah, the original Xbox was based on Windows NT, but I think the Xbox 360 was pretty much
 French-Rat.
 That's what people are saying.
 Is that right?
 Seems high to me.
 What, the Xbox 360?
 Yeah.
 Well, you know, there was...the Pentium 4 was up to like 3 and 4 gigahertz.
 Like years ago, there was a whole gigahertz wars and then they kind of like started over...
 I need to put the PS3 in this thing.
 Oh, my battery is dying.
 Let me get PS3 into this mix.
 Oh, you know you can't search for PS3.
 We got to fix that.
 Yeah.
 We got the...
 This is exciting.
 We're just now sitting here.
 I've got the Xbox 360.
 So, you know what's funny about all this?
 So there's the gate stuff and I think the idea that Steve Ballmer couldn't decide on
 a product and he had to call Gates back in and Gates was like, you should go with Windows.
 And then Jay Allard is now and Robbie Bach, they're leaving the company.
 They've left.
 Well, I don't think they're officially completely gone.
 Yeah, I think they are.
 You know, it's kind of like they lost like these leading lights, right?
 I mean, Jay Allard, I think...
 The Xbox is like an unadulterated success for them.
 If there's one piece of Ballmer's legacy that you could say Ballmer won at this thing, it
 was the Xbox 360.
 Right.
 You know?
 Makes a lot of sense.
 You can't credit Ballmer for Windows.
 You know what's funny?
 You could say Xbox 360, good job Ballmer, except now you lost the guy.
 You lost the guy who made it.
 Right.
 You lost your dude.
 Yeah.
 But it's like, just the idea that like Ballmer couldn't make that decision, had to call in
 Gates and Gates was like, let's go with Windows as opposed to like, let's go with this radically
 innovative thing that seems awesome.
 Well, you know, I don't want to go back down this road.
 But then, you know, what's really funny?
 What I think is super crazy is they said, no, let's not make a tablet this way.
 But then that's exactly what they did with the phone, right?
 They're like the beginning of Windows phone was all the phone is not a PC.
 Well, but that is built on, I mean, it's not Windows.
 It's not, it's certainly not Windows.
 That's like Windows mobile is like, here's Windows again.
 Here is my offer to Microsoft.
 I will let bygones be bygones with the courier.
 If you build a courier app into Windows 8, done.
 That's going to happen.
 Yeah.
 So they want to acknowledge it more.
 Remember this?
 Remember this great idea?
 You know what though, honestly, would it have been great?
 They had to build it.
 It had to work.
 It had to be as elegant as they made it.
 I'm pretty sure if they did have an email, they did it, right?
 I mean, everything they said they wanted to do.
 It's true.
 They're, they're, you know, from this report that also sounds like, uh, Allard wanted to
 be just creation.
 And I, especially if you look, you know, he didn't want to have email on it.
 And like emails kind of a big thing that people do on their iPads in bed, you know, like just
 kind of, I mean, that's, that's stupid.
 Everybody knows that.
 That's, that's like, like, like, oh my God, it's fine.
 I'm okay.
 I'm not.
 I'm not.
 If Microsoft had come out with a tablet that wasn't really as feature complete, that was
 very for one single use and was maybe a little expensive, I don't think it would have done
 well at all.
 Somebody is asking where they can get a bracelet like yours.
 Any, any local hot topics.
 Any hot topic.
 Any hot topics.
 You know, I will say this, the mall in my hometown in Wisconsin is now full of nothing.
 It's now full of nothing but hot topics.
 It's all hot topics.
 It's really weird.
 It's hot topics all the way down.
 When I, when I was there, it was like, there was none of that stuff.
 And now it's like, wow, every kid in Roushine, Wisconsin is some sort of crazy goth.
 That is the only way you can support this level of gothic life.
 I want to address the people.
 When I grow up, the goth economy.
 I want to address the real goth economy.
 It's trying to think of what the equivalent of main street and wall street would be for
 the goth, the goth economy.
 It's like the, the cemetery.
 It's like the, the, the, the, no, but it would be like two places where the goth, where the
 goths would be.
 Oh, I see.
 Real, you know, the goths who are controlling the goth economy and the goths who are just
 living one percenters.
 So it would be hot topic.
 Yeah.
 And the people who own hot topics.
 But I was going to, I wanted to comment on the, the people in Ustream who think that
 I'm drinking wine.
 I'm actually just drinking seltzer, but this was the, I took a wine glass.
 Yeah.
 It's, it's a clear.
 If you interrupted our awesome goth economy bit.
 No, the goth economy conversation was over.
 It ended.
 But we should wrap up, I think, because, is there another topic?
 There's a few more.
 Really?
 We can run through them really fast.
 We've only been on for less than an hour.
 So, oh wait, can I borrow your, can I do this?
 Yeah, take the power.
 Excuse me.
 Look at this.
 Wonderful.
 This is, this is the real goth economy right here, man.
 I wish I could, I wish when I, when I, I wish when I took that I could immediately start
 playing power.
 Like Kanye West.
 No, so right on the career stuff, which I think this is maybe the funniest news of the
 week.
 HP introduced a Slate 2.
 Oh yeah, Slate 2.
 After, after killing the touchpad, it's a viscerating webOS.
 They're coming back just for enterprise only.
 Still runs Windows 7.
 It's basically the same product.
 WebOS, man.
 Slate 2.
 That's what, that's, that's HP's newest tablet entry.
 I mean, webOS.
 It's gone.
 It's over.
 I mean, webOS.
 Did we ever have a moment of silence for webOS?
 It's happening right now.
 It's not 10 minutes.
 Oh, we should.
 It might come back in the form of a transistor.
 Yeah, that's probably irreverent to do a moment of silence for something that's not officially
 dead.
 Listen, let me tell you something.
 What's Meg Whitman tells me it's dead, then I'll know.
 No, no, no.
 And they keep on saying stuff like it's ultra sophisticated software that we just need to
 find a way to use.
 Yeah, I tell you the thing they said from day one that we've been making fun of them
 for is going to be the way they use it.
 Printers.
 They're going to put webOS in printers.
 Remember when Rubenstein was like, they were talking, they were like, think of all the
 cool things you could do if a printer had apps.
 I can't think of those things because they don't exist.
 That's not real.
 No, come on.
 You know what, man, webOS, those guys, you know, whatever.
 There was another story actually last week that you should, what?
 WebOS, I think a little, a little.
 You want to do what?
 You should pour out your-
 A little blue for the webOS.
 A what?
 A little bleepy blue.
 Yeah, that's pretty fitting.
 WebOS.
 Oh, whoops.
 I know.
 WebOS at HP.
 Terrible.
 Yes.
 Terribly awesome.
 Yeah.
 Anyhow, but how do we get on webOS?
 Oh, HP, we're going to put the Slate 2.
 The Slate 2 is a device that I don't think I want.
 Did anybody buy the Slate 1?
 Apparently it was big and enterprise.
 That's what's involved.
 I know, that makes sense.
 I mean, because the truth is when you look at the lens, I mean, these things are being
 used.
 People are using things that run Windows in a tablet form.
 I see them all the time in enterprise situations.
 You know, when I'm down on the factory floor and I need to get a payload of-
 You got to triage something.
 I got to triage something down on the factory floor.
 You been in the hospital, didn't you?
 What?
 You been in the hospital, didn't you?
 No, you triage like docket.
 I think that's a thing.
 You also do triage in a-
 You triage your email, I think.
 You can triage anything if you're working to quickly fix something.
 I wonder which intern wrote the description of the HP Slate 2 in our database because
 it's like kind of hilarious.
 What does it say?
 It's like, you know, blah, blah, blah, a bunch of specs.
 Other changes include the always exciting TPM chip for security, a new Bluetooth keyboard
 dock, and a flat black cover rather than the gray textured one featured on the original.
 Sounds like I'm going to guess who wrote that.
 I'm going to guess who wrote that.
 I think it was Lucas.
 Is that Lucas?
 Do we know who that is?
 No.
 Is he here?
 No.
 It was you.
 Oh, I was about to be really impressed with myself.
 Actually, I just remembered that there was a phone that I wrote a description for and
 I want to find it.
 I want to see if it made it through the process.
 Let me see.
 It was a, I believe it's a, what is the designer phone?
 Oh, it's the Windows phone, the designer phone that just came out.
 What is the Windows phone designer edition that just came out?
 It's by a designer.
 Porsche?
 I know what you're talking about.
 I don't remember who the designer is.
 It's the purple one, right?
 Yes.
 I have to find this.
 What is it called?
 I'm going into cell phones.
 I'm sure somebody must have said this, right?
 Anybody?
 Sorry, I'm looking at the gift.
 Is it LG?
 Life's good.
 Yeah, no, it's based on LG thing and she has a name.
 It is a female.
 You're right about that.
 Well, check this out.
 John asked me because I didn't know who it was.
 I'm going to use our filters to find it.
 Take this.
 Take this?
 Take that.
 I know the one thing is we couldn't find a picture for it.
 Everybody was really mad at me.
 Remember Lucas?
 You were mad at me about it.
 Oh, Jil Sander.
 Jil Sander.
 Thank you.
 Is that, will that work?
 There's a slight comparison.
 I just dropped that in.
 Oh, that's weird.
 That's not working.
 Wait, what is it?
 You dropped it in?
 No, I dropped it in the HP slate and slate 500.
 Oh yeah.
 These are the two slates.
 Jil Sander found it.
 This is not available, right?
 No, not yet.
 And I still haven't found it.
 That's not good.
 Do you want to talk about some real products that came out?
 Yeah, please do.
 I just want to find this description.
 All right.
 So then here's, there's a...
 You just keep going.
 I'm just going to list off the other stuff.
 That's fine.
 Yeah.
 Sorry.
 Can I just say, can I just say we have not slept this week.
 No, we haven't slept at all.
 I mean, we have really not slept and last night we got pretty drunk.
 Yeah.
 And I'm not going to lie.
 I'm not going to lie to you.
 I don't think this is the best we can do.
 I think we could do better, but we're not going to today.
 We can, but not today.
 So real fast, let's just talk about some stuff.
 Yeah, I'd love to.
 The rest of the news.
 Wonderful.
 So Paul, you want to talk about the Zoom 2 and the Zoom 2 Media Edition?
 So those are announced in the UK, not in the US, which is bizarre.
 But if you're English, you can get a Zoom 2.
 I just don't know what they're doing with their like corners.
 No, this is their new thing.
 Like Motorola.
 The Razr looks like that too.
 Yeah, Motorola is like a, is a war against corners.
 Yeah.
 There's this weird angled corner.
 I mean, that's.
 Sandra and Joe was in a meeting.
 It was like corners.
 Did you say a war against corners?
 Yeah, that's basically.
 Like we don't want any 45 degree angles.
 Is it 90 degrees?
 Sorry.
 90.
 Again.
 They have two sides.
 They've got an 8.2 inch, which is their media edition.
 And then there's the Zoom 2, which is 10.1 inch and they have IPS displays.
 One of the big problems with the original Zoom was the display.
 Yeah, but this isn't like a normal phone.
 I wouldn't say it was a big problem.
 It wasn't a great display.
 Well, I mean, but it wasn't.
 Up against Samsung.
 I mean, were people like, I'm outraged.
 How dare you?
 I was outraged.
 If your cold computer is a display, you should have a pretty good display.
 Okay.
 So my, by the way, my, my description is.
 This better be great, Josh.
 This better be really.
 It took us a long time.
 Well, I remember putting this product in and I, you know, I didn't have much time to put
 many products in.
 But you have to find the window where our Ustream chat is so I can share this with everyone.
 Somebody's outraged at me apparently.
 I'm outraged at you.
 There's a bunch of, there's a bunch of.
 Oh, I don't have, I'm not a moderator, so I can't.
 Here I'll.
 Let me give you the.
 There you go.
 Try that.
 What am I, what am I trying exactly?
 Where did you, I don't know where you gave this to me.
 It's in IRC.
 Oh, I see what's going on.
 I think the description is pretty good and pretty fitting actually.
 I can't, I can't.
 Oh, I'm not in con.
 This is a problem, Josh.
 Oh, well that is a problem.
 What do you know about that?
 Are you guys loving this?
 Are you in?
 Paul, are you in?
 Oh my goodness.
 Well, how can I get ahold of you then?
 Just say something in the Ustream chat.
 I literally have no way.
 I, oh.
 Why don't you just read it out loud?
 People, people can listen to this on the radio and the car is on a community.
 They can't look at a video.
 The E906 is a Jill Sander branded Windows Phone 7 device.
 Besides its slightly more fashion focused styling, the phone, it's really funny that
 you suggested reading it because it had never, it did not occur to me that that might be
 a way I could get people.
 That's how tired I am.
 Wow.
 Besides its slightly more fashion focused styling, the phone is equipped with a variety
 of software hooks into the quote world of Jill Sander.
 It runs the Mango 7.5 update.
 The E906 falls in the footsteps of the Windows Mobile 6.5 Giorgio Armani phone, which no
 one ever purchased.
 Wow.
 I know it's not much of a payoff, but.
 That's rough.
 A little Easter egg, a little Easter egg in the database.
 Fine, I'm going to put a few more in there.
 I just, did any, do you know anybody who's ever purchased the Giorgio Armani anything
 that was technology?
 No.
 No.
 Somebody like really tacky.
 If you're rich and tacky, you're going to buy a Vertu.
 Yeah.
 You're not going to buy the Giorgio Armani phone.
 The new crazy Blackberry, the P9981.
 It's spelled P prime 9981.
 What is it called?
 The Porsche.
 Yeah, the Porsche.
 The P9981.
 Have you guys seen the Porsche?
 I'd say Porsche has really, really diluted its brand.
 Have you seen the, oh no, it's like, it's like, it's like Ferrari.
 Have you ever seen the Ferrari store?
 Yeah.
 There's a, in San Francisco, I don't know if they have them everywhere.
 In San Francisco near the hotel I always stay at, there's a Ferrari store and it's just,
 all the classiest dudes and ladies.
 It's like what Ferrari, I mean, I guess a Ferrari is a pretty ostentatious car.
 Right.
 But still I think like, if you have enough money to buy a Ferrari, you'd know better
 than to buy the Ferrari gear.
 You know, like if you have enough money to buy the Ferrari, you at least should have
 enough class to not get the ridiculous Ferrari red leather jacket with racing stripes.
 I know.
 I don't think that's a-
 I used to live really close to-
 It depends if you're new money or old money.
 Ooh, nice Paul.
 Way to go with old money.
 If you're old money, you don't buy the Ferrari.
 Right.
 It depends if you're West Egg or East Egg.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 What egg are you from?
 West or East?
 Answer the question.
 Look, there is a part of Chicago where the super, it's called the Viagra Triangle in
 the United States.
 Oh, come on.
 Really?
 Yeah, it's all the old dudes in their ridiculous cars like go drive-
 That wasn't the actual name of it though.
 That's what everybody called it, Viagra Triangle, like Russian division.
 But it wasn't named by the city.
 No, the city, the mayor daily was not like, and I came to the Viagra Triangle.
 Does that happen to house?
 Does the mayor Quimby from the Simpsons?
 A little bit.
 Wow, we're really just riffing now.
 This is nothing new.
 I will say there was always like dudes in white Ferraris in like silly ostentatious
 Ferrari jackets.
 Yeah, I think it's a thing.
 Maybe you're right.
 I think it's a thing.
 Maybe you do go into the Ferrari store after you buy a Ferrari and you get like-
 It's like your first move.
 You get like the Ferrari, they have like a pen that looks like a car or something.
 Just think of like a-
 You're like sighting your chick in your room.
 Just think of a combination of things that's bad, involving Ferrari branding and they have
 it in the store.
 What's something you think would be a bad combination of things that are branded Ferrari?
 Like a men's shaving kit.
 Yes, they have that.
 A men's shaving kit.
 I'll certainly-
 And all the handles of all the stuff is shaped like a Ferrari.
 To be fair-
 Or the horse, they have like the horse.
 To be fair to this poor, stupid phone, it's not actually like Porsche, the car company
 design.
 It's Porsche design.
 So they're like different companies.
 Yeah, but these-
 But they're related companies.
 Sorry, it's Porsche.
 I mean, it's not like we'd have a separate thing called the Verge design company.
 Although that's a pretty good idea.
 We could do some men's shaving kits.
 Yeah, I think we could do some-
 Yeah.
 Verge shaving.
 No, but like the Verge, I wouldn't let the Verge design company make ugly stuff.
 It's like a whole-
 Because it'd be a bad reflection on my brand overall.
 It's like nobody cares about the Porsche brand anymore.
 Except for the old dudes with Porsche jackets.
 Or Porsche.
 Yeah, who you talk to.
 Where's the-
 I mean, a Porsche is no Ferrari.
 It's true.
 Do we take the-
 I think.
 I don't know how much they cost.
 Great thing for your buck though.
 I really don't know how much they cost.
 There it is.
 Oh, we took out the prime in the database.
 We did?
 Yeah, the apostrophe was like not- remember I was making that product look like I had
 to go-
 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
 But the official name is P apostrophe 9981.
 We didn't fix that.
 There's only one product in the world with an apostrophe in the name.
 Interesting.
 Somebody just asked in Ustream, what would Verge build if they had an opportunity to
 build a tablet?
 I think we'd build the Zoom 2 Media Edition.
 Flat out.
 Done.
 Zoom 2 Media Edition.
 You know the interesting thing about all these second generation Android tablets is that
 they're the same product, right?
 They're just slightly thinner.
 Yeah, the Galaxy Tab and the Galaxy Tab.
 This has like a-
 This has media.
 This is a media edition.
 Dual core.
 Was the original dual core?
 Yeah, they're all tiger 2.
 I'm more interested in the Zoom 2 Family Edition.
 Yeah, well, I mean, the Zoom 2 Family Edition is basically the old Zoom.
 They just didn't sell a bunch of them, so they're like, that's for families.
 What are we going to do with all these Zooms?
 We should give them to kids.
 Is this exactly the same in Turtles?
 Yeah, more or less.
 Do make a comparison.
 I don't have time.
 I mean, it's really close.
 I mean, honestly, it's a little bit different.
 It's a little bit different.
 It's a little bit different.
 I mean, honestly, I wouldn't build a tablet.
 It's like they literally put out this product for the holidays.
 I have to say, if we were going to build a product, I would not want to do a tablet.
 No.
 I've already described my dream product.
 What is it?
 Oh, it's your-
 It's a keyboard with no screen.
 It's just a keyboard, man.
 You type your ideas.
 Do you remember my suggestion for what you could do to make that product right now?
 What?
 I think it was get a Bluetooth keyboard and don't look at your screen.
 Yeah.
 It was the portability aspect.
 You can get a foldable Bluetooth keyboard.
 Just pair it to your phone.
 Boom.
 You're going to be awesome.
 Neelai.
 Nice going.
 I just don't understand.
 Great job on figuring out the solving balls problem right now.
 You know what's great about video?
 You guys saw that high five.
 That's where the money's going right there.
 But I wouldn't build a tablet for sure because there is no tablet market.
 There's the iPad market.
 I wouldn't want to compete in that market because unless I made an iPad, I wouldn't
 be competing.
 I'm not saying people shouldn't make tablets.
 I'm saying I wouldn't want to do it.
 I'm saying people should because I think somebody is going to come up with a great competitor
 and it's going to be great and I'm going to buy it repeatedly.
 Over and over again.
 I would make a phone.
 I would do a phone because here's the thing about phone-
 You'd buy a web OS.
 I would buy web OS but only to put it on printers and then I would make a phone using original
 Windows 1.
 Seriously, you could run Windows 1 beautifully on anything these days.
 Think about how affordable that would be.
 I mean the catalog of applications would be pretty large.
 Okay, I will say this.
 The Zoom 2 is a 1.2 gigahertz OMAP 4 where the original Zoom was a 1 gigahertz Tiger
 2.
 It won't be able to play all the Tiger games that you bought on your original Zoom.
 Whatever happened to that?
 What's going on with the Tiger situation?
 Aren't we due to see a bunch of Tiger 3 stuff?
 My hope is it's right around the corner.
 But here's the deal with Tiger.
 They're saying, at least with Android, they're asking people to make special apps for Tiger.
 I asked somebody about this.
 Which is insane because it's like adding another layer of fragmentation.
 It's like, well with this Tiger 3, you're not going to have apps that only run on Tiger
 3.
 Well, they're like, well, if someone buys a Tiger 3 thing, they want to have exclusivity.
 Sure.
 Yeah, that's what people want.
 They want less options.
 They want fewer options.
 What developer is going to spend millions of dollars creating something exactly for
 your GPU?
 I don't get it.
 The whole Tiger thing just boggles my mind.
 I was using the Atrix and then I had all these games I bought and I can't play them on any
 other, unless it's a Tiger device.
 Then they have other versions that are not Tiger and I had to rebuy them.
 That's crazy too.
 How about identifying that I own the Tiger version and then saying, well, we have a...
 Or how about creating...
 Forget it.
 I'm not going to get into it.
 Android, a lot of problems with Android, but also a lot of great stuff.
 I really am excited about the Galaxy Nexus.
 This leads me right into the last new product thing that you're talking about.
 I have something I've been meaning to write about that, but go ahead.
 No, that's a good thing.
 I don't want to ruin that thing.
 Don't.
 There's two more things we need to talk about.
 We need to talk about the HTC Resound.
 What's the matter?
 What's going on over there?
 We don't need to talk about the Resound.
 We do.
 Please.
 It happened.
 Oh, fine.
 The train wreck.
 Just real quick.
 You think it's train wreck?
 Verizon needs...
 It was T-Mobile and HTC couldn't stop putting out phones for a month.
 And Verizon is right there.
 Are you talking to me or are you talking to Verizon?
 I don't know.
 Somebody told me in Ustream to hit the bot nine this way.
 I don't know why I called this a train wreck.
 It looks pretty cool, but I just...
 Man.
 What?
 What's wrong with the Resound?
 Can somebody drop the link for the Resound in there?
 Yeah.
 We actually have a stream.
 We also have a product page.
 So much content.
 God.
 We are destroying you.
 There's a lot of material in this stream.
 The product team is really...
 They thought it was really funny that I just realized how big it was.
 Did I already say this?
 That I realized we had a really huge site after we launched?
 Yeah.
 I did.
 And they thought it was hilarious because they'd been building it.
 I'd only been talking about it and giving everybody hell.
 Yeah.
 Sorry.
 It happens.
 So this phone, it's apparently really huge, as Chris says.
 It's really chunky and big.
 It's like just yet another phone on Verizon that feels the same.
 It's got beats, though.
 I will say this.
 It does have a lot of the same specs as the Galaxy Nexus.
 720p, HD display.
 Oh, I forgot it had the HD display.
 It's not as big.
 It's 4.3 inches.
 That's actually a really good point.
 The biggest problem for me is that any phone you buy right now that's not the Galaxy Nexus
 is going to have a strip of buttons and that even if your phone is so lucky to get ice
 cream sandwich, it's going to have these useless, stupid buttons.
 And I cannot abide.
 You cannot abide.
 Can you imagine having a phone with useless buttons across the bottom?
 No, no, no, no.
 They won't be useless.
 They'll work.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Well, that's even worse.
 Then you have duplicate functionality.
 No, no, no, no.
 They won't show you the other.
 They don't show the buttons when you have buttons, I believe.
 Yeah.
 Doesn't that make sense?
 No, that's just even worse.
 Why?
 Because then I have buttons again.
 So you just put all this thought into exactly how buttons work.
 No, I think he put thought into how do I get rid of buttons on phones because I think they're
 stupid.
 Right.
 But he has a whole...
 Yeah, no, but the whole point of a software button layout is that it's malleable and
 it can be moved around and it can be tweaked.
 But no, no, I think Android as a platform is married to the buttons for the foreseeable
 future.
 Right?
 Because it's not that this is a transition step on the Nexus to get rid of buttons in
 the next version of Android.
 It's how do we just get rid of buttons?
 How do we take over the buttons?
 Yeah.
 There's always going to be a back button and a home button in Android.
 I don't think that's ever going to go away.
 There's too many devices out there to depend on it.
 Because that's what you want.
 You want that stuff to just go away.
 It's got this...
 Yeah, it's just that menu button.
 There's a reason you don't use...
 It looks like mystery meat.
 They got rid of that.
 The menu button.
 Yeah, there's no menu button.
 Yeah, it's insanity.
 There is no menu button in the new OS.
 So what happens to the resounds menu button?
 Just nothing happens when you tap that?
 What happens to apps that need a menu button?
 Well those will presumably go away as developers start developing for the new design language
 they have which is exposing stuff.
 But they have the install base of phones.
 I mean, this is Android.
 But you understand, right, the whole idea of Ice Cream Sandwich.
 So you're saying to me that if you have an Ice Cream...
 It's to move features out of that hidden menu...
 It's continuing what Honeycomb was doing.
 And that's what I'm saying.
 I understand.
 But what happens to the legacy apps?
 They get updated.
 Or they just don't work.
 No, but once you have...
 Once every phone has Ice Cream Sandwich...
 There's a software button though.
 Once every Android phone has the latest version of Android.
 Or they can make a menu button appear when you need it.
 For a legacy app.
 Okay.
 But you were saying there's no menu button.
 And that's what I'm saying.
 The fundamental idea of Ice Cream Sandwich is that there is no menu button.
 Not the only fundamental.
 It's one of the fundamental ideas.
 And if we're transitioning into a phase...
 Like another thing that the Galaxy Nexus does is it uses that whole link for widescreen
 movie watching so you don't have as big of black bars.
 I just think if you're moving into that direction, it's just...
 I don't know.
 It seems really weird to buy...
 Because you know, they...
 At the launch event for the Razown, they put up a huge slide that said Ice Cream Sandwich
 ready next year.
 It'll have it.
 Well sure.
 I mean, they know that it's coming.
 So far it's the only...
 I don't think I'm like maybe...
 Everybody else has said they're going to do updates.
 This is the thing.
 Who am I to say I'm not probably going to get any of these anyways.
 But it's just terrifying to me.
 Terrifying.
 Yeah.
 This much...
 I mean, I'm going to say the word.
 I'm going to say it out loud.
 I already said it earlier.
 I was just saying all that.
 Well, but you know what?
 To me, this is why I'm all in on the Galaxy Nexus.
 Because it's pure Google.
 It's what they want.
 It's where they're going.
 It'll get the updates.
 And I'm not going to have...
 I will use every phone because we test every phone.
 And I'll play around with everything.
 I'll review a bunch and so I'll have to use them for a while.
 But I'll buy the phone to use for...
 Until I see the next phone I want to buy.
 And that's what everybody does.
 The difference is...
 I mean, that's the one thing where we get a little...
 We have this perspective on it that regular humans don't.
 When somebody goes to buy the Fascinate, those sorry bastards.
 When they buy the Fascinate.
 They're buying it for two years.
 They're buying it to use for two years.
 By the way, just think about that.
 Just imagine that you bought an Android phone two years ago.
 And you're still under contract.
 You and Joe Flatley still have a G1.
 You have the Nexus One.
 Well, nobody really sold the Nexus One.
 I mean, maybe on T-Mobile.
 What was the most popular Android phone?
 Two years ago.
 The original Droid.
 Two years ago, you bought the original Droid.
 What version is it on?
 Is it on Gingerbread?
 It doesn't even have multi-touch, does it?
 Oh, they do have multi-touch because the milestone in multi-touch.
 Two point...
 People are saying Froyo.
 I don't know.
 Everybody lies in the used Droid.
 I will say this.
 Everybody I know, I had a bunch of friends with original Droids.
 They got 2.2.2.
 They all went to...
 Really?
 They all bought iPhones for us.
 You didn't go to Gingerbread?
 No.
 Every single one of them.
 So that's insane.
 What's that?
 I had a bunch of friends with original Droids.
 Every single one of them, their contracts all just rolled out.
 And every single one of them got an iPhone for us.
 Exactly two years ago, October 17th.
 Well, a little bit more than two years ago.
 So not exactly.
 Exactly.
 No, that's what I'm saying.
 It was October.
 So they all bought them when they came out on Verizon because it was the best smartphone
 on Verizon when it came out.
 And their contracts...
 Huh.
 You know what I just realized?
 Yeah.
 Interesting timing for Apple to release that device.
 Seriously, it all...
 Actually, really interesting timing.
 I don't know that they thought about that.
 Really?
 Well, think about it.
 I don't know that that many people...
 They weren't on Verizon when Verizon started selling the original Droid.
 What did people buy loads of?
 The original Droid.
 Why?
 Because it was the only thing that they could get that was like a decent smartphone on Verizon.
 So Apple releases its brand new smartphone on Verizon two years to the day that those
 people's contracts are ending.
 Verizon doesn't have like 11.
 I don't know.
 I don't think that's just a coincidence.
 Verizon doesn't have like a, you can upgrade after like a year and a half thing.
 I don't know.
 I don't know Verizon.
 I actually...
 I have to say there must have been some thought put into that.
 I think you're reading too much into it.
 I don't think so.
 I mean, maybe it's just part of the cycle.
 I think I just got lucky.
 Yeah, 18 months.
 You can upgrade at 18 months.
 Well, there goes my theory.
 Yeah.
 Stupid theory.
 Whatever.
 18 months.
 Can you imagine?
 But you know 18 months was...
 I mean it's still...
 What's happened in 18...
 What happened in 18 months from the first Droid?
 No, but I'm saying 18 months would have been their target kind of iPhone day, right?
 Because that's June.
 I mean, when did the Galaxy S come out?
 It seems like a year, maybe a year ago, less than a year ago.
 It feels like less than a year ago.
 They're going to product database.
 God, stop making me do product database.
 Yeah, why?
 Why am I asking when I could just tell you?
 You know, actually what's funny about the Galaxy S is the Galaxy S2 just came out in
 2018, right?
 June 2010.
 And literally this week the Galaxy S2 skyrocketed.
 Yeah.
 So hold on.
 Somebody took the Vergecast name.
 I want you to know something.
 You're going to get a letter from our lawyer.
 We're going to get the Vergecast from you and I'm making that my personal promise.
 The idea that you would take it after I said it is deeply offensive to me.
 They take it after you said it?
 Oh yeah.
 Okay.
 Definitely.
 Yeah.
 I will make it our lawyer's work to ruin your life.
 I will find you and I will gut you like the animal that you are.
 You know, when you just threaten a generic listener, it's one thing.
 But if you threaten a real actual person-
 You think this could be crossing the line?
 It might be crossing the line.
 Well, I don't know who it is.
 True, but there is an exact person-
 Well, third problem for putting them- They should have put themselves in my sight, in
 my gun sight.
 My sniper rifle sight.
 No, no, no.
 Hey, it's their fault, man.
 I mean, you've got a gun sound effect.
 Mess with the bull, get the horns, man.
 By the way, we're not bringing this on.
 I want you guys to know this is not a thing that's part of the podcast now that we have
 a sound effects boss.
 No, I was going to have that one.
 No, because that's lame.
 The sound effects box is not lame, but it on the podcast is lame.
 Anyhow, I don't think it's a big deal because I don't know the person.
 I don't know who it is.
 But it's attached to a specific person.
 But when they're identified, I'm going to say it's a person.
 Whatever I find out who stole my girlfriend from me, I'm going to kill him.
 How would you not know who stole your girlfriend from you?
 You could not know.
 How would you not know?
 She broke up with you.
 She was like, you know what?
 I need some me time.
 I'm working long hours.
 I don't know where she is all the time.
 Right.
 He's working long hours.
 She says, I need some- I knew it.
 I need some me time.
 And you know, it seems like it's no big deal and then you find out there's a new guy in
 her life.
 Yeah.
 And then you take him out because he stepped into the sights of your sniper rifle.
 Is that a problem?
 I didn't think so.
 Anyhow, it came out the Galaxy S was released.
 Where is the- I'm looking for it here.
 I can't find it.
 God, I'm still so mad about your girlfriend.
 Oh, this is the general.
 This is the general Galaxy S.
 Oh yeah.
 Let's do the fascinate.
 As opposed to the Admiral Galaxy S.
 Yeah.
 The private Galaxy S.
 Just looking here for the-
 Colonel Galaxy S.
 Just looking here.
 I'm like, you're doing this.
 What?
 I can't find it.
 Do we not have this information in this entry?
 Somebody is going to pay.
 Lieutenant.
 Someone is going to pay.
 It's not in this entry, man.
 Lucas, you're fired.
 I dare you.
 Lucas is-
 We don't have the fascinate?
 No, we have the fascinate is there.
 I just don't have the- Oh, there it is.
 Sorry.
 July 18, 2010.
 I was looking in the wrong place.
 I'm super smart.
 July 18, 2010.
 Yeah.
 A little bit- a little over a year ago.
 Yeah.
 Those people are happy.
 It's fine.
 I don't think so.
 His Bing search on it.
 Have I touched my theory?
 No, I haven't heard your theory.
 I haven't heard your theory.
 My theory is the fascinate is the one outlier of Bing integration, and then every other
 product where they're like, and we've decided to integrate Bing.
 That's like the death rattle of the product.
 The touch pads are like, let's put Bing on it.
 That's how you know.
 Playbook, let's put Bing on it.
 It's over.
 Oh, you think Bing is the cause of death?
 No, I think once you take the money from Microsoft to do Bing, that means you're desperate.
 If you're desperate, your product is about-
 But Samsung has the most popular-
 No, I'm saying the fascinate is the one outlier.
 I feel like your theory is a little weak.
 I'm saying-
 I feel like you're kind of-
 There's one other product of Bing integration that isn't from Microsoft that is a success.
 It's the fascinate.
 The fascinate, I'm pretty sure is a success because Verizon sold it as the closest thing
 to an iPhone before they had an iPhone.
 I'm trying to think of a- Oh, I'll tell you one.
 Yeah.
 With Bing integration.
 A little device you may have heard of called the iPhone.
 No, that's not integration.
 It's integrated.
 It's integrated in the browser.
 You can-
 You can set it as your default search engine.
 You can select Yahoo too.
 It's not-
 I call that integration.
 That was terrible.
 What do you guys think?
 Integration?
 Wow, dead silence.
 In the way that the touchpad is integrated with Bing.
 Dead silence from the root.
 Where it's Bing Maps and Bing-
 I don't know.
 I'm just saying all I'm saying is-
 You're saying the Playbook?
 Okay, fine.
 Yeah.
 Maybe the integration is deeper on those devices.
 That's what I mean.
 Where it's the primary, where it's all the services are Bing.
 I mean-
 Where you literally, Microsoft is giving you money to use Bing.
 I might have just been trying to use a semantic loophole there to call you out.
 Yeah.
 I disagree with you.
 Well, I think it's a little bit of a-
 I think it's a little bit of a-
 I think it's a little bit of a-
 I might have just been trying to use a semantic loophole there to call you out.
 Yeah.
 I disagree with you.
 Well, I'm trying to think.
 I can't-
 That's hard.
 There aren't that many products that have Bing integration.
 Yeah, all the ones that do, all the high profile ones that have failures.
 That's what I'm saying.
 But it's not Microsoft that's the problem.
 No, no, no.
 It's not Microsoft.
 Whatever.
 It has nothing to do with Bing.
 You're saying that it's a sign of desperation.
 Yeah.
 You were like, well, we need the money, so we'll take Microsoft's money to do Bing.
 Right.
 And then that-
 What about Nokia?
 Do you-
 Yeah, that's-
 Do you try to say something?
 Are you trying to say-
 Are you now-
 Were you looping back here to the-
 Yeah.
 Blackberry has a whole Bing deal.
 Yeah.
 That's what I'm saying.
 I had this theory a while ago that Bing integration-
 Put that down.
 Bing integration-
 I put it somewhere I reached to put it down like I couldn't go get it.
 Bing integration is a signifier that you care more about the check you're going to get
 from Microsoft than you care about your customers.
 Yes.
 That's what I'm saying.
 That's what I'm saying.
 Right.
 Okay.
 We're in the same place.
 Yes.
 That's it.
 I'm not disagreeing with-
 I mean, I brought that knowledge to the podcast.
 I mean, but you know it is-
 I mean, you don't use Bing.
 No.
 And I refuse to say that Bing doesn't-
 Who does?
 The 20 playbook owners.
 People from Microsoft.
 I know people from Microsoft.
 Yeah.
 But they press secretly use Google.
 Yeah.
 Oh, actually.
 They're like it worked.
 They're like, I got to Bing this.
 And then they get, as soon as they get home they're like, oh, thank God.
 I can finally find what I'm looking for.
 I don't know.
 Here I am again.
 I actually, I like Microsoft.
 I sound so bad.
 I sound so mean.
 No, no, no.
 They're fine.
 They're great.
 Actually, Bing is-
 But Bing is not a bad search engine.
 Bing is not a bad search engine.
 I think it's a good search engine.
 It's a good search engine.
 It's a good search engine.
 It's a good search engine.
 It's a good search engine.
 It's a good search engine.
 It's a good search engine.
 No, I'm not, it has nothing to do with Bing.
 But people don't use it.
 People don't use it.
 No.
 And I, you know-
 Actually, but their market share has risen.
 Yeah, but like at the expense of like A9 and Yahoo search because they part of Yahoo.
 Nobody used A9.
 That's what I mean.
 It's like all this other stuff is-
 Nobody used Yahoo.
 Well, Yahoo search.
 But they have the, anyway.
 There's one last tiny thing.
 Yes.
 Which is the Nook tablet that leaked out.
 Oh my goodness.
 The Nook tablet.
 So we saw, like apparently it was a new product.
 Yeah.
 It was a new product and it was the Nook tablet.
 So we saw, like apparently somebody was trigger happy.
 There were three different sites that got this leak at the same time and it was the
 sheet.
 Yeah.
 Also, it's the least.
 So, I mean, it's the Nook color.
 Yeah, they just beat that up.
 They're calling it the Nook tablet.
 It's a little thinner, a little faster.
 A little thinner, a little faster and it-
 It's two for now.
 So it's more expensive than Kindle Fire 2.
 Right.
 So the only thing is, are we sure?
 Are there any tweaks to the hardware?
 I just-
 Well, we don't know the issue.
 I mean, I'm not sure.
 I mean, I'm not sure.
 I'm not sure.
 I'm not sure.
 Are there any tweaks to the hardware?
 This sheet could be wrong.
 Right.
 Just looking at this image, it looks so exactly like the old one that I just wondered, because
 there's additional news that there's going to be a price drop on the existing Nook color.
 Right.
 And is this associated with that price drop and there's going to be a redesign?
 I just hope it's redesigned.
 No, I think this is it.
 It is possible.
 Sometimes they'll use a dummy image.
 Yeah.
 I like the design of it.
 But it looks a little old now.
 I don't think so.
 I feel like it's a pretty cool future design.
 I have to say, the screen's not flush with that edge.
 Well, maybe they may, but they might make slight changes like that.
 Okay.
 Well, hopefully-
 I'm not saying they're going to, but I'm saying that they could.
 It's like how they move the antennas on the iPhone 4S.
 Right.
 Could be the same thing.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 Well, the thing is, that I think is super interesting about it is that the reason the
 fire is cheap and I'm pretty sure Amazon's losing money in every fire because they assume
 that you're going to sign up for Prime and you're going to buy all the stuff from them.
 I mean, they're either losing money or just breaking even.
 They're on the losing money.
 I was reliably informed that they're going to be losing money in that thing.
 I don't think Barnes & Noble knows.
 Yeah, but they may lose money on it.
 But I'm sure they have figured out-
 It's a console problem.
 I'm sure they've figured out based on usage patterns, number of apps you'll buy, number
 of services you're going to subscribe to.
 The number one thing is you're going to subscribe to Prime.
 Oh, there's one other thing I want to talk about subscriptions.
 Remind me after we're done with this.
 I want to talk about-
 I don't think Barnes & Noble has that.
 They certainly don't have Prime where you're paying them $70,000 a year for whatever.
 Yeah.
 No, they don't have the content.
 Are there services that they can-
 The thing on top of it, it's priced higher.
 It's $249.
 Right.
 And there's not... Because I think they have to be right at cost.
 Aren't they doing... Isn't there another thing that they're going to have?
 They're working with Hulu Plus.
 Yeah.
 But you're paying Hulu for that.
 You're not paying Barnes & Noble.
 Well, but I wonder if they can get a cut from RevShare.
 You know what I love about Hulu Plus, which I continue to pay for?
 Yeah.
 Even though it's-
 You pay for whatever.
 I do too.
 I'm a moron.
 Even though it's increasingly useless-
 Do you watch it on your Xbox?
 I watch it on my Roku, which is actually what I want to talk about.
 Is there anything else to say about this?
 No, I just think this is... Barnes & Noble is-
 Barnes & Noble, look, Barnes & Noble can't compete right now with the Fire.
 Yeah.
 But they've been... Maybe not with the Fire.
 They've been very competitive up till now.
 They've been competitive because they offered a-
 They offered the same price.
 They offered a much more elaborate... They offered an e-reader that did a bunch of other
 stuff at a reasonable price.
 You could look at it and go, well, you know what?
 It says a lot of the iPad stuff, and I need an e-reader, so I'm going to get this.
 And you could totally hack it.
 You could see it in the store.
 I don't think that many people were hacking it.
 You're at a Barnes & Noble and you can see it.
 They got it up at the counter.
 You're like, impulse purchase.
 I'll have to get this to you.
 I will say that there's been a lot of argument that the hacking stuff, the biggest argument
 about it is the Nook Color is the most popular Android tablet.
 I think the Fire will very quickly take over.
 Oh yeah.
 The Fire is going to burn the Nook Color to the ground, I think.
 But...
 We'll see.
 There's an event next week.
 We'll check it out.
 Hopefully.
 Yeah.
 We'll be live blogging from the event, from the Nook Color Nook tablet event.
 And it should be very exciting.
 But the one other thing I want to talk about, speaking of subscriptions, was this news today
 that Roku, that HBO Go was available for Roku.
 Yeah.
 Pretty awesome.
 Wait, what to go?
 HBO to go.
 HBO Go.
 Sorry, HBO Go.
 HBO.
 That's it.
 HBO.
 Why?
 Did you not hear what I was saying?
 I don't know.
 I don't know.
 I was adding the two in there.
 I'm just going to understand.
 You don't pronounce it ha-bo?
 H-bo-go.
 I got it.
 HBO Go.
 I'm tracking.
 You don't pronounce it s-ho-time?
 Okay.
 Go ahead.
 You mean s-how-time?
 Yes.
 I was hoping that no one would notice.
 HBO to go is like a takeout place where they have TV-themed meals.
 Yeah, yeah, the Soprano sandwich.
 The Sopranos.
 Well, it would be like the Tony Sopranos.
 Or the Tony.
 The Tony.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 What else would they serve there?
 The meadow.
 It's all that you're talking about.
 All Soprano characters?
 You don't think there's any other characters on HBO?
 I just don't want to make more entourage jokes than I can.
 The brothers from Six Feet Under.
 That's terrible.
 They have the funeral parlor.
 The Johnny Drama.
 No, but they could have the funeral parlor.
 The Johnny Drama is like, it's difficult to eat.
 They could have something that's along the lines of-
 Oh, and then-
 The Six Feet Under could be like a six-foot hero that has a ton of stuff on it based on
 like you feel like you're dying after you eat it.
 It could be-
 It's like bacon and steak.
 No, the cadaver.
 Well, that's kind of loose.
 That could be a cadaver at any restaurant.
 And why would you want to eat something called the cadaver?
 I mean, there's nothing-
 Can I just say-
 There's nothing remotely-
 You definitely have to check, like when you check out the impulse thing, it would just
 be turtles.
 Think about it.
 Anyway, let's move on.
 Turtle, you know the little things, the little chocolate guys.
 You don't know what I'm talking about?
 You've never had a turtle in your life?
 I think you're more likely to have some kind of like prime rib dish called the turtle.
 Why would that be the turtle?
 I don't know.
 It would be prime rib and then on the side-
 Wait, wait, wait.
 Why immediately prime rib?
 I don't know.
 I don't know.
 He strikes me as a guy who likes a prime rib.
 Yeah, he strikes me as a guy who would like a prime rib, but then it's got some weird side
 dish like a hot fudge sundae.
 So you're saying he's a fat guy.
 Well, he smokes a lot of weed.
 Oh, okay.
 Right?
 No, but that would be like four different kinds of cereal.
 Oh, it would be like Cheetos, a bag of Cheetos.
 Yeah, Cheetos.
 We are, by the way, way off topic.
 Are we?
 Or are we right on topic?
 Because I want to talk about HBO Go for Roku.
 So the other day I was using my DirecTV, which I now have hate and want to get rid of, to
 try and watch some streaming content, but they don't have streaming content.
 They have download content.
 Do you understand how on-demand works with DirecTV?
 You have to have an internet connection.
 You get the special box.
 You plug it into your DirecTV box with an ethernet cable, and then you plug the line
 into that, and then that goes into the box.
 Oh, no.
 That's wireless.
 Oh, no, you have to have a wireless adapter for it because it's not actually a wireless
 box.
 And then you put your... You download your on-demand content.
 You have to wait for it to download.
 Do you know how long it takes?
 I mean, basically it'll stream what you've already downloaded, but that's like saying
 you could watch the first five minutes of this and then it'll freeze annoyingly.
 This is all to watch apparently.
 No, no.
 This is to watch HBO shows that I've missed.
 I missed the last episode of Boardwalk Empire, and I had an issue with the DVR where I had
 conflicting shows or something.
 I'm giving you a type of-
 We're really deep.
 You're saying the Roku now is-
 Take us all the way, Josh.
 Go.
 Well, I was like, you know what?
 Maybe I've got a solution.
 I've got this iPad here, iOS 5.
 Got this Apple TV here.
 This is mirroring.
 Updated.
 I'll just mirror HBO.
 Go onto the TV and watch it.
 Guess what?
 Doesn't work.
 Why not?
 Can't do it.
 I've done it.
 No.
 I did it with the ABC app and I did it with the HBO app.
 No, you didn't.
 Yes.
 No.
 What did it do?
 It just said you can't do it?
 It does audio and no video.
 You did something wrong.
 No.
 I mean, I've definitely done it.
 That's how we watch the ABC shows.
 I don't think you have.
 That's how we've been watching-
 HBO, but have you watched HBO shows like that?
 Yeah, yeah, we watch HBO.
 You are sure you've watched HBO like that?
 100% sure.
 Can anybody confirm and you stream because I'm almost positive that this is not true.
 Can anybody confirm that you can or cannot watch HBO go mirroring from your iPad to the
 television?
 It's not smart enough to do content blocks.
 The app hasn't been updated.
 It just mirrors.
 It says they can disable it.
 I'm pretty sure if you do a search-
 When did you do it?
 It might have been the beta.
 It might have been that.
 Yeah.
 When did you do it?
 Just recently.
 The full release.
 They can update their apps to block it apparently.
 Right.
 I guess the cable app said that.
 That's weird.
 It's not the beta.
 I've been doing it with the ABC app nonstop.
 My point is I thought I was going to be in home entertainment bliss, but I was in home
 entertainment hell.
 Then I got an email telling me that Roku now allowed me to watch HBO go content.
 Guess what?
 Roku's streaming actually works like normal streaming.
 It's really great.
 I watch Amazon stuff on there all the time.
 Do you have a Roku box?
 I do.
 I have a Roku box.
 Have you done this successfully now?
 No, I haven't because it just happened today.
 I've been busy doing the verge.
 But tonight, tonight.
 I'm excited to hear that.
 I'm excited to do it.
 You know what's interesting about the Roku stuff, I'm super crazy about it, is that they
 have decided that they're not a cord cutting solution, that they're a supplement.
 They know that they can replace-
 Well, this HBO Go thing is a supplement, but let me tell you something.
 I pay $13 or something for HBO.
 I would easily pay double that monthly if I didn't have to get the rest of the cable,
 if I could just get the HBO without the rest of the cable on demand.
 I think there are literally millions of people that would do this.
 Here's what I would get.
 If I could just do all the cart, and I actually wrote a thing about this in Washington Post
 about this ITV, the Apple TV that everybody says is going to happen, that Gene Munster
 has been saying is going to happen since 1978.
 Seriously, I'd get CNN, the local channels, the regular networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox.
 Put up an antenna.
 Right, well, you could do that.
 I'm not a big fan of antennas, though.
 You shouldn't have to do that.
 No, no, no.
 I'd rather just get them on an app.
 Have you ever seen what a local TV app looks like on an iPhone?
 No, no, no.
 It wouldn't be local TV.
 NBC would give me an app, and they'd say, where do you live?
 And then I would plug in my stuff, and I'd get going.
 Live TV.
 That's okay.
 Or not even live TV.
 I don't care.
 The only thing I really need live TV for is news, which is CNN.
 I don't really watch any other news channels.
 I'm not happy with CNN, but I'll take what I can get.
 I don't watch live sports, but if there was an option to watch, say, a game because I
 wanted to see the Steelers game on Sunday.
 Or if someone's over, and hey, can you put the game on?
 This just happened, and I bought the game.
 I actually thought that in my DirectTV package, the NFL ticket was included.
 It was new, right?
 It could have been included.
 I think something's wrong.
 I paid $45 for a single game, so I need to call them.
 Well, I've been meaning to call them and tell them, I think that you guys-
 Well, you can call them now.
 I'm telling them right now, at DirectTV, you best be over bad.
 Hashtag, best be over bad.
 But what was I talking about?
 Your dream?
 Oh, my channels.
 My channels.
 Yeah, yeah.
 AMC.
 By the way, this dream is like, it's a nice dream, but there's a reason HBO Go works the
 way it does.
 It's because HBO makes more money from Comcast and DirectTV in time more than they would
 ever make doing this on their own.
 HBO Showtime.
 I'm almost, by the way- I'm done.
 I'm almost 100% sure.
 MTV, no.
 E.
 Yeah, Apple, when they release- Keep up with the Kardashian.
 If they release a TV, they're going to do it in partnership with the networks.
 We're not going to go down this road.
 I'm telling you.
 We'll be on the podcast for another... We're almost at two hours now, are we not?
 And we've said almost nothing.
 That's the crazy thing.
 Literally.
 We should hear a word.
 We should wrap up.
 We should really wrap up.
 So before we do that, I want to take a poll here.
 What do you think?
 Should we keep doing the video podcast?
 Because that was our plan for the Vergecast to continue doing a video podcast.
 Yeah, the people- Wow.
 Oh my God.
 What is happening?
 Really.
 Today, they said no.
 Yeah.
 I like, this is very meta.
 Yeah.
 This is wild.
 Yeah.
 Okay, so that's a no on doing the video?
 There's a screen.
 You can cut to my screen.
 They were cut to your screen.
 Oh, really?
 Yeah.
 I just want Google Docs in the background.
 Wow.
 Okay, well then I will keep doing it.
 But honestly, we want to give you guys the best experience possible for this video podcast.
 We're looking at other providers.
 We're thinking about, is Ustream the best thing?
 We like Ustream.
 There are some issues with Ustream that people have had.
 We're looking around.
 They're very nice to us for our first one.
 We're going to offer an audio.
 We're going to do an audio podcast.
 This will be, I don't mean we're going to do a second podcast.
 Right after this, following this podcast, will be our real audio podcast.
 Following this rambling disaster, we're going to do it all over again.
 So the audio is a problem, which we'll fix for the next time.
 We had a technical issue here.
 So don't worry about that.
 It's not always going to be in one ear.
 And the video, we know we'll work out video kinks.
 But frankly, I'd like to do a little bit more, I think we can do a little bit more with video
 than we've been doing.
 The screen stuff, the screen stuff is explosions.
 I'd love to be able to trigger like an overlay of an explosion whenever I need it to go along
 with my sound effects box.
 Can we make this as cheesy as possible?
 Make this like a morning, the morning drive show.
 Well, it looks like the I-95 North is getting pretty packed.
 Yeah, he got it, man.
 I think there's an ambulance coming.
 Boy, that joke really bombed, didn't it?
 Anyhow, it's been a long, long week, folks.
 And I'm very upset about a lot of things that just happened.
 All of which were initiated by you.
 All right.
 Well, that's the podcast of the week.
 Josh was kind of like poison to himself.
 I really am.
 Poison.
 Do we set up podcasts at theverge.com?
 Yeah, we have it.
 I'm about to tell people they could use it.
 Yeah, you could use it.
 Go nuts.
 It's been a busy week.
 Go nuts.
 Is it podcast?
 Podcast, singular.
 Great.
 That's our podcast for the week.
 If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email us at podcastattheverge.com.
 You can leave a comment on the post when it goes up.
 Actually, some people were talking about potentially having a forum that's just for talking about
 the show.
 That'd be awesome.
 Because we're doing a new show on The Verge.
 Jack, can I say when we're doing it?
 Did he leave?
 Chad's run as far away as possible.
 Is he confirming that he's last?
 Yeah.
 Wait, are you...
 I can see...
 The 14th, right?
 14th.
 First show we're doing on The Verge.
 The first show is November 14th.
 It's a live show with an audience.
 Is our guest confirmed?
 Can I say our guest?
 I can.
 Matias Duarte from Google is coming on the show.
 And we have a bunch of other cool stuff planned.
 And it'll be nerve-racking, but it's going to be a lot of fun.
 Well, nerve-racking for us.
 It'll be fun for you guys.
 Chad, you have the mic.
 Can you guys hear me?
 Yeah, you sound great.
 Oh my God.
 This is amazing.
 Can I stand next to Josh?
 Sure.
 Hey, buddy.
 That's great.
 We just want to see your...
 That's perfect.
 Just here, lean down.
 So everyone, welcome Bradley Cooper.
 Bradley Cooper, everyone.
 I'm now pointing out Chad's uncanny resemblance to Bradley Cooper.
 Yeah, Chadley Cooper.
 Yeah, well, after all this...
 What was working with DeNiro like in Luminless?
 DeNiro's tough.
 Yeah.
 Oh, they're saying the mic doesn't work.
 Swing over.
 There you go.
 Just use this guy.
 You don't need...
 Oh, there we go.
 Hey, wow.
 How about that?
 That's what he sounds like.
 Is Joanna here?
 People are asking for her.
 We do requests now for video stuff?
 This is the kind of high drinks.
 Yeah.
 We do requests for video stuff.
 But yeah, so the first show is on the 14th.
 And that is if you guys are checking your calendars, a week from Monday, which is exciting.
 And Matthias Duarte is going to be there.
 Going to have some cool gadgets.
 Some demos, some very cool stuff.
 And giveaways.
 Giveaways.
 Yeah.
 Cool giveaways?
 Some good stuff.
 How cool are the giveaways?
 You know, stuff.
 Everybody gets a touchpad.
 You could put something...
 Yeah.
 Everybody gets a touchpad.
 That's like...
 Everybody gets a touchpad.
 You're very cozy over there.
 Everybody gets a web whisper.
 Get TV closed.
 God, I'm next to a real life movie star.
 I like how you're whispering in his ear and he's got cans on.
 And everyone can hear it in the mic.
 Yeah.
 Hey, listen.
 Hey.
 I got to talk to you about something.
 Why are we whispering?
 It's really too much.
 It's gotten really...
 Yeah.
 It's gotten super weird.
 Anyhow, we should really wrap up.
 I'm going to back out.
 Yeah, you really should.
 Just back out of this.
 Pretend this never happened.
 So I was going to say, but some people suggested that we should possibly have a forum.
 I think at the very least, you guys are obviously welcome to start threads about stuff that
 you are thinking about.
 Yeah.
 In meta, we have a meta forum where you can talk about The Verge.
 Yeah.
 Podcast show forum, that'd be good.
 We could probably do that.
 I would just like to point out that we just received an email that said, great show, guys,
 on the podcast, referring to it in the past tense.
 So whether this person is...
 Oh my God.
 What if they're in the future?
 What if they're in the future or...
 What if that came...
 What's the timestamp on that?
 Or we've overstayed our welcome.
 Yeah, it's possible.
 Was it like, great show, but I had to go and you guys went on too long, so please don't
 do that again?
 No.
 No, well, you never know then.
 I mean, there's still...
 Are there still people in there?
 It was sent from an Android tablet though.
 We have lost a few viewers.
 Yeah.
 A few thousand viewers.
 This is from John Titor.
 That's pretty awesome.
 Anyhow, but I just want to end this.
 Can I just end it?
 Let me end it.
 I got to get home.
 I'm starving.
 So there may or may not be a forum, is what you're saying.
 Yeah.
 I was going to say that if you want to get in touch with us, you can email us at podcastattheverge.com.
 I almost said podcast.
 This is my expo.
 Podcastattheverge.com or go into forums, talk about the podcast, talk about the upcoming
 show if you want.
 We'll have a lot more information on that.
 And that's good.
 You all get juju juice.
 That's what we say in Ustream.
 Yeah, I got two.
 They actually...
 When I got the first review unit, I complained about it.
 I was like, the screen's really bad on this thing.
 Let's send another one.
 All different batches.
 And I got it and the second one was worse.
 You're not taking much of juju.
 The juju dose.
 You meant the grid 10.
 Anyhow, just please, I got to wrap this up.
 I'm going to kill you.
 You're going to get in my sights in a second with my sniper rifle.
 I'm going to have to pull the trigger.
 The idea that you would need a sniper rifle.
 I know.
 Where are you?
 I could literally kill you with my bare hands at this rate.
 Not that I would ever do anything like that because it's too messy.
 So, you know what you're asking.
 We're so close.
 Twitter handles.
 I know.
 If you want to get a hold of us on Twitter, the verge is at verge.
 I'm Joshua Topolsky.
 Neelai is Reckless.
 Paul is Future Paul.
 Chad is Chad Mumm.
 Yeah.
 Feel free to harass him.
 Also, you should check out our Tumblr.
 You should check out our Tumblr, which is thisistheverge.tumblr.com.
 We also have a Facebook page, which is Facebook.com.
 Thisistheverge.com.
 Do we have any other social networks?
 We've got a network page.
 We've got a set up a MySpace.
 We've got to set up a-
 We should just buy Friendster.
 Friendster.
 We should just buy-
 We should just buy-
 Incorporate it into our platform.
 Friendster, the new social networking element.
 Actually, it's not a bad idea.
 When I was on Google, how much does Friendster cost?
 No, you can't afford Friendster.
 Justin Timberlake bought MySpace though, right?
 He's like one of the partners.
 I think he made a mistake.
 It's one man's opinion.
 I think he made a mistake.
 I think he made a mistake.
 I think he made a mistake.
 I think he made a mistake.
 I think he made a mistake.
 Anyway, Joshua Topolsky is on Google Plus in case you're wondering.
 These guys are as well.
 I like his-
 You're not on Google Plus?
 No, I'm waiting for the Google app support.
 Paul's on Google Plus because he's a communist.
 We have a hunger strike basically.
 We have a hunger strike basically.
 We're not a communist person.
 That computer's going to sleep behind you.
 The one that's running our logo behind.
 Can I just say-
 I think you have a positive.
 I think you have a positive.
 I think you have a positive.
 I think you have a positive.
 I think you have a positive.
 I think you have a positive.
 Can we just give a pop-up warning?
 We got nine minutes and 54 seconds left.
 Can we end this thing in the next 9.58?
 9.44 now.
 All right.
 Look, thank you guys so much for watching and listening.
 This one was a little chaotic.
 We are going to reign it in, I promise.
 Or maybe we won't, depends on what you guys want.
 Because we're here for you.
 Anyhow, but seriously, thanks so much for-
 I'm just going to talk to the camera now.
 Thank you so much for listening and watching.
 Thank you for coming to the site and participating and liking it.
 Yeah, this week has been incredible.
 It's been nuts.
 I mean, when you've worked on something for such a long time, and just been cranking away
 on making it happen, and then it happens, it's just such an incredible sense of relief.
 But there's also, we did something that's very public, and you don't know how people
 will take it.
 People have taken it really well, and it's great.
 And we're excited.
 We have a ton of cool coverage coming.
 We have lots of awesome features, reviews, and of course news.
 And so we're very excited to be doing it, and finally have the whole thing out there.
 And that's it.
 We'll be back next week with more of the Vergecast, the highly, hotly contested...
 On topic.
 Hotly contested name.
 We should just call the podcast On Topic with the Verge.
 Off Topic is what we should call it.
 Off Topic with the Verge.
 That's our second...
 That's our other podcast where it has nothing to do with technology, and we just talk about
 stuff like just whatever most of the stuff is we talk about today.
 Hot topic at the mall.
 Hot topic, gothonomics.
 Gothonomics.
 And what kind of channels I'd put on my...
 We definitely, by the way...
 Is it legal to threaten to kill a specific person?
 Somebody just insulted us on the news stream.
 It is in the gothconomy.
 That hurts me.
 There we go, eight minutes and seven seconds.
 Yeah, eight minutes and five seconds.
 Yeah.
 And yeah, that's it for the week, and we will be back next week with more of this delicious
 and highly nutritious podcast.
 So thank you for tuning in.
 Rock and roll.
 Rock and roll.
 I was thinking about Goth and roll.
 Goth and roll.
 That's super weird.
 It's the worst.
 Hey, Google Plus has Google Apps.
 I literally just thought about throwing my computer at you.
 Yes it was scary.