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When most people think about Android and its origins, they think of Andy Rubin, who is largely credited as being the father of what is now the world's most widely used mobile operating system. But Rubin didn't do it all on his own. He had a lot of help from many brilliant people, including his co-founder Rich Miner. Miner helped develop and expand Android into the powerhouse we know today. These days, Miner is a general partner at Google Ventures, the search giant's investment arm. His job is to find the latest trends and up-and-coming companies in the mobile technology world for Google Ventures to invest in. If Miner likes what he sees, he can be a life changer. With Google's coffers on hand, he can be a rainmaker of sorts. Definitely tight security. They didn't quite do a cotton swab, but we got registered anyway, so we're in. Should I swing a little bit more though while I do this? Maybe it'll be more fun. I just don't know why a carrier is going to want this. Hi! You like this? Alright. We found one customer for the Nokia phone. Yeah, big screen, reasonably responsive. I'm just tickled to see Nokia with Android. And soon to be Microsoft with Android. How good is that? When we're looking to invest in startups, I mean, the key thing is you're investing in teams and people. You know, you also, hopefully they're working on something that's interesting and that you think you can help out with, or at least in my case, I like to think either myself or Google Ventures can help out with what they're trying to build. But it always starts with the people and then the vision of what they're trying to build, and then ultimately what's the market, how are you going to, you know, is there a way to monetize it? But that's a tertiary issue. Google Ventures became a venture capital firm that takes Google's massive storehouse of cash and invests it in startups across a variety of industries. Since 2009, it's invested in over 225 companies, including well-known names such as Uber and Nest. It differentiates itself from other VC firms by offering a support network and close access to Google engineers and services for the companies it invests in. It's almost like bootcamp for new startups, but with a Google-esque flair. While some companies like Nest go on to be acquired by and integrated into Google, that's not the goal of the Ventures team. In fact, some of its investments have even been purchased by Google's competitors, such as Stamped and Astrid, both of which ended up in the arms of Yahoo. With a strong background in mobile technology and a doctorate in computer science, Miner is involved in a lot of the investments in mobile companies made by Google Ventures. That's why you can find them at massive trade shows like Mobile World Congress looking for the next big thing. They say bigger is better, right? Curve screen. But I don't think I want to schlep that one around. We've certainly made decisions to invest in a company when we've joined those companies here on the show floor and seen the type of interest that they've had and the attraction that they've had. Oh boy, I'm actually going to do this. You can edit later on. That's brilliant. Yeah. Mobile World Congress and other shows offer a density of information and new products that make it easier to spot trends than through other means. Over 70,000 people attended the show this year, and hundreds of companies were showing off their wares and ideas. Even big players such as Samsung and Nokia used the show to launch important new devices in their lineups. Seeing what's new and actually getting to get a real-world feel of it is one of Miner's many goals there, from which he can infer trends for future technologies. Well, clearly the quality of the phones, I think, coming from a lot of the Asian manufacturers and Chinese manufacturers, are matching the quality that you see from some of the more established brands. So now it'll be interesting to see how they take these quality phones and get their brands well established. I think HTC is a good example of a company that, again, seven years ago, no one knew what HTC was from a consumer brand. They were rebranding most of their products to carrier brands. And then Peter Chow just decided he wanted to build a consumer brand around HTC. But Miner isn't just there to play with gadgets. He's there to find interesting startups that Google can invest in. That involves a lot of off-site meetings, dinners, coffee meetups, and other informal activities that dominate a venture capitalist's schedule. At a big show like MWC, the conversation can easily be monopolized by the big players, the new Samsung smartwatches or Nokia's peculiar play into Android. Finding the small guys that might not actually have a booth or presence on the show floor requires more work, but Miner says it can be done. Even if you're a startup and you're not showing on the show floor, if you're in mobile, you're typically here at the show meeting with people. So it requires a little bit of forensic work, but you can find the startups. We actually met the first time at the Google booth at MWC here three years ago. And this is an investment I haven't done, probably should have maybe, but time will tell. Finding the diamond in the rough is Miner's end goal, and given Google Ventures track record, he's been pretty good at doing it thus far. If that next diamond is going to be found in the back halls of Mobile World Congress or the coffee shop in Boston's Austin-Brighton neighborhood, Miner will be there to find it. When I was on Android coming to the show, we had a lot of work to do. Because, A, we were building the OS prior to coming here, and then once we're here, it's really about getting partnerships done. And so we were 7x24, locked up in rooms with every carrier, handset, OEM, getting deals done so that we could get distribution. That was in the early days prior to 2009. Coming to the VC, it's a little bit more, you know, it's a lot of work, but it's a very different nature. It's more hunting, gathering, finding really bright people that we can help out as Google Ventures, which is what we do. We obviously give them money, but then we try to give them a lot of other resources and help them build great big companies. This isn't the first time Rich Miner has jumped into the VC world, having first founded a firm for Orange. Spending a day with Miner, it seems to be the place where he shines. Whereas an entrepreneur only has one big moment, a venture capitalist can live that moment over and over again. He's an arbiter of the future, and this time around, he's got Google's checkbook.

It's Wednesday, March 5th, 2014. I'm Evan Rogers, or you can refer to me by my criminal kingpin name, El Capitan de Bitcoinio. Esto es 90 seconds on the verge. Washington DC, the capital of the United States, has voted to decriminalize marijuana. By a near unanimous vote, the council ruled that possession and private consumption of the drug in small amounts would be a civil offense resulting in a $25 fine. The bill goes into effect this summer, thus making those family trips to the capital a whole lot more fun. However, as DC is going green, nicotine is having a tough time in LA. Following cities like New York and Chicago, Los Angeles is banning the use of e-cigarettes in some public places. The city council voted unanimously to ban, quote, vaping in restaurants, bars, parks, and other areas where cigarette smoking is prohibited. Thankfully, e-cigarettes will still be allowed for, quote, theatrical purposes. Mmm, the theater lives! And finally, Swiss scientists have broken an informal four-decade-long ban on LSD research. A study was conducted in which cancer patients received the drug as well as talk therapy to curb their anxiety about death. A year after the session ceased, those patients who had received a full dose of LSD experienced a 20 percent improvement in their anxiety levels, while the group who received a lower dose had an increase in their anxiety symptoms. While the study was small and the results weren't statistically significant, the fact that the test took place at all bodes well for psychedelic drug research, as the drug caused no serious side effects. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, we check in on meth. Yep. Still illegal.

It's Tuesday, March 4th, 2014. I'm Sam Sheffer, and Bill Gates might be the richest person in the world, but last night I ate 14 fish tacos. So who's the real winner here? This is 90 seconds on the verge. Wallet and banking service Flexcoin is shutting its doors after hackers stole 896 Bitcoin from the company, rendering them unable to continue functioning. While not as central to the Bitcoin community as Mt. Gox was, the Flexcoin shutdown is another blow to an ecosystem that's facing growing doubts from would-be regulators and government. With the increase in these kind of heists, we can expect Ocean's 14 to be a much different film. Gerard Butler may have battled North Korea in last year's Olympus is Fallen, but this time he has a new enemy, the FCC. The FCC has issued a $1.9 million fine against Viacom, NBCUniversal, and ESPN for their promotions of last year's action film with TV spots featuring the two-tone emergency alert system. The cable companies have all acknowledged that they approved the video that included the tone. I guess they should have just gone for their original choice of music in the trailer. And finally, adults need protein, but more importantly, they need food found in elementary school cafeterias. Oscar Mayer has launched a new take on its Lunchables brand called P3, short for Portable Protein Pack. The snack comes in four different flavors, each packaged with around 13 grams of cheese, nuts, and meat. P3 is available now, and no, there's no pizza option. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, Betty Crocker revives an old favorite and starts selling adult dunkaroos.

Hello, welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. This is episode 82, I think. It is March 4th, 2014. We are back from Mobile World Congress, at least those of us that went, and we're back where we live. My name is Dan Seifert. I'm Vlad Seifert. I am actually where I live. The other guys are in the office. We guys all live there. I am Evan Rogers. Now, Evan, I'm Chris Sickler, by the way, and actually I'm going to pop my can of soda right now. Oh my goodness. Just FYI. Those levels. But Evan, I have to ask you, is this your first time actually being introduced as part of the regular hosting staff? Did that just happen? I think that just happened. Wow. How does it feel? You know what, it feels like an honor. Feels like an honor and a privilege. How does that closet you're jammed into right now? I mean, you know, you do what you can. Evan and I are both in kill rooms, just for our listeners and viewers. So you're aware, we are both in specially designed kill rooms at Verge headquarters here in beautiful Midtown Manhattan. So if we do suddenly disappear or the screen goes dark, it is because we have been murdered. This is true. Yeah, so as you can obviously tell, Dieter Bohn is not with us this week. He lost his voice, but you know, I've learned that since he lost his voice, he's remarkably good at shouting over email. So he's still drilling fear into us. You know why he lost his voice? It's because he vapes. He's a vapor. He's a serial vapor. He is a serial vapor. I think there's a relationship there. Like I understand it's not supposed to be as bad as cigarettes, but something about vaping that I think might be affecting the voice box. That's my theory. That's my medical opinion. Hmm. Hmm. And you are a... We should put a quote apart to provide... Yeah, you are a professional doctor, right? I'm not, but I play one on this podcast. Okay, okay. As long as you're in character, I mean that's totally cool. Okay, so Dan, what are we talking about this week? So you know, what happened in the past week? So I guess the biggest thing that's happened since the last time we spoke was Apple finally launched its iOS in the car thing, which they're calling CarPlay, which I find hysterical. But it looks like we're finally getting a decent in-car entertainment, navigation, and management system, which is really highly ironic because cars are packed with technology, but they've had these terrible, awful user experiences for a decade or more now. And we're finally seeing someone fix it, though I'm not sure this is really gonna be that great. I would just like to get a consult from Dr. Ziegler right now because Dan is suffering from a weird bout of optimism. This is completely uncharacteristic of the Verge mobile show. This is why we need Dieter back. We're lacking the beard presence from Dieter and the pessimism. All right, well, you know, if you really want me to go negative, Vlad, it turns out that iOS in the car is powered by QNX, which is owned by Blackberry, which means it's eternally doomed. Well, so... Thank you, guys. Hold the phone. Hold the phone. So, first of all, QNX, Kinect, however it's pronounced, is the shining star in the black hole. I don't know if that's even astrologically possible, but if it is possible, it is the shining star inside the black hole that is Blackberry. They are super important in the auto industry. They count, I want to say, the majority of the world's global automakers as customers. There were rumors recently, I believe they were confirmed, that QNX is replacing Microsoft's software stack in their cars. So they're a super big deal. And their software is running in just all sorts of big name automobiles. So when you hear that QNX is the backbone of CarPlay, that shouldn't, A, be surprising, or B, be concerning. Because regardless of what happens to Blackberry, QNX will survive. It's a profitable and very important unit inside the company. Absolutely. And just to take a more serious note, the reason I'm jumping between optimism and pessimism is that we don't really know that this is necessarily going to be a solution to the problems that Dan set up. We were having this conversation, our European team, this morning. And the thing that came to me is that technology integration, not just technology in general, but integration and making things fit together and be seamless is very much at its rudimentary stages both in the car and in the home. You take your phone, you're at home, and okay, now you have AirPlay. And AirPlay works. AirPlay is great. And I guess that's the thing that gives people like Dan optimism is AirPlay works well, Apple has implemented it well, now has CarPlay, which kind of completely breaks the metaphor because you're not transmitting via car, you're transmitting via lightning cable, whereas AirPlay transmits via the air. But anyhow, I mean, what we've seen, we've seen a few demos from the Geneva Motor Show of Apple's CarPlay, and the thing is it integrates with your dashboard. So all of your knobs and dials and touch screen, and there's even a specific button to activate Siri and to activate voice commands on the steering wheel. So that's really the only modification that the car manufacturers are making. It integrates with what you already have there, but that's not a good thing in my book. Or at least it doesn't really advance things because the touch screen responsiveness and the quickness of the UI is exactly as you would get from an infotainment system. It's not iOS 7 quickness, it's car infotainment quickness, which isn't quick at all. Yeah, it's actually surprising to me that, I mean, considering how strict, for lack of a better word, Apple is about those kinds of UX parameters, it's actually surprising to me that they're going through with this. And to be honest, I think that that is probably a large reason why we saw such a delay between the launch of iOS 7 and the rollout of iOS in the car, which is now CarPlay. But it's weird. I don't understand, for the life of me, I don't understand why it is that auto makers have such a hard time producing responsive hardware and software stacks in their instrument clusters and in their dashboards. It doesn't make any sense to me. My first question is, A, whose engineers are working on this? Is it exclusively Apple's engineers, or is it Volvo's engineers? Well, so, okay, so let's just say, you know, the announcements that they've made, they're partnering with new Mercedes, new Volvos, and new Ferraris. Which are, and you know, if you look at the cars that they have been showing off at Geneva, a Mercedes in-dash entertainment system uses different components and different things than Volvos, and they both use different than Ferraris. So it seems to me, like, to answer your question, Evan, it seems to me that it's the car manufacturers, engineers that are producing the hardware that goes into this and stuff like that, and then they kind of just like, it seems to be interfacing with an API to the iPhone through the lightning cable so that, you know, it's like a, whatever you just, a projected image of whatever's on your phone. Gotcha. Well, like, I don't know, the question of like, why are car manufacturers using QNX? Like, or QNX, I have no idea how you'd describe it, but it is, it's a real-time operating system, and like, there are just not that many real-time operating systems out there that can be bought and adapted for like, any kind of product. Usually they're used in automated like, CNC milling machines and that sort of stuff, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that a lot of these automakers are also using Tegra 4 chipsets. I wouldn't say a lot, but Tegra 4 is definitely becoming, it's not just called Tegra 4, like, they have a specific, you know, they have certain part numbers that they're using in cars. Audi made a big deal out of it at CES, but it's certainly not all. Gotcha. I don't think that a lot of the processing side of things is happening in the car. I think a lot of it is happening on the phone that's plugged into the car. Here's where I disagree with you. Like the, in terms of the actual infotainment and like, the data, like, the phone is serving as like, a data source, but in terms of like, the hardware, like, I just think it's a combination of Tegra chipsets and a real-time OS is really interesting, because Tegra chipsets are one of the few chipsets, like I said before on previous shows, that actually support like, true OpenGL and they have lots of like, transistors to support hardware acceleration. So the question of like, why aren't car manufacturers building like, responsive stacks of software? Like, I think they're definitely trying. That's why they're adopting like, this kind of hardware and this kind of software. But at the same time, they're throwing in like, these really crappy, resistive touchscreen displays that you get on like, a Walmart Android tablet in your, you know, $250,000 Ferrari. No, they're moving toward capacitive systems like Cadillac Q and… But the ones that they're showing off in Geneva are like, resistive touchscreens. Really? Are you sure? Yeah, that's what everyone's been complaining about. That's really bizarre and inexplicable. Well, yeah, I mean, the auto industry has historically been anywhere from, you know, two to seven years behind the consumer electronics industry in terms of technology and just, you know, mindshare of what's important, the kinds of technologies and apps that are important. And I think that a big reason for that, I mean, this is something that they've acknowledged. I talked with executives at Ford and CES and they're just very open about the fact that, yes, they know that they're way behind. One of the reasons for that is the insane regulatory environment that the car companies have to deal with that is far beyond… That's an excuse. I mean, these guys are behaving like email was just invented last year. No, no, no, you're right, but they, you know, it's kind of a moving target. NHTSA and other regulatory bodies like NHTSA are smack in the middle of determining, like, all sorts of very specific parameters around, like, how long the driver should be allowed to look at the center stack, what kinds of things they should be able to do when their hand is on the screen and they're driving, things like that. And so there are lots of moving parts. And you're right, that's not an excuse for the system to be unresponsive at all, but I do think that they have their intent divided than, say, the intention of, like, just a smartphone maker that was just trying to pump out a smartphone. I believe that for, like, manufacturers like Ford, which are producing these mainstream vehicles, they've got to produce however many hundreds of thousands a year and they have, you know, cost is obviously a major factor in every decision that they're making. But when you talk about, like, Ferrari, where everything is hand-built and cost is really not a factor, they'll just raise the price of the thing and people will still buy it. You know, it's, like, inexplicable that they're just so stubborn. Well, so the reason for that is that Ferrari in particular, I mean, all of these high-end automakers, but Ferrari in particular uses, I mean, all of the electronic components are outsourced to one of these major, like, auto electronics conglomerates, like Denso or Delphi or, you know, Visteon. And so, those are the same companies that are supplying, like, Ford and GM. So it ends up getting all up at that level anyway and then they just get, they basically get the same crap that everyone else is giving. It is getting, it might be packaged a little differently, but, like, the underlying operating systems and the display and all that are basically the same thing. I mean, like, look, if I'm driving a $450,000 Ferrari, if I'm driving an F12 Berlinetta, odds are I have a Vertu anyway. So, like, this whole CarPlay discussion in a Ferrari is a little ridiculous in the first place, in my opinion. So this is what I want. So to bring this back to mobile, like, can I just ask what actually happens when you don't have the iPhone? Well, you just have your regular in-depth system. The whole point here is just connectivity with the iPhone and improving the interplay between the stuff you have on your iPhone and the dash system. But I just wanted to make kind of a side point building on what Chris has said. I do feel like there is some super advanced technology in cars, like, particularly the CES. We saw those laser headlights in whatever else the Audi was doing. I mean, there's some really in-depth, advanced, intelligent stuff. I know Volvo, they have these amazing brakes in trucks that are demonstrated where you brake in, like, I don't know, inches on rain. They have these really intricate, awesome systems which show that they have engineering. They have technological advances and knowledge and all of that stuff. And that just really reminds me of cameras, particularly DSLRs. So these guys will get everything right. They will do these amazing autofocus systems, really intricate systems, and then they will just kind of screw it up by just not bothering to do human usable UI. It just seems like there's this hurdle that they're not overcoming. It's addressing the user and addressing the user's needs as opposed to just being really good at engineering and the technical side of things. Yeah, so that's a good point. So this is what I want in my next car. I don't want whatever Ford or Mercedes or whatever I buy, I don't want their stupid hardware in my way and I don't want their entertainment system. I want a dock that I can put my iPad in and launch an app and have my stuff that I want to use in the car. Like, that's all I want. Like I know Sony announced this thing at CES, which is like an in-dash car unit that you can like dock an Android phone in and it'll interface with that and stuff like that. I want that. That's what I want. That's where we should be going with cars. Take it out of the hands of the car manufacturers entirely. They obviously don't know how to do this stuff and just like let me use the thing that I already know how to use. Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that and I think it's a very complicated subject. What car companies, the road they were starting to go down, and I think they pulled back from this, but GM certainly was doing it, was they were saying, okay, well on the low end we will just have you bring your own phone and you'll plug it into our system and you'll use your phone through, well like CarPlay. And so they launched that on the Chevy Spark and a few other like ultra low end models. But then they said on the high end, we want to control the experience and make it like a really integral part of the car so you end up with something like Cadillac Q, which is just pervasive throughout the entire car. Where I think you get into trouble, there are two places where I think you get into trouble. One is with physical controls. I still think, don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for how usable Tesla made the Model S's giant touch screen, but still at the end of the day I think the physical controls are a better idea for cars. And so integrating those in a smart way with something like an iPad that you dock in the center stack is a challenge, right? And then two, car companies are starting to move away from the center stack and they're doing really cool and intelligent things with the instrument cluster, which is a different story altogether. So you're not going to dock an iPad in the instrument cluster. So how do you manage that? Okay, fair enough. But then with the radio… To address, I see where you're going with the instrument cluster and yeah, that's a fair point. But to address the physical controls, I mean if you give me a dock for my iPad, I can still have physical knobs, sliders and buttons for my HVAC system. And then all it needs to do is give me a volume knob, which it can interface through the lightning port or something like that. So that's the extent of physical controls that I really need when I'm driving. And the rest can be done through the touch screen or voice or whatever it is. So let me actually pull us back to CarPlay because we've discussed it for quite a few minutes but we haven't actually discussed the specifics of it. And the core of it really boils down to Siri voice commands and Siri reading information out to you and Apple's maps. And this is the reason why I personally am not too psyched about this. Apple's maps is probably the weakest part of its software portfolio and Siri just doesn't have the same sort of high quality voice recognition that Google does. So honestly, the two strengths that Apple is supposed to bring with CarPlay are the strengths that Google has and Apple is iffy on. I will say that Apple Maps is definitely not as good as Google Maps but it's a lot better than it was two years ago when it debuted and had all these problems. I mean they've been iterating on it a lot. I've used it a few times and really didn't have a noticeable difference between that and Google Maps. Still no integrated transit directions which I find very annoying. That's just total malarkey. Especially since they bought a whole bunch of companies that do transit. And as far as Siri goes, actually from my own personal experience, I have this little doc set up in my car where I put my phone in and I can see it there easily. It's held right in front of my face. And I was using Siri just last night to send text messages to my wife and it was great. It worked just as good as the Moto X which I've done that before. And it doesn't have – it's definitely not as good for doing web searches and things like that but for the things that you need to do in the car, navigate home, send a message home, call so and so, Siri works just fine for that provided you have a good wireless connection. I was on LTE, it was fast, it was reliable, things like that. If you have a sketchy cellular connection then you know it's a different story. Right. Yeah, I just – It's a very different story if you don't have a car at all which is actually my case. So are you – are you suggesting that you won't buy a Ferrari just so that you can use CarPlay? Is that what I'm hearing? That's correct sir. Mostly also because I would probably buy one or two or three Android phones before I consider an iPhone. I'm just so broken up with that OS until they fix the Gmail software. Oh my goodness, I could not be in the most opposite position right now. That's terrible. I just got a – I just got a Z1 Compact and – Show it off. Okay, okay. It's good. Evan, this is – for a lot of people this is an audio podcast. So just saying I'm in the opposite position and sighing doesn't really make your point. Okay, so I'm holding up a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact model D5503, 16 gigabyte model black, BK monitor. I wanted this phone so bad, so bad, and as soon as it arrived on shores I went down to my local importer. I got it. I was so excited. I've had – as many of you know I had been using a Z1 for a very long time, but when – but I've been wrapped up in this like terrible return process. The screen – or I'm sorry, the rear glass just cracked in my pocket. I sent it back. They sent it back to me with a completely defective camera. And so in that time period I have gone back to the iPhone. And man, man, when this – you know like the Compact I was super jazzed about last year at CES. It's got everything I could possibly need. Like it's fast, small, has an SD card port. The screen is way better. The camera is just as good as the Z1. But getting back into Android like oh god it's gross. It's the worst ever. Everything is choppy. It's just like – That's pretty harsh. But okay – No, okay. So no, the thing is – The point is really that it's the quality of apps. It is the quality of apps. So like the pervasive jerkiness is not in the OS. Like Sony's done everything they can from an OS standpoint to make the actual operating system like very smooth. But once you get into those apps like the experience is not as good for many of them. There are apps that I love like the Transit app for example. Bringing it back to Apple's like you know complete lack of integrated transit directions. Like the Transit app on Android is gorgeous. It works really fluidly. It's really made for that interface. But you know like Evernote for example like that is a completely just horrific experience that you're coming from the iOS version. This is a super played topic. I think you were very frustrated this weekend and you had a really poignant tweet about you know people complain that the Android app experience isn't as good as iOS. But a lot of it seems to come down to the fact that these companies like Evernote and whoever it might be just aren't putting the resources into the Android app development that they are on the iOS side. So you're going to get a lower quality app and you're going to get people not interested in buying these apps or paying for these services on Android because the experience kind of sucks. Well let me ask you this. Like where are the barriers to entry? Because you know Google has an in-app purchasing system right. So developers can't use that as an excuse anymore. And you know the SDK has evolved a lot. You know I know people still complain about programming in Java. But you know Objective C in Xcode is not necessarily a beginner's language. You don't just walk into that either. Yeah no I don't think it's that. So I think there are two things. One it's uncertainty over form factor and resolution. And two it is, and this might be a complete myth at this point. But there is definitely a stigma around conversion on paid apps right. Like there's a perception that iOS is the more premium platform where users are more likely to spend money. And that you know two and a half, three years ago there was definitely evidence to suggest that was the case. I don't know if that's still true. It may not be but regardless that stigma I think is still there. Yeah I mean when you're making long term business decisions it does make sense to look, I mean the resources you have available are two to three year old studies on who is spending what on apps. Right. But the thing is is like two to three years ago look at what Android, look at both what Android as a platform and Android phones as a hardware platform were capable of and everything has changed completely. Also let's see here. Well you just said everything has changed completely but at the same time you're describing Android as pretty much the same as it was three years ago. Everything is too jerky and yes I'm good enough. Android as an operating system has improved significantly. What I'm saying is the investment by these companies in Android is something that that has not changed. And that is a problem. Can we get back to the Z1 compact for a second and just note that it is like the hardware is just not good on that phone. I could not disagree more. I think it's inspiring. I have three specific comments about the hardware. One it is like shockingly heavy for its size. Like you pick it up expecting it to weigh a certain amount and it weighs like twice that much for some bizarre reason. Two it's thick. Like I don't know what the dimensions are but it feels and looks really thick. Three it has a ridiculous bezel on it for no apparent reason. Like that screen should go to the edges especially like we live in a Moto X world. Like it is not acceptable for there to be that much bezel on a phone of that size. Okay I will give you the bezel but I will not give you any of it. The hardware is phenomenal. The aluminum ring or the aluminum chassis that this is made out of is gorgeous. I don't know what I can do for you in terms of the weight. Why is it like 14 inches thick? I mean like honestly because that's the size of the camera. The camera is that thick. What's the problem? It is the problem. Also there is one thing, I'm looking at the questions right here in the side panel for Google Hangouts. And let's see here. There is one question that I would like to address and that is choppy. And guys like I have them both like right here. I can notice the difference in what you would call lag. One of them is five hours ahead of the other one. That's a lot of lag. Oh goodness, anyway yes. So I mean like lag in Android is a thing. Like it comes down to hardware compositing. Okay well I'm just going to do something unusual because sometimes I agree with two people disagreeing with each other and this time I'm just going to disagree with both of you because you're both just wrong. You just jumped to both extremes. I don't think the Z1 compact hardware is phenomenal but I also don't think it's trash. So Chris is right. So far as there is the industrial design just has, it lacks refinement to it. So the sides of it can be quite rough. The edges or the corners rather are just too sharp. Those are things that Sony could have softened up a bit, done a bit more of a curve on them. It is a thick and heavy phone but also I would say if you can use it in an Nexus 5 which is really really light for its size, that can kind of realign your expectations. Like honestly if you compare the Z1 compact to like an older phone, one of the Nokia's from the early 2000's, it would be just perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with it. Also the thickness wouldn't be a problem because again by those standards it's not particularly thick. I just don't really consider those major problems but as I said I don't really think that it's amazing. Yeah I agree on the bezel Chris but at the same time let's not forget how much stuff Sony has jammed inside it and the biggest strength with the Z1 compact for me was the battery life and in order to fit that size of a battery you pretty much need that size of a case. So maybe we could have done a bigger screen perhaps but the case is fifth to the brim which the weight testifies to. That's fair. Also it's waterproof which factors in a little bit to the design. That is the bomb. What are you people doing to your phones? Like I have never had a waterproof phone in my life and there's never been a situation where I was like gee I really wish this phone was waterproof. Like I don't swim with my phone. Wait wait wait, when you can have your phone in the hot tub with you it's pretty good. If you're in a hot tub and you're just thinking about using a phone your priorities are all screwed up. I mean sometimes you do need to use a phone. And Vlad what's your answer? Okay the answer is very simple and it's something that I realized again while I was reviewing the Z1 compact in the freezing miserable London weather. Is things like glove friendly touch screens. I think the waterproofing is exactly the same in so far as it's an absolute gimmick until the first time you really need to use it. And then you're like dude I feel so good about the fact that I can use this phone with gloves on you know. I feel so good that I can use this phone near the pool for example. You know not in London, not in the UK. You never get pool worthy weather but in a nice country like Bulgaria people go to the pool. And using your phone next to the pool without needing to wrap it up in a towel and things like that is fine. It's a good thing. It's an advantage. And like I say it's a gimmick to most people until you come to use it and then you just start to feel smart because everybody else is either freezing their fingers off or just not using their iPhones. So there you go. Well to be fair there are quite a few phones now that have glove compatible screens right. I know I mean it's only been an event. I'm just saying as a feature it's anybody can make a waterproof phone. Panasonic made one and then they quit smartphones for whatever reason. I really like those to Lugafones. I think more people should be doing it. And Samsung is doing a little bit of that with splash proof Galaxy S5. So I just think it's a good thing. The Galaxy S5 is just as waterproof as the Z1 compact. No it's not. That's not true. Isn't it? No. Now these guys are IP. It's IP67. Right but the Sony is the way to do IP57 if I'm not mistaken. And they get to call themselves waterproof whereas the Galaxy S5 is water resistant. Either way IP on my phone and it will be okay. That's the important takeaway here. So moving on to things that actually happened in the past week. HTC's next generation one kind of got the full tour before its announcement. Probably some kid out in the horrible state of Illinois got his hands on this. Very slick Dan. Very slick. He got his hands on what very apparently appeared to be his parents copy of the M8 as it's known or the new HTC One and gave it a really really really rough to watch video tour. Kind of showing it and comparing it to the current version of the HTC One. And you know assuming that this is final hardware, this is what we're expecting to see when it's being announced in like two, three weeks. It looks very similar to last year's model. Which kind of lines up with the renders that we've seen leaked and stuff like that. Right. So there's a few subtle differences. One thing actually one of our commenters when we covered the video was just really really psyched. He's like wait the headphone jack is at the bottom of the phone? Take my money. I mean no lies like that's a big deal. That is a huge deal. Like going back to how I was saying. You guys are going to have to explain to me. So I'll do it right now. Going back to how I was saying how I have this dock in my car. So I have this dock in my car that I put my phone and then there's a wire that comes down to charge my phone which goes into the bottom obviously. And then I also plug into an auxiliary jack in my stereo because Bluetooth is an awful experience. And so on the iPhone I can have both wires coming down from the bottom. It's really nice out of the way. On something like the Moto X or the Nexus 5 or whatever I've got these like I've got one wire on top and one wire on bottom and I've got this like messy nastiness all over the place. So I like having the headphone jack on the bottom. Also just the pants experience. The pants experience is totally different. Like the drawing it out of your pocket. Think about how much less you have to turn it over. Yeah it just makes more sense. I hadn't thought about the pants experience I have to confess. Always be thinking about the pants experience Vlad. Like that should be the top of your mind at all times. I'm just not going to keep this going. But seriously about the phone. So I mean that's one of the small tweaks. Headphone jack moved from the top to the bottom. There's a looks like plastic black panel at the very top of the phone. Which actually to me looks really slick. It's like a really slick design element that got leaked in a press picture earlier and now basically this video seems to confirm it. And the size, exactly the thing that I was saying that Sony could have improved with the Z1 compact making the sides just that extra bit curvier, extra bit softer. That's what seems to have happened with this new HT1. So I mean the company is pretty proud of the One design already. And a lot of people loved it. So it doesn't see the need to go and change it too much. I agree with you there. The One was you know it's a great design phone. You don't really need to fix what's not broken. But what kills me about this new one is it uses on screen keys like a Nexus 5 or Moto X will. But it still has that stupid plastic bar or glass bar below the on screen keys that serves its only purpose to show HTC's logo. And so like they could have like made the screen bigger or shrunk the bezel or whatever because the screen or the buttons have now been moved on screen. So that kind of noise. I can't say that I've touched it in person. I haven't used it. I don't really know how well that works in usability but just from an aesthetics point it kind of bothers me. And then you know on the back of the phone it's got this new camera sensor. Our wonderful leaker apparently had no idea what that camera sensor was for or how it functioned unfortunately. So he can't say what it actually does. But it's been rumored that that is going to provide some sort of light trail like functionality I think so maybe some sort of refocusing abilities and not 3D photos to the dismay of many. Well it's obvious that the sensors are asymmetrical right so that would certainly lend credence to the notion that it isn't a 3D camera. No. TC is going to be so hard broken about this. The fact that he won't be able to buy another HTC 3D phone or Sprint. So we've made fun of TC one of our news editors here for a long time because of how much he loved the Evo 3D. But you know he said something to me today when I was teasing him about it once again and he's like the reason I love that phone was because it had that awesome shutter key for the camera. Like he didn't care about the 3D stuff. It was that killer shutter key and I was like you know yeah you're right. For me what made that phone so awesome was the fact that it had the green hornet built in. That really was the killer feature. So here's what's tragic about both the 3D and any potential like Lytro functionality that might come in with this camera or Lytro S functionality. It's like you know there were who knows how many of those they sold but like they all took 3D pictures and where are those pictures now? Like do they still exist? Can you still view them in 3D? If that's the case is it like Lytro where you have to have some kind of flash plug in to view them in 3D? Like that's not like in terms of sustainability like I've got pictures. You view them on your Evo 3D. Well yeah once that camera is gone or once that phone is gone what are you going to do with that? You buy another Evo 3D? That's terrible. Like I have iPhone pictures from a billion years ago that are still in my accounts and in my galleries that I really like but you know how can you refer back to them if like HTC drops the support for their flash plug in or flash goes extinct altogether and etc. These novelties like sure maybe it's another line item but at the end of the day like a really high quality picture is something that's going to last you. There's a couple of ways they can go with this and yeah you're right the 3D pictures are a real pain to view outside of a 3D camera or whatever. I mean if this thing comes past that it has a refocusing ability it could be used to like you know you take your picture, you have your app on the phone that can do the whole refocusing thing and then you refocus where you want it, you save it as another file and you can share that file and then you can go back and save it again. So like maybe it's not like the interactive ability to change your focus all the time isn't preserved across devices and things like that but you still have a photo captured that you can view anywhere. That would be dope. I just really hope they put in a great camera. That would make sense at least. That seems likely then and also it's something that we saw with the LG G Pro 2. I think it's going to be part of LG software in general for smartphones which is that it takes a burst of I don't know six photos or whatever. And it's very much like Nokia's refocus. It's software based rather than hardware so it takes them at various distances and you can actually notice that if there's any motion in your picture so that the thing that's focused furthest away from you is like half a second after the thing that's focused closest to you. And a lot of companies are doing these things. I think exactly as Dennis is saying when you're able to refocus photos that might be something that is an option in the phone and then you can just pump out general JPEGs, standard JPEGs with all the rest of your photos. But I mean I just need to have a moment to remember the Evo 3D and like you guys were saying the fact that you could take pictures with it and then view them pretty much explicitly on that device. And I had such a struggle looking at the lenticular like display and trying to convince myself that there's a 3D effect going on. I mean that was such a train wreck. I just don't have anything else to add to it. It was just pretty sad. So I mean the HCC has already told us they're going to announce this thing on March 25th which is just about three weeks away. So I'm sure we'll have plenty of more leaks to see until then but we'll have a better idea of how this actually works when it's actually announced. But moving on, so today it was actually revealed that this company is planning to release the first dual booting Windows phone and Android smartphone this year which begs the question of why. Well you know, why ask why. So if I, go ahead. I can definitely see a situation for myself and maybe for others, only power users certainly where Android is the, Windows phone is the operating system you want to use but Android is the operating system you have to use just because there's some esoteric app that you need or really not so esoteric app, just an app that isn't on Windows phone. Or you know you have a Google services situation and of course the support for Google services is pretty weak on Windows phone right now. So I mean I can see that, I get it but the use case is so narrow that three people will buy one of these and I will be one of them. So do you think, okay so do you guys think this will be an actual dual boot situation where you can dual boot from one to the other and maybe share data which seems hard but or is it going to be something like you start up the phone for the first time and you can choose which operating system you would want. Well no, it makes sense that you would be able to switch between the two. I mean that's a dual boot device as opposed to like make a choice once and you're stuck with it. I don't know. I just don't know how they'd be able to share data especially like Windows phone is very much like iOS in that it silos things pretty hard. And you know at least how it used to work with SD cards, you used to specially format them and things like that. I have no idea how it would be able to share data between that environment and Android unless we're talking about like a virtualization or something like that which sounds horrifically nightmare. Honestly I am with Chris on this one. There's just nothing for us to talk about here. I mean as much – you kind of have to imagine yourself in a situation that 99% of the global population just aren't in. You need to feel some compelling reason to want Windows phone ahead of Android at least in some circumstances, which for most people just isn't the case. My biggest, best and most sincere consumer advice is if you have a choice, go with Android. I mean we can have the discussions, we can have the debates with everyone with iOS and all of that but Android versus Windows phone is like what does Windows phone have that Android doesn't bring? I mean there really isn't anything. Like maybe responsiveness of the UI but you can you know dance around the UI and then you end up with crummy apps that aren't serving your needs. I mean that was my experience with the Lumia 1020 like the hardware and software look beautiful and then the whole experience is really fluid and like pretty gorgeous. Like I can see myself in an alternate reality where you know everybody had adopted Windows phone but the apps right now not there. Although I will say like maybe this dual booting thing is totally outside the spectrum of the normal user. I think what's more interesting is that Microsoft relaxed their licensing requirements to allow this. At the same time Microsoft, I mean okay Microsoft hasn't taken over Nokia. Nokia is still an independent entity, yada yada yada. But at least behind the scenes you have to say that Microsoft allowed the Nokia X to happen as well. So it's kind of facing up to the fact that it needs to play forward Android in some respects. Don't you guys think? Yeah and also keep in mind that at least in theory if this OEM is playing by the rules, this device will effectively be paying double to Microsoft since Microsoft makes a significant royalty off every Android device sold. So there is actually you know there's a good monetary reason for Microsoft to be okay with this. There's also little incentive to stop it because it's such a niche product that like you know it's a good point. I mean we haven't mentioned the company name yet because we don't remember it. We're not talking about Samsung here, we're not talking about LG or HTC or any of that. We're not even talking about Huawei or CTE. This is a company called Carbon. It looks like they're based out of India. So they apparently are appealing to a very specific probably very narrow market for this. I wonder if these are also dual SIM. That'd be cool. That'd be like having just two independent phones. That would be awesome. I think that would be amusing and it would be kind of a cool thing to tell your friends about but functionally and in terms of usability and again it just I don't know. To me I don't know how to describe it. I don't know if it's a train crash or whatever but it just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't really add to your life. Like at the moment. I'll tell you what it adds to your life. Hang on a second. Hang on a second. At the moment I'm boot camping Windows on my Mac. There is one reason why I'm doing it and that is to play Dota 2. So gaming. It's kind of the classic reason to want the other OS. Everything else, OSX now not Mac OS, takes care of. For the most part you do come to… Okay, what I'm trying to say is you have the best OS for your needs and if you try and dance around and switch between OSs to do a variety of different things what really ends up happening is you spend too much time managing and jumping between operating systems or whatever. I'm only boot camping for one extra reason and it's a compelling enough reason for me to do it. But if I need to use Windows for something and then Linux for something else and OSX for a third thing then the best advice is actually to try and consolidate things and just use one OS. The one that gets most of your things done. That's really the cleanest way to do it. So speaking of getting things done, since we're still on the topic of Windows Phone, this week we saw the first look at Microsoft's apparent answer to Siri and Google Now which is being called Cortana and it's a voice based personal assistant. It supposedly has a personality just like Siri does and apparently it's named after something from Halo, is that right? I heard my wrong. It is indeed from Halo. You're spot on but it's just the ignorance you're displaying is so cute. I also believe it is pronounced Cortana. Whatever. It's a terrible name, if they bring it to market with that name it's terrible. Listen, it has a female voice, it doesn't mean it has a personality. Well Siri has a personality. I mean Siri will talk back and you know. Siri will sass you. Yeah, Siri will sass you. Will Cortana sass you? Okay, yeah actually that's fair enough because I'm looking at one of the screenshots that we've procured and it says I'm absorbing the entire internet, won't take long. So Cortana is you know. By the way, this is tangentially related but I need to get out there because I don't think I've complained about this yet and it really bothers me. So Siri, this first came up for me at CES this year. I was using my iPhone as my alarm in the morning and I would say, you know whenever I use my iPhone alarm I set it using Siri. I say set alarm for 5.30am or 5.15am or whatever. And if you set an alarm time for before 6am, sometimes randomly it will say don't wake me up. Like it will respond don't wake me up and it's supposed to be a joke but I read it as like well are you refusing to set the alarm or are you making a joke? And then like I don't know if I'm going to be woken up in the morning or not. Now it turns out that it is just a joke but still like you need to set boundaries for when Siri will sass you and those boundaries are not set yet. So I mean voice recognition, it's like a major part of every OS now. It's definitely a requirement. Well I want to be clear, Windows Phone 8 does have voice recognition already. You can dictate to it and things like that. What's significant about this new thing that's coming with 8.1 apparently is this is going to be a personal assistant in the same way of Google Now and Siri and you know Microsoft is pulling in all this data. You are supposed to give Microsoft this data, it's supposed to scan your inbox for calendar appointments and package tracking. That's going to go into something called notebook right? Yes, it's got this component called notebook which adds all your data. They are partnering with Foursquare for location stuff. But you know I think the same problem that essentially Siri has with Apple, Apple has a Siri, Microsoft is going to have with this. Is that you know for most people the company that has this data already is Google and Google has you know most of your online activity already and it makes it Google Now that much more powerful. It makes it smarter and more predictive and things like that whereas Siri just has you know maybe your calendar that you have stored on the phone and you know it's able to send text messages and make phone calls and things like that but it's not predictive in the same way that Google Now is. And I think you know Microsoft is probably going to run into the same kind of issue with this service you know except for the people that are fully invested in Microsoft's ecosystem. Well just to say I think from Microsoft's perspective this is a universally good move. What I'm reading again from Tom Warren who seems to just have a copy of Microsoft roadmap. He tells us that this is going to replace the Bing search and one of my favorite jokes is something to do with the fact that okay the joke I don't remember but it was about the fact that Bing is like the most underused physical or capacity button on a phone ever. Like nobody ever reaches for it. Nobody ever uses the Bing search on a Windows phone. So you know overhauling that, sticking this personal assistant on there and branding it with Cortana which you know for guys other than Dan who again is super adorable with the fact that he's not familiar with Halo is going to be a really cool thing. And you can set a nickname for yourself so your phone can actually start calling you Master Chief. So if Microsoft really wants to harness the good will that it has from all of these Halo gamers and from its you know it has a treasure trove of fan loyalty with Xbox. So it can do a lot here. You know to just give you a phone where you're like this is like my Xbox and you know try and bring some synergy between them and talk to your phone and it's like the character that like your sidekick or your assistant or whatever in the Halo story and it calls you Master Chief and you can kind of live a little fantasy there. So there's a hook there. At what point during the podcast did you start just smoking tremendous amounts of crap? I will tell you when. I will tell you exactly when. It was when Evan took us into the weeds with OpenGL. I was like I was seriously discussing Nvidia's OpenGL performance with respect to in Dash entertainment system. That's fair. So look there isn't a single human being on the planet who is like oh I played Xbox, oh I've heard of Cortana, I'm going to buy a Windows phone now. Like that's the argument you should be making. That is absolutely not it. You totally do not understand the mentality. I'm not talking about people who have heard about it. I'm talking about people who are like deeply invested into it. You're talking about the fan children. Yes and they exist and they're real and I'm one of them, not of Halo though. Because I am that way with Dota 2. Like if you made a phone where my favorite Dota 2 hero could be like a really fundamental part of it and I could kind of interact with it and stuff. I mean I wouldn't tell my friends about it. I probably wouldn't tell people about it on this podcast but I would use it and I would probably smile about it. I mean this is the same strategy that you know HTC has with its Hello Kitty phone right. Like there's these diehard Hello Kitty fans and they're going to buy the Hello Kitty. This is the same strategy as TomTom had when it did the Darth Vader voice over for turn by turn navigation. It is actually cool. That's the distinction. Hello Kitty is not cool. Darth Vader is giving you turn by turn navigation. For a large number of people, Hello Kitty is cool though. I mean it's just like when you do things like that, obviously with the HTC that I mentioned it's not a flagship device that they're trying to sell to everybody. There's a market for that. But like when you're targeting something like that, you're targeting like segments and if that's the strategy then that's like a very small strategy right. That's not a way to take your platform mainstream. That is actually a very good point and it reminds me of something I've been thinking about recently and that is specifically the fact that we can't find a perfect phone, a perfect user experience precisely because everyone is trying to do something that's just universal. Like they all want to mass produce the next iPhone. They all want to mass produce something that will sell in millions and millions and millions and it all looks the same. And the thing is that's hard to do with hardware. I think it's even harder to do with software. Like the software that really delights people is one that is at least in some way customized, at least in some way altered from this standard cloth that everybody gets. And that's the thing that bothers me is the fact that particularly with wearables, everyone says the word wearables but everyone is really thinking about a smartphone wristwatch. Everyone is thinking about a wristwatch with an arm processor in it and some smartphone like functionality in it because that's what everyone thinks will sell the most. And the thing that I'm thinking is if you do more niche things with wearables, you have the technology to make them really excellent. Again maybe it won't sell to everybody but it will be useful to humanity which is completely not a capitalist thought but there you go. I think you're absolutely right Vlad. If there was one thing that like, the thing about Google now and the thing about Cortana is like you can only feed it, like Chris said, you can only feed it the information that's available on the phone. But Vlad I think that if we're ever going to get to products like the kinds that you're talking about, like you need pervasive like data awareness from someone's life. And like the unfortunate reality is that really Google is the only one who not only has access to that kind of data but has had the foresight to kind of like organize it and deliver it in ways that they can capitalize on their apps. Vlad really just wants, Vlad wants Samantha from her. Well I mean I also want Samantha. I haven't seen the movie so please don't spoil it. But you know I think this is actually very telling of what Microsoft is now realizing which is that you know they have a chicken and egg problem which is like they don't have users and they don't have apps. The only way to get apps is to have users. Like apparently in order to drive the investment you have to have user base. Nintendo is like dealing with the same problem right now with the Wii U. But where Microsoft is really not like has historically not been very talented is in terms of like vendor and service lock in. And Google is so talented at that and Apple is so talented at that. But Microsoft has kind of like played the sidelines but it's really interesting to see the Nokia X come out and focus completely on services. And I think this is Microsoft realizing that if they're going to establish long term vendor lock in they have to hook people on these services, get them using them for a long, long time. And you know once you are in those kind of like loops then not only can you derive like data out of those services that you're offering but you know people will stick to your platform longer. The unfortunate thing is that they've ran that whole screw Google campaign so if they ever do try and mine information out of your email it kind of looks, it's a bad look. It's a bad look indeed. So on that note I think that wraps up the Verge mobile show for this week. This has been episode 82. Again today is, we're recording this on March 4th. Perhaps you're listening to it tomorrow or another day or whatever. We thank you for watching and tuning in and listening of course. If you want you can of course follow us. All of us are at Verge. You can send us email. You can drop comments on the post. You can follow us individually on Twitter. I'm DC Seifert. Vlad is Vlad Seva. He will not follow you back. Evan is Evan Rogers. Chris is Zpower and hopefully Dieter will be back with us next week. He is at Backlawn and we hope him Godspeed on getting well and getting his voice back. But until then, see you guys later. Bye.

It's Monday March 3rd 2014. I'm Ross Miller future Razzie award winner for worst combo See I play myself who plays against a dog. It's also kind of myself. It also dresses an elderly man It's I need a new agent This is 90 seconds on the verge 12 years of slave took top honors at last night's Academy Awards Steve McQueen is now the first black director to win best picture in the show's 86 year history as for gravity While it didn't take home best picture Alfonso Cuarón science fiction epic did win seven other major awards including best director Cuarón is the first Latin American director to do so we even got an EGOT last night Robert Lopez who won for best original song Is now the 12th person ever to win an Emmy Grammy Oscar and Tony Award But the biggest winner of the night Samsung the galaxy note 3 or something very similar was Prominently on display last night as host Ellen DeGeneres took selfies during the telecast One shot with about a dozen celebrities and award winners set a new Twitter retweet record Surpassing Obama's four more years tweet in just over a half an hour and thank you Bradley Cooper for making sure this record-breaking tweet was not shot in portrait and finally park reverse neutral drive now iPhone Apple today announced carplay which effectively puts iOS on your dashboard Carplay is built primarily around the use of Siri for commands dictation and reading messages Unsurprisingly Apple Maps plays a large role here more than a dozen car companies have signed up for the program including Volvo Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz The first such models will be out later this year and that's it for today's top stories with coming up tomorrow Pharrell's hat finally makes this list of demands

I'm David with The Verge and this is the Sony RX10. It's hard to describe what this camera is. On one hand, it's a lot like a DSLR. It looks like one, with a big grip, a big lens, and a viewfinder. At $1,299, it's priced like one too. But it doesn't have interchangeable lenses or a big sensor or dials and buttons everywhere. But it doesn't matter. It's fantastic. It has a Carl Zeiss lens with a 24-200mm equivalent zoom at a bright f2.8 the whole way. I've never seen a lens quite like this, and it's well suited to shooting everything from portraits to sports. The only trouble it ever caused me was trying to quickly zoom in and out. Since it's all done electronically, it's a little slow to shift, even if you use the manual zoom ring. But it has really solid macro performance, it's sharp across the entire image, and it allows for a really spectacular range of shots. It's become my go-to camera for lending people who don't know anything about photography. The RX10 almost never takes a bad picture. It occasionally overexposes shots, but it has beautiful colors, accurate lighting and layering, and produces genuinely gorgeous photos nearly every time. Its ability to take shots in low light, with soft backgrounds, and with high dynamic range is completely unlike any point-and-shoot I've ever used other than Sony's own RX100, which actually has the same 1-inch 20.2 megapixel sensor as the RX10. It's able to shoot comfortably up to ISO 3200, and even higher if you're putting your photos on Facebook and not a billboard. There's some software noise reduction happening here, and I wound up with some really soft photos in really terrible light, but the fast BIONZ X processor mostly helps a lot. I had to work hard to find a shot the RX10 couldn't handle. Its autofocus is its only real problem. Most of the time it's really fast, but it often hunts too much, or just completely guesses wrong and takes a blurry shot. It's especially bad when it's fully zoomed in, and it did cost me a few great pictures, but luckily only a few. I should say that the RX10 is really not comparable to even a mid-range DSLR. The cheaper Canon T5i with the right lens will take sharper pictures and do better in low light, and a camera like that gives you so much more room to grow into photography as well. This camera is what it is, but for some people that's a good thing. For people who want that, the size of the RX10 is going to be its only real drawback. The weatherized, leathery, magnesium body weighs almost two pounds, and it's almost six inches thick with the huge lens retracted. This camera's not fitting in your pocket, that's what the RX100 is for. But what you get in return is that huge zoom range and enough manual control that you can definitely make the RX10 do exactly what you want. There's a three inch LCD on the back, which tilts up or down and lets you shoot from either above your head or below your waist, an electronic viewfinder with all the same advantages, you can see lots of information without taking your eye away, and disadvantages, it's just not as accurate as an optical viewfinder as any other. But I'm coming around to EVFs, and Sony's really is one of the best. There's also a dedicated button for recording video, which you can do with one tap from anywhere on the camera. Video looks great and sounds great too, though it does take a slightly finer touch. You can shoot 1080p up to 60 frames per second, and everything is clear and sharp, but the camera's noise cancellation and image stabilization can both be kind of rough. The zoom is super smooth, though, and does a nice job of keeping focus as you go. There are little nods to convenience everywhere. Sony knows exactly who's gonna buy this camera. The RX10 charges via micro USB and does so a little slower than I'd like, but it means you'll never have trouble finding a charging cable for the camera. There's a built-in flash, an easily accessible SD card slot, and a standard hot shoe. Even the interface is simple, burying all but the most common settings where they can't possibly hurt you. It turns on in less than three seconds, has almost no shutter lag, and shoots about two shots per second in standard mode. Many of the people upgrading to the RX10 will be coming from cell phone cameras, so Sony built WiFi and NFC into the camera itself. You can control the shutter, share pictures, and change settings right from your phone. That's nice, but the implementation here is rough. Sony's PlayMemories app is ugly and overly simple, and it just doesn't work that well. But that doesn't really matter, because everything else about the RX10 works so well. It takes great pictures, whether you're insanely close up or incredibly far away. It takes great video, too, and it does it all without you needing to do much of anything except point and shoot. The really killer thing is that it's so expensive. At $1,299, it's really only going to work for photographers looking for a versatile second camera, or people who don't know or want to know anything about photography but have some money to burn. But Sony knows that most people who buy DSLRs never take off the kit lens, and many of those people would be much happier with an RX10. And while point and shoot cameras may deserve to be dying, cameras like the RX10, versatile shooters that take great pictures in auto and even better with some effort, might just be the future.

It's Friday, February 28th, 2014. I'm Adrienne Jeffries and I invite you to join my new bagel exchange, Mount Gawks. This is 90 seconds on the verge. Mount Gawks has filed for bankruptcy protection, claiming $64 million in liabilities. The embattled Bitcoin exchange says it has lost close to 850,000 Bitcoins, which is worth about $500 million. 750,000 of those belong to customers and 100,000 were company assets. Mount Gawks is currently under investigation by authorities in both the US and Japan, and as for the digital currency itself, it's lost about a third of its value since February 1st. Microsoft is experimenting with a free version of Windows 8.1. The company is building a, quote, Windows 8.1 with Bing, which will bundle key Microsoft apps and services into a free or at least low-cost upgrade for Windows 7 users. The experiment is part of a number of initiatives designed to push and monetize Microsoft's cloud services, as well as get more people using the latest version of Windows. Microsoft recently announced a major Windows 8.1 Spring update, with additional details to come at its annual Build conference in early April. And finally, believe it or not, there's a Minecraft movie in the works. Warner Bros. has acquired rights to make a feature film based on the wildly successful sandbox title. It's actually a perfect fit for the studio, which released the Lego movie earlier this month. That film has grossed nearly $300 million worldwide. Financial details weren't disclosed, but estimates have been in the range of six diamond blocks and a dozen or so golden carrots. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow? Saturday!

Hey, hey, and welcome to the Vergecast. Before the Vergecast started today, just before, I mean literally moments ago, I said we're in the studio here at Vox Media, the Vox Media empire in beautiful midtown Manhattan. I said, is there anything here I can wear? I think I might have specifically requested a vest. Did I request a vest? Could someone in the control room tell me? You did. You absolutely did. I specifically requested a vest. Why did I request a vest? Why did? Because vests are cool. Fancy. Yeah, we don't need no vests. Oh, we were talking about Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, cool. Thomas Jefferson had a cool vest. Great friend. I was like, man, I wish I had a vest right now. And I said, do we have any vests here? And like what's crazy is yes, we have a vest, and it is a woman's motorcycle vest with like ladies' motorcycle patches on it. Lady rider. This one says lady rider. This one says born to be wild here. I like the one on the bottom that says it ain't easy to be me. I don't know what lady owned this, but I think her and I have something in common. Definitely. Which is it's hard to be either one of us. It's not that normal for her though. But I do feel like I'm embodying some of her spirit right now. You know what's surprising about a leather vest? Comfortable? Well, it actually gets pretty warm in there. It's actually pretty toasty right here. Vests are confusing to me because it's like your body is burning hot, but then your extremities are freezing. Well, at least we saved his torso. What's the- It's all about the core though. You know, like people strengthen their core. No, I know. You got to get your core going. You got to keep it warmed up. I'm a little bit of a leader, but that felt uncouth. So I'm just going to make it an outside thing. As a new father- You have to keep that creamy core. Are we going to talk about this? As a new father, I learned actually that you want to feel the baby's core to get a sense of her temper. Like right in the solar plexus right here? Yeah. You want to get right in there. No, you want to feel the baby's core to get a sense of the baby's temperature. You can't really tell by the extremities. The baby has a vest like quality is what I'm saying. The core is important, but everything else is like a misleading. So as you can tell, Josh has a new addition. Yeah. I just bought a bunch of new edition records and I got to tell you, well worth the money. And by the way, vinyl, that sound, analog, sweet analog honey pouring into your mouth and ears. Yeah. I don't, we don't talk about this. Oh, first off, so Neely is sick. He is sick. I've been told Neely is very ill and not like in the cool funky way. He said he's sorry. He wanted to make it. He wanted to yell, rant, rave. He has no voice. He was mad about the internet. He contracted. He did. He did like the ultimate gave him. He did. I'm going to take this vest off in a second. Cause I keep, I keep seeing it in the camera and I'm like, this like gets pretty uncool. A leather vest. Yeah. Yeah. We can all wear the vest at least once. Okay. Okay. Um, but I have to say like a leather vest is like a pretty uncool overall. Oh, you're going to feel what does it say on the back? Yeah. Let's see. Oh, sorry. Love to love to ride. I mean, it's, is that a four 20 joke? Uh, no, I feel like love to ride as dual me. I'm not spoiled. I'm justly rewarded and I'm perfect. Just the way I am. What is this one? Life is good. This is pretty positive. Yeah. High maintenance. That's a four 20 joke. I tried on it. See how it feels. It's a large lady. I have to say like that. That's the wrong way. That's the wrong way. You can't do, don't be funny. I want to see you in the vest. You want to see me actually. All right. Hold on. Just get, just get it on. You made something. No, no, no, no, no. Okay. You made a child. Oh yeah. Whatever. No, no, yeah, whatever. I have a baby. Whatever. There's a baby. But, uh, what I was actually trying to say is, um, it's no iPhone. I don't know what this means. Billy just saw, just sent me a message. He said, we have a baby Photoshop clip from on the verge if we want it. Oh, is that the one where I made you a baby? Oh, from way back. That's right. We want it. We want it. Okay, fine. Whatever that is. Oh, look at my old me. Do we do this? Yes, we do. Wow. Why did I agree to this? Here's our first baby. Yeah, I, yes, this is a beautiful baby. Who wouldn't want to have this very uncomfortable child? Where were we thinking this? Of course. Uh, but what could this child's name be in the future? I'm thinking probably something like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Uh, maybe it could be, what about, like, I don't know, Zybord topolski. Yeah. That looks good. I don't understand this at all. Oh my God. I'm like, I gotta tell you that wasn't that long ago. Remember the Zybord? I have no idea what the joke was there. What was the point of that? It was 4G LTE optimist Epic Miller or something. We were making fun of device names. That was very good. Um, anyhow, great trip down. My baby does not look like that. Not yet, does not have the beard. My baby, first off my baby's a female. So if she had a beard, I'd be pretty. Okay. I'm sorry. I love, I can't believe you just dissed my daughter. Now that I'm a dad, I get real defensive about shit like that. How dare you, sir? Dude, the vest makes you a red dude. That's my daughter you're talking about. Life is good, man. LG. LG, life's good. All right. Anyhow, so Neelai wrote this piece this week. That's called Changing Gears, by the way. Right. Neelai wrote this piece, the ultimate... To me, it's like the ultimate Neelai... This is his ultimate rant. Right. He just gets right to it in the headline. Are we allowed to say this? Are we allowed to say this? The Internet is fucked is the name of the piece. This was the first headline before he wrote anything else. We're just gonna do a piece called The Internet is Fucked. There's definitely a conversation... Just so you know, we received at least 500 emails from people who can't deal with the F word. It was definitely a conver... Whatever. That's their problem. That's a you problem, not a me problem. They're totally fine with the government just fucking them. Yeah. They're like, I... Fucking is an action. They're like, I agree with your piece. We're in terrible shape, but I really take issue with the use of the word fuck. They're like, this is why I petition for more censorship. Anyhow, I don't know. That's... Interestingly, it's exactly why the FCC is so fucked up. Right. Because they care more about Janet Jackson's nipple and people saying naughty things on television than... Well, we also gave you reports. We had this thing where we said, if you want to unfuck the Internet, call this number. I think we had this image at some point. If you wanted... There it is. If you want to unfuck the Internet, call this number. But people who were calling it, we heard the FCC was saying they have no control over regulating the Internet, which seems counter to what the courtroom was. This is like when you call... This is exactly like when you call Verizon. Yeah. And you're like, can I... You're like, are you guys going to get the new LG Optimus, whatever? And they're like, yes, we have that in stock. And you're like, but it's not even released yet. And they're like, we can order that for you right now. And then we get emails from people who have those conversations. They're like, a rep told me that they've got the new phone in stock right now. Or just some weird bad information that doesn't make any sense because they don't have the right stuff to tell you. That was a bad example. Okay? It's like when you're like, hey, can I upgrade my phone for free? And they're like, definitely. And then you do it and they send you a bill for $300. It's like when you call our government and say, I want to have my voice heard because it's democracy. And they're like, no, that's cool. They're like, this is actually is not a democracy. No. Press zero for movie time. Please stop calling. You can't do that. Movie phone's out of business. It's been 25 years. But anyhow, everybody should read this piece. In all seriousness, we're having a good time here and having a laugh. And we're allowed to do that because the internet is currently relatively open at this moment. But in the future that is quickly rushing up to meet us, and the future and the ongoing politics and stuff that Neelai outlines here, we are in really a bad spot. And if we don't have some serious regulation from our government that makes it clear that the internet is a utility that everybody needs to have free and open access to, businesses like ours probably can't exist down the road. And that may sound reactionary or paranoid, but I think that you get into a situation where when the Netflixes of the world have to cut side deals to get their content across the stuff that you already pay for, it starts to suggest a lot of crazy, very bad situations that are coming down the road. YouTube would never have happened in this kind of this world. You can't be a small player and be competing with big players. The beauty of the internet is small players can compete with big players all the time because they're on even ground. And you take away the even ground, small businesses, medium sized businesses, all sorts of businesses are at risk. And the consumer and the people who actually need to utilize this as a utility are going to be, we're putting up barriers to information and barriers to content and to the things that they need. And I think that it's being done in a way that is completely unregulated, completely, everybody's just kind of flying by the seat of their pants. And the FCC doesn't seem to have, they don't seem to have a legitimate, first of all, they don't seem to have legitimate power here. And they don't seem to have any real interest in actually saying we have a ruling on what net neutrality is. We have an opinion on it. We have a way to get there. No one there is really saying it. And it's scary. And if you read New York's Peace, you should be scared and angry. Yeah, I mean, the FCC definitely does have the authority to do it. They don't have the backbone. They might technically have the authority, but they don't seem to be willing to utilize it. No, they're afraid. Yeah. And this is all like, at the end of the day, just like everything in this country when it's really getting screwed up and it sucks, it is corporate interests being favored over the interests of the people. And we got to stop it. So I suggest violent revolution right now. Take to the streets with weapons of any, of whatever type you want, and show those guys who's boss. You know, it should be a pretty uncontroversial point too. It's not like people who want free internet are saying corporations are all evil, they should never make any money, you know, anything like that. It's just that somehow we've allowed two or three companies to basically dominate the entire internet. Yeah. And it's like, imagine if Comcast owned most of the highways in the country and didn't let you like- That's probably next. They were like, oh, you want to go to Nebraska? It's like, no. Hey us, hey us. Wait, wait, wait. Highways are not a public utility. You can walk on the grass. They're definitely a public utility. They're an interstate highway system. That's the argument you're making. It's a great analogy. It's a great analogy. Why don't you let them stop in there? Why don't you let them try it on? I'm getting a little hot. This vest would never have existed if not for the interstate highway system. That's true. You could, well, you certainly couldn't get on your hog. That allows Roughriders to stop, drop, and open up shop anywhere they please. Oh no. Is it me now? You didn't. Is it me now? Wait a second. Now, I can't wear double. Yes, you can. No rules. There's no rules here. For now, there's no rules. Yeah, this is non-core. I don't know that the stop, drop, and open up shop. How are startups going to stop, drop, and start up shop? Are those the actual lyrics? Yes. I don't think that's actually covered by the openness of the highways. I just want you to know that. You got to get permits and stuff to open up a shop. That's really good. In fact, you can't just put whatever you want along the highway. You heard it here first. You can't just open up a shop. Josh DePulsky says you can't. You can't on the highway. You see there's designated rest areas. So you can't just stop and drop either. No, you can't stop. You can stop and drop at the designated area. You can't open up shop. Here's what the internet is going to be like the New Jersey Turnpike. Did we just get the Ruff Ryders? What's going on here? Oh, yes. By the way, I just want to say earlier TC was like, could we just play Axel F for the opening music? And Ross was like, we don't have the rights. But we do have the rights for that, no problem. Well, video rights and audio rights are much, anyway. Are they? Not on the open internet. Everything is free. It looks good on you. I wasn't even hot in this jacket. That looks really good on you. I'm going to say it fits really well. How was that tweet? By the way, I have to say, since so far I think I've successfully derailed every topic we've tried to have. What was that tweet that was on screen? Was there a vest tweet on screen? Oh, with a... I thought I saw one. I'm not in control of what goes up on that screen. I'm not either. This is kind of bad. There we go. Cable time. Yes, yes, yes. We can all wear the vest. Is that supposed to rhyme? I don't know. I'm just going to assume it. I don't know what that means. Is this a thing now? The vest across America? Is it the plan that Raheem demands? I'm looking at this image of these three Mac books here. There are some mad people. Just see, there are people right now writing an email or forum post or comment about the Verge guys using Macs. Oh yes, of course. How dare you? So, will I have a gaming PC at home? And so does Josh. I built a killer gaming PC. Yeah, Josh did. Which I never turn on because... I never turn it on anymore because there's so many updates every time I turn it on that I'm like, I'm just going to leave this. Someone's calling me. How do you play DayZ then? So first off, I don't play games that require me to have a keyboard. That's number one. I'm not sitting in front of my large television with a keyboard on my lap in some kind of like track ball situation. Noob. Who uses a track ball? You have the fucking... You have the headset and the track ball. Even the nerdiest... You have one of those split keyboards. Even the nerdiest of nerdy PC gamers. Use the keyboard that's like one of these guys right here. Make fun of track ball players. Track ball. Track ball. This guy right here. Track ball is nasty. I think it's because it's all gunked up. I'm a mouse man myself. No, I mean, when it comes to operating... I actually used to be a mouse man. Now I'm just like, I guess I'll use the track pad, but not for gaming. That's for bozos. I use one of those old joysticks you get like you're ever into the old PCs, how to cut like two buttons. That actually really makes me feel nostalgic because I had like 10 of those when I was like younger. I was like a loser nerd and I had some horrible joysticks that I hooked up to my XT. You know what? Anyhow, moving on. Yeah. So yeah, read any last piece. The internet is fucked. And I'm sure... Exactly. Yes, this. Oh my God. I think I actually own this. I think I actually have this joystick or had it at some point. I missed this for the Gravis game pad. So depressing to me. I can actually, there's like in place my mind goes to that's like a very lonely kid and it makes me so sad. It just makes me so sad. Oh, do you guys want to call that FCC number live? Yeah. Yeah, I just do. You want to call them? Ask what's up. I have a feeling this is going to get really boring really fast. I think so too. It's going to be like, they're going to put you on hold and then they're going to actually, here's what's going to happen. You're going to say, I'd like to file a complaint. I'm worried about this. I'm like, of course, like, you know, tell us what your problem is and it's going to be super boring and straightforward. We could do, what if we, what if we recreated what it might be like when you call them and they don't want to take your complaint? Could we get a phone ringing sound? Yeah. Somebody picking it up. Okay. Hello FCC. How can I help you? Hello? Yes. This is the FCC. How may I help you? My grandson told me the internet is fucked. I'm sorry, ma'am. I don't understand what you're saying. How do you, why are you in a character? I don't understand. I don't play grandma. Why aren't you just TC then? Because I don't use the phone personally. How are you going to use? I never call them. You're going to be in big trouble once TomCat shuts down the internet. That's true. Okay. Moving on. This is such a great, I think this is one of our best shows ever. I feel already. It's good to have you back. It's good to be back. Yes. Although I am losing my voice. So this will be it for me. Okay. You want to talk about Samsung? Let's talk about a little bit. Yeah. Call me crazy. I like this. I like the looks of this gear fit. No, I think it's great. It's cool looking. Vlad had a great editorial. The gear fit is what wearable should look like. And I agree completely. The question of course is how it works. Yes. And like battery life and like is it functional? Anything can look sexy. Of course. But is it functional? It's functional. Right? Am I right? It looks nice. I mean it tells the time, has notifications and you can read it. I just already feel like I can't be asked to use my smartphone anyway. So I don't know if I want it on my wrist also. Look, I would love to be getting more information down here. But I'd like to do it in a way that isn't gross and lame. So I'm just going to get you a glass, bro. No, can I tell you something though? Can I have to say two things that have occurred to me that are very vivid as a father now with a baby that needs to be fed with like a bottle and stuff. I'm taking videos with glass. Photo taking. Oh man. When you do not have your hands free, seriously a problem and doing things with the television. Like I think I now understand why people are like voice control. I think I now get it. It's for people with kids. It's for people with babies who are like, I'm doing this with the baby and like I can't turn the TV on and I'm bored. Here's the question though. Because guess what? Babies, not really very interesting. They don't do very much. Just a thing that a baby does that's impressive makes eye contact with you. Like that's a big deal. The baby made eye contact with me. I mean dogs do that like day one. You know, you're like the baby is looking at me, mission accomplished. You know, like babies really, they really are. It turns out they take, it takes a while to really be able to do anything of use. So question though, what if, what if your baby's words, first words ended up being like okay glass or like Xbox on. That's scary. I keep imagining what would happen. This is an artist rendering of the Tupolsky family. I don't know what this is. Babies are all kind of similar looking. I keep imagining the horrific scenario where the baby, it's like, you know, three weeks old where she says something at three weeks. Can you imagine just a little baby suddenly speaking to you? A newborn, a newborn speaking to you. But like it just starts from like, hello Josh. Maybe not that, but maybe it just is like, you know, chair or whatever. Where did you, how are you doing that? I don't think it's, yeah, hairy. I don't think it's possible. But anyhow, it's scary. I wake up in the middle of the night. There I am right there. I wake up in the middle of the night, sheets soaked with my sweat and frightened that the baby will say a word to me. Hey, like, Hey, what is that? Who is that? It's the baby talking. Look who's talking now. I haven't had a lot of sleep. The Gear Fit, it seems pretty cool. I might just get across right into your beer. I'm just saying. Can we just track zero to baby anytime? What's the price point of the Gear Fit? Do we know? What's the number? Too much. Whatever it is. I'd say like 99 bucks. I have to say, this is cool. This is actually cool. Here's what I don't like about it. It seems a little high, like a little thick. It would be really cool if you could put like a NATO strap on that. Like what's on my watch right now is called a NATO strap. Right. But that would make it much wider I assume. Cause this is, looks like a, well maybe, but it would have, but you can do, I mean maybe though. No, no, no. I mean, I mean, I mean this seems like high, tall. Right. You know what I mean? I think this is cool. Can you change the desktop on it? The back, I mean the background. There's no price. There's no price yet. What did you say? What do you mean the wrong direction? For those who can't hear. Oh sorry. John is speaking to me in our, in my, in my earpiece. He said, isn't it the wrong direction? And I don't know what he means, but you mean it should be up and down instead of a cross? Don't know what that means. He said it should be perpendicular to your wrist. Oh, they have different bands. Right. Cause right now. Oh, so you can change the band. Yeah. Okay. So is that fit or is that the other gear? Cause there's three gears that came out this way. Right. I don't think, is this the gear? Is the gear fit? Fit gear? Does anybody know? Those are really ugly. I will say every one of those bands. No, this is the gear, regular gear. Those bands are disgusting. The bands they just showed were sickening. Yeah. I mean, I get that. Like I like the idea of having horizontal versus square. I like all of those. Cutting back to all of us staring off. It's really what this vest looks like. It's cool. You look like it. It's so hot man. Daughter of anarchy. Daughter of anarchy. My kids are so hot. My kids are so hot. My kids are so hot man. My core is like molten slag. Lady of anarchy. Here you go. I'm not wearing it now. Josh, your turn. How dope would it be to be in sons of anarchy though? I'm good. We should all get sons of anarchy vests. I'm just going to put this right here on this table. So, you know, what's interesting about the new gears, and this goes for the gear fit as well, they've taken Android off of them. They're now using Tizen, which is their custom like Java. What is it? It's like a Java. It's like a runtime situation. I don't know what the hell it is. I'm just saying words. Again, I haven't slept a lot. But it's not Android. No, the switch to Tizen, although it still works fully well with Android. So, like for most consumers, it's not going to be a big deal. For developers, I guess, they're going to have to tweak. If you had a gear one app, it's not going to work natively. So, I mean, I still take issue with the fact that they're making these square. And I kind of wish they would just try to make a round one. Okay, you want round. Well, that's better because that feels like a little bit more of a shape that is not, you're not just trying to replicate a watch. I would rather have it be replicate a watch I want to wear, like a circular watch with a nice like casing. Or do something that is not like a watch. So, what John was saying or in your ear was like, if you're looking at it sideways, it's like this. So, like you're reading like this and you're swiping. It just doesn't feel natural, especially if you're doing this. Right. So, that's the concern. Yeah, looking at it right there. Great anecdote. I'm just. So, maybe somebody just tweeted at me and said that the employees of the Verge shouldn't be able to say dope. Did I say dope? Did you? I probably said dope. I think I might have said dope. You lived in Baltimore for a long time. Was I wearing the vest though? I think I was wearing the vest. Are you from Baltimore? No, I just lived there for a little while. Yeah, I mean, that's the right way you picked that up. I picked it up from you. That's dope. That's dope. What else? So, the Morrill Congress happened. It did. It's over now. Like, some interesting situations. I mean, it was more exciting than we thought it was going to be. Nokia X, Nokia's making an Android phone. A cheap Android phone. A bad Android phone. Yes. Which is like cool for Microsoft, I think. They're like, we're buying Nokia. Nokia's like, we're making Android phones. But it does go with the. It's like the worst idea that anybody's ever had. It's like a skin of Android to make it look like Windows phone. Yeah. But also. It's like a Windows phone. Yeah. And no one's going to care. On worse phones. But it does have Skype. And it does have Microsoft Office. That's what I care about. When has Skype ever been a selling point? Wait, it has Office? I think it has Office. For Android? No, no, no. Maybe. Well, what would it be? I have no idea. It's an Android phone. It's an Android phone. I rest my case. They're trying to put Microsoft on the sweet spot. Get out. And then, so what else? Oh, Galaxy S5. Yes. Which is. The Galaxy S4, but waterproof. Which is just like the Galaxy S4, but with a different back. With a different number and the name. Yeah. I mean. It's got some other stuff. I don't know. It's weatherproof. It's like you could put it in the shower. See, to me, I think that's great. I mean, I've been using this Sony Z1, and it's waterproof. And I don't take it in the shower because I'm not a fool. But you can. But what I can do is I don't worry about it in the rain or the snow or whatever. That's the nice thing. Or if you drop it, or you put it down on the table and there's some water there. You're not like, oh my god. Right. I think it's actually a really nice looking phone. I mean, the front looks kind of classy. I think it's okay. The touch is nice. I mean, it's whatever. It's a Samsung Android phone. Yeah. And this is what the... Okay, this is Samsung. I think we know that Samsung isn't really known for their hardware design. Given the fact that they have to keep copying it off of other people. Right. Like, they're not known for... And they're also not known for their software design. They're known for being able to ship high numbers. And market the shit out of it. And market the hell out of them. Yeah. And like, fine. So be it. That's their thing. You want a nice looking device? You want to buy one of those new Nokia Android phones. Right. JK. Sony's phones are much nicer looking. And Sony did just announce at Mobile Congress the Xperia Z2. Yeah, so that's the new version of my phone. With a nicer display. So here's the thing. It has a nicer display. People are saying that it is not any larger than my phone. Is that correct? I've had both... Chris and Dieter have both said... Is that it right there? Hold it up. Yeah. So it's a... Pretty big. It's a 5.2 inch screen. This is, I think, just a 5. But they're saying less bezel. At any rate, this thing's huge and that's one of my major gripes. The hugeness of it... It's pretty light though, right? No, it's very heavy. Really? Very heavy. This isn't heavy. Comparatively to... What are you comparing it to? It's heavier than that phone. Yeah, I guess it is. Yeah. It's glass and metal, baby. But it does feel nice. I mean, it's a nice phone. Fingerprints all over the place. Well, it's made of glass. Remember the old iPhones? That's what this is like. Except way bigger. And also not an iPhone. Yeah. It's a little bit heavier. It's a little bit heavier. And also not an iPhone. Anyhow, so the Z2. Yeah, I mean, all in all, it's not a really... I mean, I think the Gear Fit was probably the most interesting. And also the most surprising because we knew they were going to do a Galaxy smartwatch coming and we kind of figured new cell phones that are iterative. But the Fit was something different at least. Yeah. You're damn right. They definitely learned their lesson not making another $400 smartwatch. Well they did. Off the bat. There is one. They did. It's not the only smartwatch you can buy from them. That's true. And I imagine it's probably like $400 for the Gear 2, $300 for the one without the camera, then like $2, $250 for this Fit? What? No, the Fit's going to be way more expensive. You think so? Yeah. It's got like a crazy custom weird little screen and it's, you know, yeah, that's going to be more expensive. No way. Why wouldn't it be? You don't think? Because their marketing is like a fitness thing. You can't sell a $300 fitness device. But it also functions as a watch, right? Yeah. Yes, it does tell time. It does the notifications. Why are you shaking your head? Because it's less capable. How much does a watch cost? Like that's not a, you can't be like, Oh, it's also a watch. So it's like $500. Well, I mean, it depends on the watch. I mean, does it have all the, does it have all the features of the Gear? I guess there's no camera, no heart. Is there a heart rate sensor on it? There is. Yes. I wish I had just read a little bit of, I mean, again, I've been busy. This is another thing, by the way, you can't do is like reach for your laptop when you're holding a baby. Can't do it. And I've been trying some pretty like funky moves, you know, it's like holding a bottle with my head, you know, maybe one arm holding the bottle in place or reaching for something, like doing one of those fathers out there. Well, no, what I'm talking about. I've learned a lot. I'm much more mature now. It's incredible. All right. You want to talk about Google? Let's talk about Google. Cause there's two projects. Google in the news. Sean Hollister wrote a great piece for us. Fantastic, fantastic, very thoroughly research and interesting piece about basically how Google is buying up Mountain View and turning it into Google town. And it's pretty like, there's a, this is a Google map in there. If you go farther down the space and it shows the it's insane. Yeah, it's crazy. This is what was once a regular community. And like now the owls are missing legs. Look at this. This is crazy. And like, you know, Apple is also building a new headquarters over here. There's like the spaceship and no one's complaining because you've got this basically this new neighborhood, this new city right here. Yeah. And so, you know, I think it's an interesting story about corporate interests in a relatively small town. You know, I think there's a, there are a lot of people, I mean, I think there's definitely some commenters and people who are like, this is great. This is actually really good. They're doing really cool things. But it does raise questions about you know, there, how much, I think you have to ask like, how much of a town should Google be able to own? Well, so they, they constantly, the reading Sean's piece, which is fabulous. They keep talking about like Google is trying to propose housing, like they really want to build a residential zone, make it fully contained. Yeah. Which is a lot like, what is this like the prisoner? The is this like law is like lost. Actually, when you think about it, imagine Mountain View is an island in the middle of the Pacific ocean where a magnetic force is drawing down planes and ultimately, um, spoiler alert, everybody's dead. Um, hope I didn't really lost for you. Not so good. All time worst endings of any show ever in the history of television. It's like five years from now, Eric Schmidt and a beard just scream, we have to go back. That's exactly what's going on. And Schmidt is with some like, I don't know, he's with some characters, some lovely ladies and a futurist, some singularity people. Ray Kurzweil is just like, he's the Desmond. He loads up, they load up with, uh, who's flying the plane? Paul Allen. Well, Sergey Brin, Sergey Brin's jumping out of the plane. Paul Allen's like, I'll get you there. Is it Paul Allen that did with all the planes? Uh, I don't know, Sergey Brin jumped out of the planes. No, yeah, of course he'll jump out of the plane. I just feel like Paul Allen knows everything. So am I crazy? Does he have, is he a plane guy? Somebody tell me, somebody tweeted me. All I know about Paul is he knows he owns like a ton of guitars. I don't know. Nobody gives Larry Ellison enough credit that dude owns an island. Like Google, like Google, Larry Page is up there like with his voice box saying like, we need to create an island where there are no laws. Right. Right. And people can do whatever they want. Larry Ellison owns that island. I'm not even talking about John Musk. It's a Charles Whittemore. Yeah, but Ellison, but Ellison hates hates those guys. He's like a jobs bro. Yeah. Mm hmm. So you got a problem there. How are you going to get the Google guys to Ellis, Ellis and, to Ellis Island? Invasion. Ellis invasion of Ellis Island all of these are movies I would watch. Self driving Google. This is Paul Allen. Are we looking at Paul Allen? Yes. Oh, right here. He's like, I'll take you. He's like the Jeff Fahey. What? Are you Lapidus? Frank Lapidus, played by Jeff Fahey. Frank Lapidus, as portrayed by the actor Jeff Fahey, star of The Lawnmower Man, a great film if you haven't seen it. What? No. He plays The Lawnmower Man. Oh, I had no idea. Pierce Brosnan, also a star of The Lawnmower Man. Wow. Please check it out if you really want to see some awesome 90s sci-fi that will rock you to your very core. Can we get a scene from The Lawnmower Man up on the view screen here? I'll give you guys a moment. I'm surprised you haven't been able to move quickly on this one. But please do. Some of the special effects of The Lawnmower Man. You get those Alfred shortcuts. The Lawnmower Man comes at a time, like in special effects, when people just discovered 3D and there was like a lot of video toaster, 3D stuff happening. I mean, it's not video toaster. This is like obviously rendered on some SGIs or whatever. But like, The Lawnmower Man graphics are really, really superb. Is this The Lawnmower Man? Is that Jeff Fahey? Is that Pierce Brosnan? It looks like Fahey's hair. He's had the same haircut. That's Brosnan. Look at the head of hair on him. Oh my God. Look at this guy's hair. It's this beautiful feather. Everybody in this movie looks like the villain from Die Hard. Correct me if I'm wrong. Lawnmower Man released in 1990. Hold on. 1993 is what I want to say. Oh, so close. You got to get to the graphics, guys. You found the one scene that didn't have any graphics. I don't know how you do that. Is there a lawnmower? Yes. Is it like a CG lawnmower? Oh, here we go. Yeah, here we go. Jeff Fahey, he is literally a lawnmower operator. He's like kind of a mentally impaired lawnmower. Let me tell you this is not- Wait, wait. So he's like cutting grass kind of lawnmower. I know some weird science fiction. He's a guy who cuts, I believe he cuts Pierce Brosnan's grass and he's like impaired in some way. Oh, here we go. Here we go. He's impaired in some way mentally like he's not very smart. Yes. So wait, this is like a horror version of Flowers for Alden, huh? This is VR. He's in VR right now. Do you understand what's going on? The thing is like that's what VR actually is. The 90s VR is actually way more advanced than right now. And anyhow, so I think Pierce Brosnan starts experimenting on him to see if he can make him smarter with these like cool cyber programs that shoot information into his virtual reality. Like, yes. Oh my God. Actually, this looks kind of amazing. Like it's like a C-Punk video, but it's just like, oh look, he's putting information into his brain right now by hand. That's how it works. He's not a fly helicopter. It is like the matrix. And then, you know, of course the experiment spirals wildly out of- Who is the guy in the suit that's ominously walking slowly towards him? I'm going to say his name is, who is this guy? I don't know who this guy is, but he's going to- Those look like it. I think what he discovers in this scene is that Pierce Brosnan is abusing his laboratory. And he's like, you can't do this anymore. And then he takes them to his basement and does some more experiments. That's what laboratories are for. Just like ramping abuse. Why do they exist if they don't make a green goblin? I mean, we could all have an island, sure. What's the point of having an island if it hurts on that island? Of course, there would be a place like this on the island. Yeah, the laboratories on islands are the worst. What's the point of having a laboratory if you're not going to create a green goblin? I think that's just a rule for life. Oh, did you see the pictures of the green goblin? The new ones. What? No. Are they on the verge? No, it was like a week ago. I don't know if we hit it. Well, were they on the verge a week ago, I guess? I don't know. That's the only thing I read. That's the only thing I read. If it's not on the verge, it didn't happen. No, but the new one is- The Jaguar. If it's not on the verge, it just didn't happen. That's right. And no matter how much you tell us. Yeah. Are you going to show it to me? I'm trying to find it. Where are the green goblin pics? I'm looking for it. Is it Dane DeHaan? It is Dane DeHaan. Dane DeHaan is like, sorry, Dane, your face makes you evil and everything. From now on, you're like the new Willem Dafoe. You're just going to play a bad guy no matter what you're in. Here we go. Even when you're a good guy, people are going to hate you. I'm going to drop it in the dock right here. I like Dane DeHaan. Don't get me wrong. He's a talented actor. Yeah, yeah. He's in Chronicle, right? He is. Great film. I think very underrated. You didn't like it? I don't know. F off. Get out of here. If you don't think it's dope, I'm not interested. We're about to bring it up, but here's the- Wow. Dane DeHaan looks totally messed up. Yeah. Can we zoom in on Dane DeHaan's face? I mean, we're pretty close to it. I can't really see it. Enhance. Just enhance. Enhance, quadrant 24, 17. And if we can't enhance on the verge- Wow, great. That's not going to face. That's not Dane DeHaan. That's a gear. It's not exactly going to face. This is really, really not good. Nope. I can see his hair. There you go. This is just like the lawnmower man. This is just like Jeff Fahey in the lawnmower man. Not a little bit to the right. Wow. Up, up, up. Okay. Go to the right. No, no. There you go. He looks messed up. He got some bad acid or something. It's like some Goblin serum or something. Yeah. Well, I mean, he has a lot. I think he has access to a laboratory. Crocodile. It's crocodile. But there isn't, isn't, oh no, that was in one of the old Spider-Man movies. Who's the- Has there ever been a Spider-Man movie that was terrible? Is it the crocodiles? The lizard? The lizard. Yeah, yeah. Again- I feel like they just keep making the exact same Spider-Man movie over and over again. Yes. I just have to say, if you tuned into this, expecting to hear, what is this? Come on. If you tuned into this Verge cast expecting to be entertained, I think you're getting your money's worth. But educated. Of course, this is free. It's free to watch. So I think you're definitely getting your money's worth. Bang for your buck. At the store in my neighborhood, by the way, bang for your buck. Your time isn't valuable. It's free. I'm losing my voice. Okay. Next topic. You want to go? You want to bail? Are you trying to get Josh out of here? Are you trying to fight? Hey guys, bail? You know what this is what the people are here for. Project Tango. Project Tango. Wasn't there like a Windows Microsoft thing named Tango 2? Project Tango is... Why is Tango so popular? Speaking of Microsoft, Project Tango is like a smartphone that can map a room, like connect basically. Yes. Which is kind of a crazy idea. It is very scary. Do we have that scene from Dark Knight? Play it. Oh, it is. Why isn't it ready yet? It is the exact... The end of the Dark Knight with the sonar. Yeah, it's everybody's got... They attract the cell phone in your pocket and it like... Spoiler alert. Please. The end of the Dark Knight. The Dark Knight uses a Lawn Mower Man like device. Yeah. What do you say goggles? It is like actually there are some similarities to what we just saw in Lawn Mower Man. Here it is. There we go. All right. Here it is everybody. This real invention. Please allow full screen so we stop seeing this. This is exclusive from Google's campus, Project Tango. What kills me so much about this is whoever the writer... Was it Goyer? Is he the writer? Yeah, David Goyer. He's like, I don't know. I don't have a solution to make this end part work. I just don't know what to do. What if I just made up a thing where he adds sonar like a bat. But that's classic Batman. It's like, all right, we need a gadget. Just put bat on the front of it. We're fine. Bat grappling hook. Bat cave. They don't call it bat something, do they? They don't name it. They don't name it. We know it's bat sonar though. It's like bat global surveillance system. Hey, it's just a Project Tango. Project... Bat prism. Yes. That position exists. To all the listeners out there, I do apologize. What we really need is a Bat Snowden to blow the lid off. It was Dick Grayson the whole time. First name Bat, last name Snowden. Project Tango is a smartphone that can map a room and presumably... What's the range on this? Do we know? I think someone does. I see you're looking it up. Super ugly. This is from the mind of... This is being led by Johnny Chung Lee. If you don't know that name, you do remember a few years back, he did these Wii Remote head tracking things? Yeah. That's him. This guy, if you actually... If you don't, haven't seen this, it was really cool. He did this kind of DIY motion tracking on the Wii where using the sensors, you could wear these glasses and when you moved, the perspective would move. And now, I guess with the Kinect, I don't know if there's games that do that. Not really yet. Not so much. It was really trippy when... It's just an extremely bizarre, weird effect. And at some point, he did... This is what he's working on now. At some point, he did go to Microsoft. I don't remember when and I don't know when he left, but then he quietly went to Google and now this is his thing. He's part of ATAP, which is doing both Project Tango and apparently Project Aura is under the ATAP umbrella. Yeah. And Aura is the modular phone project. Yes. Which was started at Motorola and now is one of the things... Oh, here it is. Here's the original project. How cool is this? This is awesome. Now, this may seem quaint by today's standards, but a few years ago, this was like what, five years ago, maybe? This was mind blowing. It's like 08 or 09. And it is kind of still mind blowing. I mean, this video basically gave this guy a career and created Project Tango. Yeah, it's true. It's weird. Power of the open internet. Yeah. Think he would have been able to put that video on the internet if Comcast and Time Warner Cable were controlling how much bandwidth was used for uploading videos. It got too popular. Yeah, they couldn't afford to it, so no one saw it. Exactly. And now he's a drug addict. So the evil corporations. Are you happy? This is the evil corporations, man. Corporations. Yeah. It's corporations. Are you happy? You turned him into a drug addict, Time Warner Cable. Soon to be Comcast. In an alternate reality. This is a really weird cyberpunk novel. This all sounds good to me. It's kind of like something from The Lawnmower Man. It actually reminds me of the plot of The Lawnmower Man 2. Actually I don't know what the plot of The Lawnmower Man is. I have a lot to watch tonight, I guess. What is the plot of The Lawnmower Man 2? I'm sure the open internet can tell us. So here's the thing. Can we do a slow zoom on the Time Warner Cable logo? Just it's really creepy. I just want to point that out. Guys, that's Comcast. What are you doing? It's like the Eye of Horus. Slow zoom going right into the Time Warner Cable. Where is it? It's just the spiral from True Detective. Don't spoil. I haven't seen it. Okay, well there's a spiral in it. Does that show up? God damn it. What is this? Trailer for The Lawnmower Man 2? Oh yeah, he's in it. Oh right. Wait, it's a wheelchair? Is that fruit? Yeah, Beyond Cyber says Matt Fruer is in it. Can I just say that the original Lawnmower Man is kind of an amazing movie and I think it, wow. I really think you should watch it. I've never seen The Lawnmower Man 2. Wow. That was definitely an Oculus Rift set. Some of these graphics are from The Lawnmower Man 1. I just want you to know that. What is going on? Dude, that hat. I feel like Matt Fruer must've been bummed. They're like, hey, we want you to be kind of like a Max Hedren character. And he's like, can I please stop being typecast as a Max Hedren character? Can I just have a career that is not Max Hedren? They're like, no. You're a cyber guy now. Get out of my face. Anyhow. Okay. So here's what's interesting about all these Google projects. Not the city, I've been buying up a city, but ARA and Tango, first off, both horrible code names that need to be changed into something more interesting. Like Connect. What was the Connect code name? It was like- Oh, Projects. Newbie Project Naboo. Natal. Project Natal. That's right. When Kudo Tsunoda went on stage, it's Natal. Remember Kudo Tsunoda? Where were we having that guy? He called it like Project Placenta. Where were we having Kudo? I think he's still at Microsoft. I think he's still working on it. Another guy. By the way, we had him on On the Verge. He was a really cool guy. Really nice. I think we had him on one of the times we had Fallon on. Fallon. Fallon. Fallon. Fallon. Fallon. I was with Fallon on. They're very much in the Google X sort of vein. They are, they are. But the thing about Project R that's interesting is there is a release date for it now, according to that timepiece. Early next year, maybe $50 for the base model. Of course, you can upgrade piece by piece. Yeah, I'm super into it. Yeah, I think it's awesome. I think it sounds amazing. I don't buy that it's gonna work effectively. I see people there, like my radio fell off my phone. And now I can't do anything. I feel like people are really smart. No way it's gonna look that sexy. Yeah, really smart people have done a lot of work to make phones small. To make a small phone with all the... And now we're like, well, what if we just put everything in a big box? I was watching a Lego movie, and we're like, how are we gonna just do it? That's the question. Am I considering it's gonna be able to slide on a really felt awesome screen to this thing? Oh, I want a higher resolution screen, or I want one with a triangle or something. Is that gonna be, or is it gonna be the phone's this thick? And there's a wire dangling off of it. They're saying... It's gonna be the size of a gaming PC. They're saying less than two millimeters. It's gonna be a gaming PC. Hello? That's me answering a gaming PC. Just imagine there's a huge box. There's a box here like so. And Ken, I'm like, hello? I'm sorry, I'm getting a bunch of updates. I have to call you back. The fan is gonna be so loud that you're not gonna hear anything. This will be done updating in four or five hours. So I can't talk to you. We're playing the games I wanted to play. So bye, and then I'd throw it into the garbage. So in all fairness, they are claiming within six to 10 millimeters, which is not bad. It's like six and 10 millimeters thick. Like it's pretty thin. Sure, if you say so. We'll see, we'll see. Can I see six to 10 millimeters on screen right now? Just enhance it over and over. If you were smart, you'd show the movie poster for the film eight millimeter, but you're not gonna do that. It's that big. It's right between six and 10 millimeters. God damn it. All right, zoom in, enhance. Like people don't wanna see how the sausage is made, John. What are you doing? Never show a Google image search result again. Yeah, seriously. Or you're fired. This is the exact size based on your display. You need to switch after you've found your image, okay? Amateur hour in there. It's JV. All right, let's talk about some other things, and culture. And culture, so actually. This is the least informative, one of the least informative shows. Oh, I don't know about that. No, no, we're really lacking in information. I really, you know, I know there's probably a viewer out there, a listener out there. They're like, I can't wait to hear the news about tech today. Don't they know how to read? Let me hear. Can't they read? This week in tech. I can't wait to hear about this week in tech. And then they turn this on. You do realize our audio is right now being run by a puppet. That's true. I'm not even kidding. Can we get a shot of the control booth? Can we get a shot from inside the control booth? I just look like, yeah, you're making a serious point. And then there's a puppet dancing right behind you. Was that made, was that puppet made at the, I think FAO Schwarz has like a puppet making shop where you can design your own Muppet. Is that what that is? I don't think legally we can say one word of the other. I have a friend, because I have a friend. Build a bear? No, I have a friend who has several of these Muppets. She's really into them. Puppets, seriously. Legally obligated to say puppets. Serious about them. Yeah, like she made, they don't have legs and she made legs for one of them. She sewed legs for one of them. Good night. All right, let's talk about some college stuff. Steve Jobs film. Yes. First off, Steve Jobs birthday was on Monday. Mm-hmm. The original due date of my daughter. That's really crazy. Yeah, but we didn't hit it. No, original due date. Yeah. Original. We missed the embargo. We obviously didn't hit it. So it's saying if my parents had sex like eight months earlier, maybe. It's more than eight. What? Five, I don't know. Just continue. It's more than eight, so five. Really, that's gonna span three weeks is really what I'm talking about here, okay. And please, don't talk about me having sex ever again. It's getting really weird. Steve Jobs film. Where's that vest? Rumored. Put that vest on and you won't have sex ever again. That's a callback. You mean this vest? Yeah, that one right there. Oh God. Wait a second, I'm sorry, did you, were you talking about this? I wish I could time this so I could get it on. All right. Oh boy. Do you need help? The control room has informed me your wife just filed for divorce. We got a problem here. Lady writer, are you okay? What just happened? You're good, you're good. What's happening here? You're good, there you go. You mean this vest? Can we edit that post? We'll just cut it faster. Can we edit the post so it just seems like covered a little bit with a little B roll of these guys. We'll just jump ahead in real time. Here, I'll just do it again. I'm just gonna do it again and you guys cut it together for the edit. You think you can do it right this time, okay. You mean this vest? Whoa. Yeah. It's like a lawnmower man. That happens in the lawnmower man. Actually, Jeff Faye gets a bunch of information downloaded and then he puts on a cool ladies leather vest. What is going on? I'm loving this. It's been too long. So you wanna talk about the David Fincher rumor? So early on, early on when Walter Isaacson, I believe sold the rights to this book to Sony, listen to me with like, oh God, it's information here. Yeah. I'm not used to this. I believe there was a major rumor going around that it was gonna be Aaron Sorkin writing the screenplay and Fincher directing. Was it rumor or just wishful thinking? Because Sony Pictures had just done the social network with Fincher, with Sorkin. I don't know. I think people were like, David Fincher's gonna direct every movie about technology. Yeah. Here it is, the Steve Jobs film. Yeah. Steve Jobs lived in a world where everything had a kind of green filter on it. Like everything was green. Just like the matrix. Speaking of. No, no, no. Speaking of the matrix. It's funny you should mention the matrix. Oh really? Actually I had this great idea. Can I give away a great idea? Please do. Yeah, like pizza Chipotle. It's David Fincher related and it's also a spoiler. If you don't know how seven ends. Oh God. If you don't know how seven ends, I'm giving you a fair warning. If you don't know how seven ends. Yeah, can we get a picture of what's in the box on screen? Just take it. But here's my idea is like, somebody should make a fake, okay, spoiler alert. Seriously. Also epilepsy warning. Somebody should make, somebody should make a, like they should sell this. It's the kind of thing you might get at like geek.com or whatever. Yeah. Or like anyhow, it's like a model of Gwyneth Paltrow's. What a head? Model of Gwyneth Paltrow's head. It's a model of Gwyneth Paltrow's head in like a brown paper box. Merry Christmas, son. And you can send it to people as a gift. And it's like hand, it's like hand letter. I had the idea the other night. I think it was like after many hours of sleep deprivation. Oh God. But like, isn't that an amazing gift? Wouldn't that be amazing if like you get a box cause we got a package from, cause we get a lot of packages. Wait, what is a package? When you have a lot of, when you have a baby, a lot of people send you stuff. Like a severed head. And your daughter's gonna have a very weird brain. No, but it's a fun gift. It's a gag, you know, it's a novelty gift. And you get a box and it's in the brown paper and you unwrap it and you open it, it's Gwyneth Paltrow's head. I mean, that's, if you don't think that's an amazing idea, I have to question your sense of good ideas. That's not a very good like questioning. That's a great Valentine's Day gift. I was like, what's going on with my arm over here? It's in a mess. Look, what's going on on my right shoulder here? It looks like I've got some weird shoulder deformity because of the coloring of the chair and my shirt. But if you look at this, it's okay. That's fine. No, but look, right there, it doesn't look right. No. I don't like it. It's a tumor. It looks like a weird extra muscle. What a great show. Yeah. I'm doing it. You made it this fast? Okay. But if Fincher were to do the Jaws biopic and so it- Oh, is that what we're talking about? We put this on the table over there. As we heard, this Horkin film is supposed to be like three parts in quote unquote real time. Steve Jobs preparing for three events. The rumor was. Oh, I don't remember. He wrote the script as in like, it's right before unveils the Mac, it's right before unveils the iPod. It's just like in real time, they're 45 minutes or 30 minutes prior. That sounds cool. It's an interesting idea if he went with it. Did you see Jobs? Oh, you didn't you review Jobs from Sundance? Yes, I did. Yeah. That was not like really that good. That was lifetime. I think Justin Long made the definitive Jaws film. Yes. Can we get a clip? Wait, wait, we're getting scared. Do you think you'd have to license, would you have to license Gwyneth Paltrow's- Head. Like-ness? I guess you would. Yeah. No. I don't know, man. Can someone make this happen? Does she really own her likeness though? It was kind of given to her, right? I guess you could like, you could make it look like Gwyneth Paltrow and the character could be named like Lillith. There's something that sounds like Gwyneth, but isn't, what's the name of the character in the movie? Like how people make like one, we'll put one defect in an ornate rug. Not important. How much is our viewership tanked, by the way, throughout the, throughout the, has it just plummeted? It's like we've lost like- Wait, is that real? Is that real? Is that a true number? It's not a true, guys. Oh, okay. I was like, well, that's not a true number. Literally, it's the puppet talking. So here, it is plummeted. People are like, let me check out this informative- Ten people are like, no, we want tech news. We want tech news. Puppets live. Not Teresa Miles or Mills. But I think, I think that, so anyhow, I think, I think here's the thing. I will say this. Social Network was grossly inaccurate on many levels, but it did make for a fairly entertaining film. Yeah, it was compelling and like- And it was well made. I think Fincher's best movie is Zodiac, personally. Oh, so good. Great flick. You mean sarcastic? No, it's great. I think it's really underrated. I think that most people don't even know that it exists. It was like kind of a quiet, just like, I don't know. It just didn't do, people didn't want to watch a movie about a serial killer who doesn't send a box to someone at the end. That's like a made for TV movie about the Zodiac killer. That was actually a lot better. Is that Richard Ramirez? Is that the person they think? I don't know who did it. Do they never, they never, I forget, I forget how Zodiac ends. Do they catch him? Spoiler alert, don't tell me. He dies before he gets prosecuted, right? All right, okay, that's enough of that. Yeah. Well, spoiler alert. But it did happen in reality, so it's not, you can't really be mad at me for that. I know, I was just saying, what happened to Jesus? Don't spoil it. But I think, here's the thing, I think Fincher could do a good job, but I think you have to ask yourself, what really is the movie about? Like we know and love Steve Jobs. We know his story. Like we've studied him as a person in our world. We've talked about him a lot. What is the movie for a broad audience about Steve Jobs? Like how many more films are they gonna make where it's like he was a hippie in the 60s and he did acid and then like he was hard to work with at Atari and now he made the iPhone. Like how interesting is that story when you really look at it? Because that's what I was kind of struck by watching Jobs, which is not only is it identical to Pirates of Silicon Valley, like you just can't mess with the arc because it's exactly the same, but I was kind of like, this is cool to me to some extent because I know some of these stories and who these people are and I know their background. But like, is it a compelling tale to a broader audience, which is the audience you, and that's what was interesting about Social Network. He turned the Social Network about, which is really probably not nearly as salacious and interesting into a story about this weird loner who had some weird issues where he was trying to like, he's trying to overcome his horrible image issues by creating Facebook. But also it wasn't trying to be everything. Like it wasn't like, here's how, from the time he was a zygote to winning Facebook. Had a CIPO. Right, it didn't show that the whole, well, his story is obviously far less like there, but I mean, it made it into like a character driven piece about a kind of flawed person. And so, and I guess jobs, like, let's be honest, no shortage of flaws to look at. No, no. But no one claims he's a great person. He says he's a great businessman. Like that's the big thing. I don't have a personal life. I mean, really they should just, like who cares about a shit at Apple? Like they should just do like a, that 70s show mini series. Where he's smoking dudes with Kelso up in the attic. That'd be great actually if he was smoking. I guess my question ultimately is like, what is the definitive two hour story about Steve Jobs you can tell? Cause I don't know about launching the iPhone. It's cool, but when it happened, it didn't, people were like, oh my God, like people who knew about technology, like, oh my God, he's going to do a phone. But regular humans were like, what's a smartphone? True detective season two, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I like it. Partners. I like it. So anyhow, I think we have to see like what that, I'm very curious to know what that story really is. The thing you were describing, the Sorkin concept is sort of interesting. If it says that's actually how he did it, like that'd be great. And like, I'd be interested. It's going to be obviously depending on who is casted as Jobs. So I don't know. Kevin Spacey. Justin Timberlake. I didn't actually see Jobs, but I feel like there's a lot of his personal life that wasn't. They don't go into the personal life. They go into kind of a strange daughter and that relationship. They do go into that in pretty good detail in the Pirates of Silicon Valley though. Okay, Harold Ramis passed away. He did. Harold Ramis died at the age of 69. Star of many fantastic films. Writer, director, producer, and star. And I think most people know him as Egon from Ghostbusters. Here he is with the, what is this device called? God, I haven't seen Ghostbusters in forever. Spectral, Spectro. Spectrograph, Spectro Rob. Spectrometer? Ghost detector. Ghost, it's the ghost sniffer. Anyhow. Very young Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray as well. Young everybody. I mean, great, super talented guy. Really funny, smart. And you know, just a downer. Like, I don't know. I grew up watching a lot of movies this guy was in, particularly the Ghostbusters movies. I know a lot of people diss Ghostbusters too, but I think it's pretty entertaining. I love it. I love the song too. It's great. Vigo's in that, right? Yes, Vigo. And there's also a Bobby Brown song. Yeah, my favorite movie is The Child in Order of Importance, Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Ghostbusters 2. This is something, there's a Bobby Brown track that goes along with that film. And this is something that happened, I think, a lot in the 80s that you really don't see too much anymore. That he does a rap in the song and it's about stuff that's happening in the movie. Like he name checks Vigo and several other characters. Could we get a little bit of Bobby Brown's rap from Ghostbusters 2? I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I think it's called We're in Control, I Could Be Wrong. I did some Egon cosplay. Did you really? Yeah, it's a- Like recently? John, can you bring that up? Was it Egon specifically? It's on the document at the top. I gotta look at this too. Oh yeah, Egon. What? This is crazy, I don't buy this. Wait. Is this a troll? No, it's not a troll. 100% serious. That's you? On the left there, yeah. Oh, wow. It's Egon. What do you mean, on whose left? On my left or the people's left? Your left. I'm the taller one. How can you tell it's Egon? So this is, yeah, that's my question. How do you know it's Egon? There's no thing that's Egon. It's all in the performance, you can't capture that. You got Slimer on a badge? That's not how they- Yeah, I don't read all of that in Slimer. Listen, I didn't make the threads. I get it, I get it. I also went as a Ghostbuster, I think, for Halloween. I Could Be Wrong. But anyhow, very cute. That's you on the left there. Yeah. Look at you, you're like mushroom hair. Your throwback Thursday. Yeah, never again. No bowl cuts. TBT. Bowl cuts should be illegal. I think that's cool. Like circumcision and bowl cuts shouldn't be prohibited. There's a sadness though. There's a kind of sadness there, TC. Yeah. You know, darkness in you. I see. You got the trap and everything. That was purchased though, right? Yeah. Okay. Now can we get a little bit of that Bobby Brown song from Ghostbusters 2? Can we get that up on the view screen? I think they're working on it. On the view screen? You can't find it? You wanna look at the song. I wanna look at it. That's what I said. Everybody said he's a really nice guy. Yeah. You know, they're still gonna make Ghostbusters 3. Well, how do you feel about that? I'm sorry. You think it's in poor taste? I don't think it's a poor taste. I just think whether or not he was involved, like it's gonna be a bad movie. Right. They need fresh meat. They're using all the old guys. It needs to be Ghostbusters 3. Oh, here we go. Is this it? I'm not hearing any audio. Is that what we can't run the audio? We don't have sound. We're pretty advanced here. Yeah. But I mean, that's what Subways look like now anyway. I mean, look, this video is crazy. That video is crazy. That's pretty awesome. That was nuts. All right, what else? What else are we talking about? I mean, we can talk about just a lot. Is it Got Milk? Godzilla? We gotta wrap up soon, unfortunately. Do you wanna talk about the Oscars at all? It's coming up on Sunday. No, not really. We're gonna do, we'll have some Oscar coverage, but I don't really wanna talk about it. That's fair. Got Milk, they've gotten rid of. Got Milk. What is Heroes Reborn? Oh, God, they're bringing Heroes back. They're bringing Heroes back. Oh, right, I'm sorry. Heroes, bring Heroes back. No. Siler. No. The other guy, the guy with the hair. They haven't announced any of the characters. Peter. Peter's brother, Milo Ventimiglia, the blonde girl, Hayden Panettiere, Allie Larder. God, Peter was so whiny. The guy who turns into a gecko. Masioka. Masioka. Eshiro Nakamura. Yeah. The old guy, Malcolm McDowell. Linderman? Linderman, is that what his name? Linderman, yeah. They kill off all those people, right? Siler was a cool villain, though. That first season of Heroes was pretty good. Oh, yeah, when he killed Veronica Mars? Yeah. First. Oh, that's right. Was that the first season? That was the first season. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. He didn't kill the character of Veronica Mars, though. No, it was. It was Veronica Mars. I don't think that's right. That's why there's no season. That's right. That's right. Are you? That's cool. That's cool. Take a little off the top. He had a great story, great back story. Very cool. And then, of course, just like Lost, great first season. And then everything was garbage. Well, they had that writer strike. Oh, yeah, there was a lot of the writer strike. Writer strikes, we have ruined a lot of great things, though. Like shows on TV. It should be illegal for writers to strike. We've got to break these writers unions up. Well, it's like, how are there not enough writers? Everybody's doing it. Look at the internet. Like, it's like, all right, we're just going to take fan fiction and try to just producing it. Yeah, but actually, I think that that would be totally passable now. I would love to see our writers pick it. A lot of good fan fiction out there. And that's going to be 2015 is when they're doing it? Yeah. Or this year? No, I think it's next year. Seriously, I'm going to wait till 2015 to see the new heroes. It better be amazing. I'm more excited for the new 24. Yeah, that's going to be great. I'm not a 24 fan. Are you a 24 fan? I mean, yeah. What do I need to know? Bring me up to speed. I never really watch any 24. I mean, I understand the character. I understand that every episode is an hour. There's a world-ending terroristic threat. And that he works for what organization? CTU, baby. Yeah, CTU, Counterterrorism Unit. It's a fake, made up thing. And then he goes off the grid for a while. And for a while, he goes off the grid for one day. There's a movie where he goes to Africa, and everybody dies, and he's really sad. And then he comes back. Why are you ruining it? No, it's basically like a very violent torture from the guy. You just ruined everything for me about 24. Really? How many seasons of 24 are there? There's like eight. Yeah. What's eight times 24? So what's seven times 24? Look at this. Now, he does a lot of torturing. This is actually a lot of people think that 24 was actually kind of like a propaganda, piece of propaganda for the US torture of prisoners of war. Because it was like, sometimes you have to break the rules to save lives. That's right. And it's always like, it's 100% successful. I mean, it's a Bush era show. It's from a time when we felt that there was a constant, nonstop, very localized threat of terrorism at every turn. Every 24 hours. Every 24 hours in every city in America. Every 24 hours, they have to invent a new color at the top of the scale. When you live in Pittsburgh, it must be great to live in Pittsburgh or wherever when there's a terrorist threat to a major city. You're like, I'm good. I live in a very small town. I mean, Pittsburgh's not that small, but they're going to hit Philadelphia, right? They're not going to go over Pittsburgh. They're going to hit New York. I'm saying small towns are safe. That's where all the robots are. Small towns. They're going to take out our robots. That's where all the people who are posing, all the robots that are posing as humans live. They live there. They're not even doing anything. Josh, stop giving the terrorists an instruction manual. Let me give you some coordinates to put your robot family. Is that what the terrorists are using now? Robots that look like humans? Like screamers. That's what the terrorists are using. Screamers. Another great film from the 90s. I think we're wrapping up. Oh, one more thing. One more thing. Daft Punk, Pharrell, new track, like leaked today? Was released today? Very excited. Pharrell and Daft Punk are here. You described it as you thought the lyrics were suggestive in a negative way. I think you said rapey. Rapey is how you described it. I don't know if that's what I said, but I think that's what I said. Because it says the lyrics are, open up your window, let me give you a hug. Yeah, something like that. I think that just sounds like when French guys. Yeah, but if you really think about it, in what situation would you ever open a window? It's because someone's sitting in a tree branch, looking into your bedroom. You want fresh air. Are you worried about hugs? I mean, I know Robin Thicke has ruined the hug. No, I love hugs. I think you misunderstand. He's the gust of wind. The hug is the wind hitting your body, your nude body. Sounds like a pretty rapey metaphor to me. I imagine you throw the window open, the fresh air hits your nude body. That's the hugging question. Caresses your nude body. Not the hand. Caresses. You go in for the hug. No, there is no person to, it's representative of a person. So the wind is like, represents the touch of a person. No, it's just there on your body. It's like some Dave Matthews band level. Well, it wasn't, open up your skirt, little boy. Show the world something. That's the Vergecast for this week. That's the Vergecast for this week. So much great tech news. So much tech news. All your technology needs. As always, you can get in touch with us. You can email us at vergecast at theverge.com. I'm sure we'll get a lot of that now. You can leave a comment on the post when it goes up, or you can get into our forums and start a conversation on theverge.com. You can find us on Twitter. The Verge is at Verge. I'm Joshua Topolski. Ross is ohnoRoscoe, no E on the end. What are you, TC Sotic? At Barack Obama. TC is TC Sotic. No, he's laughing stock. Yeah. And he's great on Twitter. Yeah. He's great on Twitter. He's like the new Darth. Wow, you're just throwing it down. And that's our show. Somebody's asking about Tonight Show. Several people have asked, am I going to go on the Tonight Show? We're, I've talked to the producers. We're working on doing something maybe in April. I hope I didn't just dox anything. But it'll be something special, I think. But who knows? It might not happen. You never know. But yeah, maybe. Just because somebody just tweeted at me. So that's why I'm answering. If Leno isn't back by then. If Leno isn't back, I have to say, I really am enjoying the Tonight Show. And I'm not just saying that because I like Jimmy and all the people over there. I actually think it's really refreshing. No, the transition's been great. It's really good. What do you think about Seth? You get a review of Seth. Yeah. So I would say the Mondays. I don't get the set. I just don't. It's weird. So the Monday. Those chairs. The Monday Seth versus the Wednesday Seth, because I was watching that before we got on. It's much different. Like when you watch it Monday, it was week in update with an interview. And now he's learned to talk to the audience. Yeah. He's learned conversational. It's all right. I think they need, they still need to figure out what to do. But like. They should have gone full on weeknight update. It took Jimmy like six months to figure out like how to be quirky. It's pretty good. Look, it's a tough job. It's good though. I'm sure he'll do a great job. It's surprisingly good. I just don't like those chairs. That's my own thing. Yeah. And that's it. That's it. That's it. And listen, from one family man to another, or family lady to another. Lady writer. Lady writer. We could be in bad trouble very soon. I'm very worried about our families. My jack power will save us. Stay tuned.

It's Thursday, February 27, 2014. I'm TC Sadek, and I'll never tell you what my real name is. Alright, it's Timothy Clement. This is 90 seconds on the Verge. Project ARA lives. Google has announced that it will host a conference in April for its modular smartphone concept. The first Project ARA device could launch early next year for as low as $50. Each of its so-called phone blocks will be upgradable later, of course. And if Project ARA doesn't have a tie-in with the next LEGO movie, it's dead to me. The story of mass government surveillance just took a very creepy, very invasive turn. According to The Guardian, Britain's GCHQ captured webcam images from millions of Yahoo users. The NSA is said to have assisted in the program, known as OpticNerve, which ran from 2008 through at least 2012. And yes, there was nudity in somewhere between 3 and 11 percent of the images it gathered. Personally, I think they were just curious who posted in Yahoo Answers. And finally, there's a new nutrition label that reflects how Americans actually eat. For the first time in 20 years, the FDA has proposed changes to the nutrition facts. Both the calorie count and the servings per container have been supersized. A new line for added sugar has been included, meant to highlight one of the leading causes of obesity in the United States. Listing vitamin D and potassium is now mandatory, while vitamins A and C are now optional. And this is my proposed change for the new food pyramid. It's a pizza. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow is Twitch Plays TC, a postmodern remake of The Truman Show where 100,000 people simultaneously try to control my actions. Come on guys, I really have to pee.

It's Wednesday, February 26, 2014. I'm Dieter Bohne, and traveling around the world in 80 days would have been way faster if you just used Google Earth. It's like, come on, bro. Anyway, this is 90 seconds on the verge. Uber, Uber, Uber. The car service is in hot water following a text message sent to one of its drivers claiming it didn't bring on new drivers before Valentine's Day, thus activating its price surge. Uber has long defended its controversial feature used during peak hours and holidays. The company has confirmed the text, but says it did so to reward new drivers with a strong holiday paycheck. Uber claims it doesn't artificially increase prices, saying it has algorithms to do that. But either way, lovers in San Diego had less money to spend on those precious little candy hearts. Darth Vader, Darth Maul, and now Darth Driver? Girls actor Adam Driver is in final negotiations to star as the villain in the upcoming Star Wars Episode 7. Driver's name has popped up a number of times recently for potentially large roles without panning out. The deal is expected to be confirmed in the coming days. Meanwhile, Star Wars Episode 7 is due for release in December 2015. And finally, our dreams of a Sorkin-Finscher reunion may actually be coming to fruition. David Fincher is in early talks to direct Sony's upcoming biopic of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin, this would mark Fincher's second collaboration with the acclaimed writer. First Facebook, now Apple. All we need them to do now is a Tinder movie, and the trilogy will be complete. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I take to the skies and enter the danger bone. Highway to the danger bone.

I'm Valentina Palatino with The Verge, and this is an emotional sweater. No really. Think of it as a mood ring, but on a much larger, softer scale. This is Tech in Motion's Wearable Fashion Show, an offshoot of the New York Fashion Show where designers show off what the future of fashion is going to be. Until now, we've only heard about how tech companies can make more fashionable products. Is the Pebble Steel's design the best for a smartwatch? Can Nike make its fuel band even sportier? Will Google Glass ever look normal? But while everyone has been focusing on the consumer electronics world, the fashion industry has been playing. We saw jackets and bags outfitted with tracking sensors that would alert you if you forgot something. These come from the up-and-coming designer, Asher Levine, whose work fit the likes of Beyonce and Lady Gaga. I collaborate with different technology companies and integrate their technology into various products that we make here. I'm inspired by biology and nature, and as you can see, the inspiration is like grenade meets reptile. And then it integrates a phone halo tracker device. And what it is, it's a chip that tethers to your phone via Bluetooth. If you walk away from your bag or your bag gets stolen, your phone will beep. And if you can't find your phone, then you just use the chip to beep to your phone to find your phone. In addition to mood-enhancing garb, we saw 3D-printed shoes that, yes, you can actually walk in. Some designs were rather extravagant, with the fluidity only possible from 3D printing, while others just looked like your basic department store shoe. But many of the best designs are the most subtle, like Ministry of Supply's classic business wear. Special fabric acts like a battery, absorbing and releasing heat depending on the environment, but it looks and feels just like your favorite dress shirt. Some of the biggest ways that fashion can use technology won't be so obvious or outward facing. It's integrated sensors and 3D printing detailed patterns. It's technology not as the final product, but as the toolbox from which ideas can come from. And designers can now experiment and produce these faster and cheaper. At our downtown shop, we create different types of materials, and as you can see in many of the things that we make at the shop, it looks like it could be a skin from an alien, or a skin from a prehistoric creature. That's what I kind of want to do. I wish I could get that prehistoric crocodile skin right now, but unfortunately that was 30 million years ago. So what we do is we use different material innovative processes to create the skins that I actually want to use. Some of the ideas we've only seen in science fiction are now starting to become a reality. It may be a ways away before we see these things in our shopping malls, but the fashion industry is already working towards that. The line dividing tech and fashion is rapidly blurring, and traditionally designers have been plagued with the age old question of form versus function. But the next generation of designers will be asking an entirely new question. Why not both?

Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show. This is a special edition. It's a day late because Mobile World Congress is crazy, the big giant phone show in Barcelona. We are joined by our reporters in Barcelona, also hosts of The Verge Mobile Show, Dan and Vlad. Chris is here as well, and we even have the inestimable Evan Rogers, aka Kwisatz Hoderak. How are you doing guys? That's not a word. Kwisatz Hoderak. Hello. It's a good dune joke. I didn't let everybody say, hey, I'm so and so and so and so. I said everybody's name. But that's because it's a crazy wild show. We do things differently the second day. So how is Barcelona, guys? How is the show going for you? It's actually been pretty good. It's been a surprisingly happening show for things that are being announced here. There's been a lot of products announced. A lot of companies are doing a lot of things, which is kind of like a stark difference from last year where not a lot of companies did anything. So we've been quite busy here. Yeah, last year was really very business-y. It almost felt like MWC was kind of dying in terms of consumer interest. It was all behind the scenes deals and things that then panned out during the year, which is probably still going to happen, but it's going to happen maybe in the later part of the week. Whereas this week, we had Sony and Samsung come out with new flagship phones, something that didn't really happen last year. HTC also had an announcement and a big teaser toward its event a month from now. So it's a lot more exciting, I think. So okay, it seems like the biggest news of the show has to be Samsung, right? Even though Sony stuff I think looks pretty great, Samsung is the dominant Android player and they've got their new flagship phone, and it looks like a Band-Aid. Yeah, that gold color is not flattering. Setting aside that comparison, I think, I mean, honestly, it doesn't just look like a Band-Aid. It feels like one. Oh, really? Frankly, it's like you took the Galaxy S4 and you're like, we need to give people something new to buy, so we'll just do incremental changes, we'll do incremental upgrades. That might not be the most charitable assessment to give it because the camera promises to have been much improved. It now has face detect, as well as contrast detect autofocus, promises to have fast focus on any smartphone camera, 0.3 seconds. That could be a really big advantage over the long term, but honestly, for myself, I'm underwhelmed, they just made the screen a bit bigger, 5.1 inches. They gave it a new physical design, which is still very much Samsung-y insofar as it's glitzy and just unappealing. I mean, maybe my tastes are too macho, but the curves feel all wrong. Where the headphone jack is, it kind of seems like it's breaking the design or something. I don't know, and the colors, I mean, it just, Samsung said, and this is just so crazy to me, they did research and they said that the number one thing that people demand from their smartphone is, and I quote, a modern glam look. And I feel like they really matched that demand with what they've delivered. It sounds like a terrible idea and it looks like one. That's why assessment of it, to be honest. Yeah, I don't, like what does that mean, modern glam look? This does not say glam to me. This says iterative update on the GS4, which was itself an iterative update on the GS3, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I mean, just looking at this camera module on the back and this, whether it's stippled or whatever, it's just super. It's Nexus 7. Yeah. So the other thing that is super uninspiring to me is, I know they want to make it waterproof, and that's actually really great, we were all super impressed with the Galaxy S4 Active, but this thing, flap over the USB port, is kind of the worst. Yeah, don't they have the technology, I mean, we've been seeing it for years at trade shows, they have the technology to like dip phones in some coating that makes it waterproof without needing these stupid flaps, right? Yeah, they do. Go ahead, Dan. I was going to say there was actually a couple of companies here this year showing off even more ways that they can do that, the same idea, just like a different approach of dipping some other different chemical, and then they don't need to have the silly port connectors and things like that. You know, it's funny that there's a port connector or port cover on the USB port, but the headphone jack is fine, so obviously they figured out ways to waterproof those ports without requiring a flap, and we see Sony does the same thing with its waterproof Z1 and Z2, they have flap covers over the micro USB port, so it must be something to do with those connectors where it really has to be kept free of water for now. Yeah, the thing I was going to say is that there's also a distinction between being waterproof and water resistant, and the new Galaxy S5, it's only water resistant, it's IP67 rating, which if you care to go and read is slightly lower rating than the waterproof Xperia Z2 from Sony. And you know, I've already made the jokes, and I'm going to repeat it, but okay, I'm going to repeat it. Sony should market the Xperia Z2 by saying that whereas Samsung's new phone can just get wet, Sony's can take a whole dive, you know? Yeah, okay. Okay, you love that joke. I would like to point out that IP67, in fact they spelled it out on stage, IP stands for Ingress Protection, and when he said that I was thinking there was some sort of tie-in to Ingress, the game, and it took me like a good minute to realize that he was talking not about some sort of like, you know, I thought there was like some co-branding thing or co-marketing thing where, you know, the phone would come bundled with Ingress and there'd be some like natural protection for like the player if they were using a GS5, but then I later realized that it had absolutely nothing to do with that. Chris, you're the only person in the world that made that connection. No, but all they needed to say was IP67 because that's like an acronym we've heard before, but no, he's like Ingress Protection 67 on stage. Listen, they're bringing this information to the masses. Like they want people to know it's not just acronyms, it's real Ingress Protection. Yeah. So what was the vibe at their unpacked event? Because typically unpacked events are totally batshit insane, and this one was like, you know, the standard like Samsung gets up and lists off a bunch of features. Well except for the 15 minutes of random orchestra. I mean the orchestra was kind of like when people were walking in and filing to their seats the orchestra was playing and I think they were having some technical difficulties that pushed the actual event back a few minutes so they had the orchestra play on. And as far as a Samsung event, this was the straightest Samsung event I've ever attended. They just played it right down the middle as far as like showing their products, showing what their ideas behind these products were, what they do, what they're capable of and their mission with them or whatever. And they had people who represented the products talk on stage as opposed to having a Broadway show and an actor try to represent these things. So as press going to this event where you go and you want to be there to learn about the new products, this is kind of something that we've been asking Samsung to do for a while. You know, there was no misogyny, there was no dance. Wow, I totally failed. So one of the things I failed to mention at the top of the show is that these guys are actually at the press area in Barcelona at the conference center and so connectivity is as it tends to be at the mobile show, at the mobile conference, really bad. I think they're just messing with us. Yeah, I mean, we're messable. So the other thing about the GS5, I mean I know we're talking a lot about this but it's like the most important Android phone. We were, like there had been all these rumors about they're going to tone down the design and it just like, they didn't slather on a ton of features other than the health stuff which we should get to. But they did like basically keep the same Samsung experience. It's not wildly pained. It's totally the same. It's totally the same. Yeah, not just the same software but the same ID which we already talked about before, like with the exception of the back. But like if you look at the phone from the front versus the GS4 and like, if you look at them separately, not literally side by side, but if you saw a picture of GS4 then a picture of GS5 from the front, I think you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. And it's like, it just feels like Samsung is in cruise control right now which I mean, this is the classic like complacent, like company that's like basically printing money and becoming complacent, you know. And this story has played out time and time and time again over the past 15 years in the mobile industry and Samsung kind of needs to like step up its game. If the GS6 comes out and it doesn't look significantly different, I'm going to be very, very upset. The thing I would say is that Apple has kind of set expectations with respect to that in so far as you can have one design and then you can pretty much reissue it the next year but you're only allowed two years. You can't do it a third time. Yeah, that's the thing is Samsung has – or sorry, Samsung. Apple has done more to update its iPhone design. It iterates more often than Samsung at this point which seems counterintuitive and crazy but that's totally what's happening. Right and the thing is Apple plays it a bit more strange by saying this is not the iPhone 6, it's the iPhone 5S. So it's pretty much like the old one, you just modified it a bit, we're not going to call it a 6. I think that's a bit more faithful, a bit more truthful to the consumer. But I mean, come on, you know how it is. Every year you have to reissue a new flagship phone whether you're ready to or not, whether the silicon is ready. One thing I would say, there's a Snapdragon 805 chip which is looking amazingly powerful as you've got to see it today. They're moving some equipment around next to me. But yeah, the Snapdragon 805 is a great chip but that's coming this summer whereas Samsung really needs to issue its new processor and its new device now so it can get the sales going. So the company is kind of forced into this corner essentially. I mean it's just the market dynamics. It's them, it's the carriers, everybody wants something new, people want something new. So then we kind of get these overly incremental upgrades. One thing I would say about that press event by the way, Dan says he's happy with it, I am not. I'm kind of disappointed that there wasn't a nice Michael Bay interview to tell us about the phone. Tell us about a 5 inch, 5.1 inch display Michael. So what you're saying is that you wanted a celebrity to just peace out. That's what you wanted. Pretty much. Okay. Okay, oh the heart rate monitor. You guys tried that, how does that thing work? It works as advertised believe it or not. It's able to grab your heart rate in like 5 to 10 seconds. I think it's kind of a clunky design because you have to hold your phone and wait for it. We're obviously going to talk about their wearables that they announced and I think that the implementation of the heart rate monitor in those is a much better system but if you don't want to buy a wearable, now your phone can read your heart rate if that's something you want to do. So is 5 seconds fast enough for a heart rate monitor or a heart rate reading? Like when would you be using this heart rate monitor? I would say probably in between sets if you're working out. That would be my guess. Even if you're getting freaked out that you're about to have a heart attack. That's true. Yeah, but it's not an EKG, it's just a heart rate monitor. So yeah, you can take isolated readings of your heart rate. Did they say anything about specifically what kind of athletics or activities you would use this in regard to S-Health? I don't know, I mean they had a bunch of things. No, they didn't really go into that. Oh Dan, Dan. Sorry, I think we're also kind of overlapping with the lag here. What I was going to say is they had things in the background basically. They had icons showing people running and cycling and all those things. And as Dan says, I really think it's something that you can, for example, measure your resting heart rate and then go and do a particular exercise and then come back, measure your heart rate again and then judge how intensive that is and whether it's a good idea. Maybe you can provide that information to your doctor and I don't know, your trainer, whatever people do. It's an extra piece of information and tracking, but to Dan's point, I really think that these heart rate monitors make a ton more sense in the new world to get to that fit and do on the phone itself. Right. So actually let's talk about these. So let's talk about the boring ones first and then move into the awesome ones. So there's the Gear Fit and the Gear Neo, right? And the Gear 2 and the Gear Neo seem like basic iterations. So what's the difference between these two? Well the difference between the Gear 2 and the Gear Neo is that the latter doesn't have the camera. Which is awesome because the camera is a silly feature. The Neo also looks cheaper. It doesn't have the metal finish on the top like the Gear 2 does. I do want to argue in favor of the camera because that was basically the sole thing that I actually liked about the original Galaxy Gear. It's a quirky little thing that you can just take the quickest of snapshots with and it really doesn't get in the way. You don't have to pour anything out and unlike Google Glass, you don't have to have something stuck on top of your head. But yeah, I mean I look at the Gear 2 both devices and I just frunk. And like the Galaxy Gear wasn't a terribly good idea. This is not either. They fixed the software like with minimal effort. They basically just added the ability, they added a home button so that you wouldn't have to like remember one of the stuff. Which to me just basically tells you that this is just frunk. It's bad. The display, I have a very important question. Is the display always on on the Gear 2? No. If it were, it would have no battery left. My god. And these are running Tizen, right? That's correct. So yeah, the biggest change is… So do you see any notable difference with these things running Tizen? Do they seem faster? Do the software seem exactly the same? The software experience is exactly the same. They do feel snappier and more responsive but that also could be because Samsung probably upgraded the internal hardware. The big difference here is that Samsung claims you can get two to three days of battery life with this as opposed to the one day that you got with the Galaxy Gear. Whether that's attributed to more efficient chips or Tizen being more efficient, we don't really know. But you know, it is definitely a welcome improvement. I mean you do not need… Let's put it this way. If your smartwatch requires a dual core 1 GHz processor, you're doing something fundamentally wrong in the design of your smartwatch. No smartwatch should have functionality that requires that kind of horsepower. It's just like… It's so Samsung. This entire product is so Samsung. I'm glad they refined this and took out some of the major pain points from the original Gear. I thought that they were almost apologetic on stage about the original Gear when they were announcing the Gear 2. But that being said… Oh yeah, they absolutely should be. Yeah, but that being said, this is not… I mean I think we can all agree this is not the Gear to get excited about, right? Absolutely. And also Chris, just to mention on the positive side of the equation with the Gear 2, they now have interchangeable straps which again is a step forward for Samsung. But the earlier point, and it's a very important one that DISA makes, they put a home button on it. That just tells you everything you need to know. You're taking an interface that requires a home button, an interface that is usually fit on 4 to 5 inch devices and you're shrinking it down to the wrist. And it's just wrong. You need something that is specific to its physical dimensions. You need something that if it needs a button, it shouldn't be a home button at the bottom of it. Well, that's the same complaint as the Sony smartwatch 2, right? Absolutely. That it has basically the standard Android buttons below the display on the front which is insane. And the thing is you operate these things with either your forefinger or your thumb and they don't ring. So the Android buttons stay the same size in order for your thumb to be able to touch them properly, but then they occupy so much more space on something that fits on your wrist, something that is essentially supposed to be a watch. Right. Let's talk about the gear that's awesome, which is GearFit and it looks like pretty freaking good. Like it's maybe a little bit bigger than I might want a fitness band to be, but if they would just put the functionality of a smartwatch, just put notifications on this thing and have it be a health monitor, I would buy the hell out of it. Well I'd also want them to have it work with non-Samsung devices, but this thing looks great. I was going to say, Dieter, it actually does do notifications. You can get your calls and your messages and your emails on there, but it only works with Samsung devices. And like you said, I would buy one of these, but I don't really want to buy a Galaxy S5 or whatever. Yeah. Wasn't one of their initial slides, didn't that include openness and cooperation with an industry? Weren't those the words that they used? Yeah, they said that the Gear was an open platform or something like that and it's kind of silly when it only works with Samsung devices. So it's an open platform for people to bring their apps to, but you can't take it to other platforms. Apparently that's what they mean. Not only does it only work with Samsung devices, by the way I apologize, the light in this room timed out and there's nothing I can do about it. Not only does it only work with Samsung devices, but only specific Samsung devices because we saw over the course of the original Galaxy Gear's very short lifespan, they slowly rolled out compatibility to additional Samsung phone models. It wasn't like on day one it would work with any Samsung you own. It originally only worked on the Gear, I mean the Note 3 I think, and then they rolled it out to the S4 and the GS3. So it looks sweet though. It looks really cool. Well, not only does it look sweet. I mean Vlad wrote a really great report about it and like the thing that we were talking about before and I'm going to steal his thunder and then I'll let him yell at me for it, is this is Samsung when it's at its best. Yes, it's iterative. Yes, they're using technology they've got off the shelf. Yes, they're stealing ideas from other companies, but every now and then they do all those things but they are able to turn something around really fast that's remarkably compelling. And sometimes Samsung Samsung's it up and we get the Gear and sometimes Samsung Samsung's it up and they do something that's like whoa hey, this is really nice. Yes, it's been a long time since we've actually had that latter experience. But what you said Samsung took Samsung's technology off the shelf, they took that technology off the Samsung shelf. We mock Samsung energy to the high heavens about those curved displays on smartphones and we're still right, we don't think we're wrong because they don't make that much sense in a smartphone. But putting that curved display on something that is supposed to wrap around your wrist and actually requires a curve makes perfect sense. And the thing that I would say with the Gear Fit is that it's just instantly recognizable. To me it's the exact opposite of the GS5. I'm seeing people with the GS4 all around the MWC show floor and I'm thinking do these guys have a GS5 already? You just can't tell the difference. Whereas with the Gear Fit because it's super artistic Hit us with the details. There's the Z2, which is the new flagship, and then the Z2 tablet, which is like, look at us, we made a thin tablet. Yeah, the Z2 is really nice. Oh, come on. Yeah, the Z2 seems appealing. You have to give the Z2 tablet a bit more credit, yes. As big a selling point as it's selling is, but I mean, in terms of technological feats and engineering feats, I think Sony is really stepping back into its own habits of just being way out ahead of everybody else. The feeling I get with other phone manufacturers is that they're meeting engineering limits before, or lower engineering limits than Sony is. Sony can push things so much harder and to such greater extremes than everybody else. I mean, the Z2 tablet, you have to hold it in your hands. It's extremely, extremely thin, and it keeps the same 6,000 mAh battery as tablet Z, that it succeeds. It's waterproof. And it has this new display, which really is the big highlight for Sony this year of the Z2 tablet. They have these light-colored LED displays. And I've been complaining about Sony displays in this flagship phone for years now. And they finally fixed it. And they fixed it in such great fashion. I mean, this is basically what this is. Hey, Vlad. They really are as good. Vlad, I just have a question for you. And you and I talked about this a little bit on Verge Live on Monday. But why is it, do you think, that Sony has not been able to make inroads and become a Samsung-level competitor on Android yet? Because by all appearances, they are making phones that are as good as any phones in the industry right now. Yeah, that is very much the case. But I would say right now, they just fixed their display. The phone that has their awesome, amazing display isn't on sale yet. It just got announced. So we basically need to give them some time. I've been saying this for all that time. The display is probably the most fundamental spec that you can have with your device. It's your input. Your output device is the first and last thing you see and you use. So if that stinks, if the person doesn't enjoy it, they don't enjoy the entire user experience. So I feel like I've built up a prejudice against Sony's Android screens just because their display isn't bad. So Vlad, talk to me about the specifics of this device a little bit. I know on the Tablet Z, they kind of used a material that was similar to the Xperia Z, and it was like a polycarbonate kind of material. What is the outside perimeter material on the Z2 Tablet? Is it aluminum like the Z1 and the Z2? That's correct. The smartphone has an aluminum frame around the outside and has glass in the front and in the back. And the tablet, it has a soft touch back, which is just, I can't really prove on that. I can't think of a way to improve it. It feels so good. It's probably a good reason to use an Android tablet. The Z2 tablet would be the one. So on the Z2, on the iPhone. Hang on. You've got to come up with a reason to use an Android tablet, especially at this size. These bezels are pretty big. I'm using a Nexus 7 as my primary tablet right now. And I've got to say, Android tablets, you look great. I don't know. I think Sony's actually doing a super interesting thing with their Tablet Zone right now, because the Tablet Z last year's model is actually super affordable. Compared to the iPad, you can get a Snapdragon. I think it's the 800 and the Z. Sony's making a great tablet here. This Z2 tablet looks great. It looks really good. They're selling a 16 gigabyte model. The hardware doesn't matter, because there's no support from the ecosystem for Android at this size. That's the problem. That's the only ecosystem that Sony has available to them. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. But it's like, sorry for your luck, guys. You're making great stuff that nobody should buy right now. Is this true, sadly? That is true. So what's way more interesting to me is the Z2 phone. I think the Z2 phone looks awesome. I agree. Yeah, tell me about it. Well, what's there to tell? Aside from the display, it really is more or less the Z1. It keeps the exact same footprint, but grows to 5.2 inches, which means that much of an upgrade. It has a Snapdragon 80201, which is a very incremental upgrade on the 800. It's basically the same chip, which is no bad thing because it's a very good chip. Camera is basically left the same. And that has 4K video recording. But again, it's one of those upgrades where it's like, I don't have anything that plays back 4K. Not even the phone plays back 4K. So I don't really care about the damn video being at that resolution. And it really is all about that display because it is very nice. It's great color fidelity, beautiful viewing angles. I mean, they claim it has the widest color count of any mobile device, which is something that you probably need to measure. I just think it's one of the better ones in the market right now, which is as much as someone needs to do. I mean, it's still got the glass back. That's fine. I mean, not hearing that the camera's been improved much is a little bit disappointing to me. But I got to say, looking at this, comparing it to the Nexus 7 that I'm using now, and even the HTC One, which is generally regarded as one of the better designed or best designed Android phones, this seems really nice. And as long as they haven't screwed the software up too much, and it sounds like they've continued their trend of doing what they're doing with software with the Z1, which is not being totally overbearing with it, this is an interesting phone to me. This is the kind of phone that, if this doesn't have any success, then I feel like there's something fundamentally wrong with the Android ecosystem, that Sony can make a phone this good and nobody cares. Yeah, but the same could be said about the HTC One. Yeah, but I mean, you can always talk up HTC to just having any marketing money and just being that. Sony does not spend some marketing money in the US. Right, well that's the other thing. I mean, hopefully they can get some success with this in some other markets. I think it's great. I will say that Sony is one of the few mobile phone makers whose mobile phone division is making a profit. But yeah, they do have trouble breaking into the US. They bring their devices to the US far later than anywhere else in the world. And they're only on one carrier so far. So it's really hard for them to really make a dent in the US market with these devices, even if they are really excellent and attractive devices. And also, let's not overestimate the difficulties that HTC has had. The company just announced this week that the HTC One and the One family have been its most successful phones in terms of sales, most successful smartphones. So they have been doing OK in terms of sales. It's just they haven't had a portfolio around the One. They've had one flagship phone. And when people can't afford to buy the flagship phone, HTC just hasn't really had the compelling lower price point device to point them to. Then they end up in some garbage from Samsung. Well, what about the One Mini? It's not a One Mini. That's exactly the problem. It's a One minus a couple of its most fundamental advantages. If they called it the One minus, that would be like a really good thing for the product. Frankly, they shouldn't have done it. They should have done a better phone. Yeah. No, I totally agree. The other insane thing that happened at Mobile World Congress is Nokia has announced Android phones. So that's the Nokia X, the XL, and the X Plus. So I mean, how are they? Are they fast? Are they any good? Is it terrible? Is it awesome? Tell me about these phones. So I got to play with all three of them. And I guess the X and the X Plus are pretty much the same thing. The X Plus just has a dual SIM. And I keep coming back to the point where Nokia has a Windows phone already at this price point that offers a better user experience than the Nokia X. The X is running a forged version of Android that's based on Android 4.1. So it's like two years old. It's really dated software. And the performance is very apparent that this is the older version of Android when you're jumping into third party apps and you're trying to bounce around between your apps and things like that. There's a lot of lag. It's pretty sluggish. It's just not a really pleasant user experience. People with a very good experience they are mimicking the home screen interface of their Lumia phones. But they kind of missed, like it looks like the home screen of the Lumia phone. But it loses all of the animations and all the other beauty parts of Windows phone. So it's just like very surface level similarities. And the main navigation is pretty fast as far as swiping up and down the home screen. But once you're in apps, things get pretty dicey. And then it's hard to say that this is going to be Nokia's savior. They're really using this as like a Trojan horse to get people onto Microsoft's cloud services. But I'm not sure I fully buy that approach. I think it'll get people used to using Android apps instead of using Microsoft services. I think the biggest thing here is, at least the vibe that we get, is that essentially it's a Windows phone with a shortcut into running Android apps. That's what's happening here. It isn't really an Android phone because it doesn't have any of the Android applications. It tries to replace them with Nokia Microsoft alternatives. And it's like, we have Windows phone. We can't get traction with it. We also can't get it cheap enough. So we're going to run the cheaper platform that has a much wider app ecosystem. I disagree. I don't buy that they can't get it cheap enough. And unlocked Lumia 520 is $69 in the US. Yes, that's the thing. This is going to be launching for 89 euro. That's considerably more expensive than a 520 is right now. And this thing looks like Windows phone, but it does not perform like Windows phone. It's not a Windows phone experience. So it's very surface level. Nokia said numerous times that they plan to keep pushing this price lower, but they're already lower with Lumia. I don't get it. Am I the only one who thinks this looks like an unholy monster? Like this has none of the advantages of Windows phone and all the disadvantages and ugliness of a basically web-aware rectangle UI. Yeah, that's the first. This is the worst of both worlds. There's just a lot of confusing things with the UI. When you install a new app, there's no app tray or app list. It just gets thrown down at the bottom of your home screen. And so you can put it in folders and stuff like that, but there's really no great organization there. It's got this second home screen called Fastlane, which Nokia is kind of like combining your most recent apps and notifications into one feed, which they say is very popular on their Asha phones, but I'm not sure it really translates that well on Android. And then Nokia is always known for putting great cameras in their devices, and these particular ones have fixed focus three megapixel cameras that are terrible. So it's like there's no advantage to it. The only advantage that a user has when they buy this is the fact that it has a Nokia name. You're not getting Nokia's great design. You're not getting Nokia's great camera technology. You're not getting Nokia's great software. You're getting scraps. This doesn't even seem like a good, this is like the saddest vendor lock-in ever. Like for Google, it makes sense that they are pushing devices that really bring people into their service ecosystem because their lock-in is so great. But this is like, oh, well, introduce people to Microsoft services, but you'll still be running Android apps. But Microsoft doesn't make a huge amount of money from these services. I don't think Google had anything to do with this, or any participation, or anybody called Google and asked would you buy it if we did a really garbage Nokia with Microsoft services running on top of Android. But I think the biggest issue here is also from Microsoft's perspective, it's just kind of a head scratcher. I see why Microsoft's acquired Nokia. There's a lot of good reasons to think if Nokia was going to pursue this plan anyway, Microsoft wouldn't have liked to have its main Windows Phone manufacturer split its focus between Windows Phone and Android. That would not have been a good idea. But once Microsoft agreed to acquire Nokia, and I know that deal hasn't closed yet, it really should have put a stop to this. Because what does it say to Windows Phone developers? Like do we carry on making Windows Phone apps, or do we switch to Android knowing that Microsoft is going to support Android apps now? It's a really confusing situation for them, isn't it? Yeah, no, it's totally confusing. And I mean, honestly to me, it just seems like what Nokia has decided is they don't believe that they're going to get the apps that they think that people want at the low end any time soon. And so they just said, look, we're going to do Android on the low end because we want people to be able to sideload those apps on there. Like the UI is whatever. It's not great. I can't decide if I think it's patronizing. There's the simplification of just having a single home screen, but then there's the fast lane, which seems a little complicated. Whatever. It's like, fine. It's not that interesting to me. What's interesting to me is that Nokia, somebody inside Nokia, felt that in order to do what they were trying, in order to achieve what they're trying to achieve in the emerging markets that they're trying to tackle, that Windows Phone wasn't going to get there. And if we're right that it's not really about price, it's not really about driving down the price of Windows Phone, driving Windows Phone down to work on lower and lower hardware because the 520 seems to prove that they're relatively close and they could get closer. If it's not about the hardware and it's not about price, it's got to be about software. It's got to be that inside Nokia, they had a fundamental belief that they weren't going to get what they needed to get in terms of app support in order to drive it in emerging markets. It's got to be the only answer that makes sense to them. I've said this before, but it really feels like to me that Nokia had a group within that was working on this for a long time. And it was very apparent that they were working on it for a long time. It's based on Android 4.1, which is a two-year-old version of the operating system. And they were just like, this Microsoft deal is closing soon. We are pushing this to market. We've been working on it for so long. We're not having this scrapped. And so there's that part of it. The other part, I think, is that, like you said, Peter, that it's a tacit admission that Windows Phone does not have the apps that people are looking for and that people buy phones because of the apps. You buy a smartphone because of the apps that it can use. And that's why Nokia initially explored this Android project for however long ago when they started developing on it. I think most people disagree with me on this. But I think there's a very real possibility that Microsoft will kin this. And it will disappear within 30 days of the closure of the acquisition. So I would say that I would believe you more if Nokia had announced one phone. But they announced three. And they announced a line of them. And they announced a Nokia Store that they need to maintain and all these other things that are pretty entrenched ideas, I guess, and entrenched services that they need to offer with these phones. But Ken was two devices and an entire cloud network devoted to them. I mean, that's fair. But there was also two devices sold on one carrier that literally nobody bought. Yeah. Right. Well, on the other hand, Nokia didn't exactly spend even five minutes on naming these devices. They just borrowed agency's naming scheme from like two years ago. Well, let's put it this way. I think that if you want a collector's item, you should strongly consider picking up a Nokia X. Because I can't see Microsoft continuing to put R&D dollars into developing Android devices. So even if these last, say, a full year on the marketplace, I don't think they're going to get successors. That would be my guess. But you know what else? This basically disproves Bill Gates. Because he said the world is getting better all the time. Whereas two or three years ago, the collector's device from Nokia was the N9, which to this day is one of the prettiest and nicest devices, even though it's kind of left. But these are no N9s. That's for sure. These are no N9s. That's my point, Dan. That's my point. The collector's device is getting worse. It's not getting better. So the other thing I really, really need to hear about, because you guys have held it and I have not, is Project Tango, which is Google's I can see the whole room and space thing out spatially. Right on the phone, better than a connector. Like a connector. I don't know. It seems insane. So tell me about this thing. So I remember talking to you guys a week ago or so when Google announced it. And I was pretty mad on the whole announcement. I was like, oh, so they're announcing another phone to give us augmented reality games. But then I got to see the thing in person. And it is pretty wild what it can do. It's got these multiple cameras and sensors on it that capture a far greater amount of data. It can measure distance. It can measure spatial awareness and things like that. And then it's got a custom processor inside that can crunch all of that data, feed it into an API, and spit it out to an app. So it can do things like you can hold up the phone, and then it can just literally start to build a 3D model of the room as you move the phone around the room in real time. And so you move the phone around, and you can see the object in front of you get built in a 3D model on the screen. And so this technology has actually been around for a long time. The founders of the company, Movidius, that developed this particular device compared it to what the Mars Rover does when it was on the surface of Mars mapping things out. But they've now shrunk it down into a thing that can fit in the palm of your hand and run on a smartphone battery. It's pretty wild. It's quite a trip to use. Did it work? Yeah, it worked. I mean, it worked. Like they built this thing. It's a developer's device that Google's going to give out to developers to build apps to actually make use of all this data. But they had a couple of demonstration apps to show the capabilities of it. So this one that is playing on the video right now is a distance heat map. So items that are further away are a darker blue. Items that are closer to you are orange. And as you move things, it adjusts as you move the phone around. So everything pretty much worked as they said it would. It was able to build a 3D model of the table in front of me right before my eyes and things like that. It was quite impressive. I came away far more impressed with it after seeing it in person than I was a week ago when I had just seen that Google announced it. So OK, I mean, obviously the hardware is super janky. But that's like because it's a developer device and they're only making 200 of them. Did they talk about whether or not this was going to turn into like, do they have plans to do production? Or is this just a crazy wild experiment? What the hell? So they were really cagey about that. I think they were really, we were talking to Movidius. We were not talking to Google's side of things. So I think Movidius was very concerned about spilling Google's plans and things like that. But the CEO did hint to me that this could be in consumer products in the very near future. But he wouldn't say how much it costs to build these developer devices or an exact time when it will be in a smartphone on a shelf in a store. Assuming you need to pay more for this thing, what app would make me be like, you know what? I want to spend an extra $50 to get the Super Tango Power from, like I think, what the killer app is. I mean, I think we need to wait and see what the killer app will be. That's why these developers are going to get it. Some sample applications are very obvious things, building a 3D model of a room or a set very quickly and easily. But they also say that they could put this in like a neck-worn wearable device and use it as something to assist the visually impaired, since it can detect how far away things are. If an obstacle is in someone's path, it can give them an alert or an audio clue. And then there's the visual effects industry that could use this to build 3D models for movies and things like that. I don't think it's an application that everybody would make use of. But there are definitely things where this could be a useful device. So Dan, let me ask you this. It kind of seems like the fact that this technology is bundled into a smartphone is actually not the most important part, just that they can get it down to the size. They have it in a smartphone for convenience's sake. It's a mobile computing platform, essentially. And if they're going to do that, why not just make it a phone? But were they also talking about having this in a slew of devices that weren't quite as computationally powerful as smartphones? I mean, that's a fair assessment. I mean, the key development that they wanted to stress was the fact that they have this processor that they developed that can take all of this data and analyze it and crunch it and manage it. And they've made this processor small enough and power efficient enough that it can run in a smartphone form factor. So they're using the smartphone as a vehicle to show it off. But there's no reason that it couldn't also be applied in other small-sized things, like a GoPro camera with this type of technology or something like that. Right. Not only could you have it in a GoPro, you could have it in something like Google Glass. And I'm sure Google is very interested in that for indoor mapping, like they said in their announcement video. But it seems like this is something that could possibly go into all sorts of different products. But it is interesting to see it in phone form factor. Yeah, I don't see why they couldn't apply it to a variety of different form factors. I just wonder if that was what they were most vocal about at MVC. They were really kind of cagey as to what future plans would be, to be honest with you. It's not really, they didn't make it seem like it was limited to just smartphones. What else is going on out there, guys? What else did you see? I don't know what else we saw that we could talk about. We saw a lot of things. It's not Firefox. We should talk about the new Firefox OS. So they updated Firefox. They showed us version 1.3, which is the latest version. It's on a couple of devices that will be hitting market in a month or whatever. And it's a faster, much more refined interface than the Firefox we saw a year ago. It really felt like this was the latest version. It really felt like this was Firefox growing up quite a bit in the past year. It's still definitely very low end. And definitely, a device like the Moto G with Android 4.4 runs circles around it. But it's a lot better than it used to be. And you can have devices with higher resolution displays and faster processors and things like that that make it an actually usable smartphone. I remember last year when we first saw the first Firefox phones, you would open up the dialer, and then you'd wait, and then you'd push a button, and then you'd wait for it to receive the button command. And then it was like when basic things like the dialer were virtually unusable, it was like a non-starter. But they've addressed those. The performance for those basic core features is a lot better. But it's hard to see this really competing well against the cheap Android phones that are really flooding the market. But the cheap Android phones, let's be super clear. Are not good. I guess they're better. The Moto G is an excellent phone. The Moto G is the counter to your argument there. But the Moto G unsubsidized is what? $100 and what? $180. $199. Yeah, and I mean, Firefox is going to move a lot lower than that. Yeah, but there's no reason that the Moto G is just like the first of a really good low end phone. I have a feeling that Motorola has said that it plans to go even cheaper and still maintain the quality. So I don't think Firefox has a long time to hold that slot without being really challenged. Yeah. And I also feel like to Dan's point, Android phones are likely to trickle down to lower price points quicker than Firefox OS is going to be able to really build out any sort of app ecosystem and really get itself to the sort of responsiveness that can hope to match devices like the Moto G. Just this week, it was revealed from Motorola that the Moto G apparently is one of his best selling phones and that the company is making a profit, whatever you say. So it's not a lost lead. I know Motorola itself has been losing money, but the Moto G hasn't. Right. Yeah, I mean, Mozilla's ultimate goal here is a $30 phone, which is pretty remarkable when you consider that Nokia on stage this week, like their first announcement before they got into Nokia X was the 220, which is a 29 euro phone that has a keypad, a tiny color display, and like its headline features that it can get on the internet. So the fact that Firefox wants to actually produce a true touchscreen smartphone for $30 is pretty remarkable. And that's not to say that you're going to get a headline experience on that device. I would say you have to put a heavy quotation marks around smartphone. Very heavy. I mean, they're so heavy, they might even crush it. Like what is, aside from price, what is Mozilla's competitive advantage in the market right now? There isn't one. Well, no, I'll tell you what it is. It's the fact that they cater to the needs of carriers. So you're seeing where you're seeing a lot of wins for Mozilla, and I think where you're going to continue to see the most wins, is in carriers that operate in emerging markets, and maybe European countries where ARPU is a little lower. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that Poland was one of the first countries where they released a device last year on Vodafone, I believe. So my guess is that, and these are countries where, and these are carriers, where they're really keen on branding the experience top to bottom. So it basically looks like a Vodafone phone. I don't know if you guys remember, but a few years ago, Vodafone released basically its own operating system that lasted about a month. But that really is the new feature phone. Yeah, but it's, well, yes and no. But it's worse than feature phones. This is the problem with it. It's worse than feature phones. I actually got to try out the $25 proof of concept, and it really proves nothing at all. I mean, to Dan's point, the new phones are so much more mature than last year and so much more usable than last year with Firefox OS. But here's the other thing that I can tell you, and it's the thing that gives me no hope for this OS. Nobody at Firefox's presentation, nobody at Firefox's booth here at MWC, is using a Firefox OS phone. So if it's not good enough for the people who are making it and for making the software to use on a regular basis, it's just not going to happen. Because you need those people to essentially be testing it for you. You can't just flood markets that can't afford the higher-end smartphones and hope that that will somehow give you success. I take Chris's point about being friendly to carriers, but I just don't think that the user is going to be. I'm not sure that Firefox OS has anything to offer consumers. I would love to be part of it, but I don't think it is. No, but here's the thing. This $25 smartphone that I have at that booth today has a garbage display, and it has amazing lag. Like, it's almost like an anchorman where his dog ate the whole wheel of change. You can't even get mad at the lag because it's so pervasive. So yeah. You just feel bad for the phone. Yeah, so I would take those $25. I would add $5 extra somehow, and I would get the cheap Nokia. Because that would at least get me an internet. But to be super clear, the Nokia you're referring to, the 220, is just a candy bar. Like a candy bar straight out of 2005. The 220 looks great, though. You're smoking, I don't know what you're smoking. You're smoking some powerful narcotic. Well, here's the thing. If you want a disposable phone, for example, and you only have $30, you get the Nokia. Because that thing will get things done for you. If you will be frustrated to the high heavens, you pay the $25 and you get a Firefox device phone. And you get nothing done. Like honestly, if you have $25 and you can't afford to spend more, then I don't know. Save your money and start sending telegrams. Didn't the last telegram network in the world just shut down last year, if I'm not mistaken? It was in India, I think. Yes, but yesterday we covered Telegram, the new security-focused mobile messaging app. That's true. That's a very clever transition. No, it's completely unrelated. Also, hold on. Side note, I need to loop back to this. Chris, it is in fact you who is on drugs. Because the 220 is a beautiful candy bar phone, and these Firefox phones look like garbage. Cool story, bro. Yep, well, that's where I stand on it. Yeah, so HTC had some random announcements, like you're going to be able to share your processor power from your phone, which, cool story, guys. No, it's good. Oh, come on. It is good. I mean, I have been one of the big fanboys of the screen computing ever since study at home, and all those ones were a big deal on PC. And I think Samsung. So what kind of work are they doing? Well, it depends. I think you can pick your own project. But they're basically doing scientific research, and they're using power cycles from your phone to contribute to that. It's like folding at home. That was on the key. Whatever. And it doesn't affect battery life or consume cellular data? It only works when you're connected to Wi-Fi and plugged into the wall, I believe. So I don't know. Maybe this is too nerdy, but one of the big things, one of the most important factors of distributed computing is floating-point performance, and our processors are really bad at that. So I would love to know what kinds of projects are available for you to choose. It's because the performance for watt seems bad. It's worth noting that Samsung is doing the exact same thing. They launched an alarm clock app a week or two ago that does the exact same concept. So there are obviously applications for it. I don't know how much or what specifically they are, but both companies are pursuing almost the same exact idea. OK. It seems like horse swallow. It's just total bull crap. Did you say horse swallow? Is it a cod or a horse? Then he escalated it to bull crap. Let's just remind everybody that Evan is from Kentucky. I thought it was cod swallow, but I didn't know that horses had swallows. What is a swallow? I don't know. I love your sense of public responsibility and communal cooperation, guys. We get to talk about a bit of distributed computing and contributing to good causes and discoveries and whatnot. That's great. No, sure, that's fine. I want everybody to do distributed computing really well and accomplish the goals and do the research. But the thing is, if this is a PR stunt, because you get to feel good about doing something with your phone, that's great. But if it's just wasting electricity and wearing out your parts and it isn't actually very effective. No, Evan, you're totally right. It is wasting electricity. Because all the other battery power that you use on things like Flappy Bird and whatever, that's productive. Well, at least that's entertaining. No, that's providing you utility in the means that you want it to do. But this is, I'll wait to see which projects are on. Vlad, every time I break 30,000 in threes on the iPhone, another angel gets its wings. And I have given wings to at least six angels. Humble brag. That wasn't even a humble brag. That was just a brag. It was just a straight up brag. Regular brag. I'm not ashamed of that straight up brag at all. That is the definition of holier than thou. I used to be a big contributor to distributed.net in the search for prime numbers back in the day. And actually, my roommate covertly installed SETI at home on countless workstations at the University of Michigan and was eventually caught and got into some amount of trouble for it. So I understand the appeal of contributing to distributed computing efforts. But I don't know, I think that this is indicative of two troubling trends. One is the trend that maybe we've topped out, at least in the short term, we've topped out the need for additional processor power in phones. Because you look at, I mean, never mind the GS5. You look at the GS4 or the HTC One from last year, they're perfectly fine and fast. And there are no new capabilities coming to Android short of something like Project Tango that would require a C change in the amount of processing power that's available to you. So now you're just sitting on this massive excess of gigaflops that you might as well contribute to a distributed computing effort. That's problem one. Then problem two, of course, like Evan says, I mean, the additional power consumption is a very real phenomenon. Like my power bill went up when I had distributed.net running on my desktop PC. Like there was a measurable impact in my bill. So if this becomes a big thing, that's going to be something to consider. OK. Yeah, I agree. That's the worst transition ever. Is there anything else that you guys want to chat about? I mean, the new HTC One leaked. It looks like we thought it would look. It's got an extra camera sensor on it. It comes in several colors and seems, I don't know. It looks like a slightly more rounded one. Yeah. It does look slightly more rounded. I'm excited. I don't think I would say. Sorry, the only thing I would say about the HTC One is that it looks a little bit more forgivable in light of the Galaxy S5. True. Yeah. Good point. Well. I don't know. Like I really hope that the new one has a regular, really great camera. Like if the main camera is subpar and they try and kind of like mask that with whatever could possibly be going on with the second camera, I'm going to be so dissatisfied personally. I can't even. Evan, that's what the Sony QX100 is for, bro. Oh my god. That is the sardine pan that I just opened. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm calling it. That is the Virtual Show Barcelona edition 2014. I want to thank Vlad and Dan especially for joining us from the show floor in Barcelona. Pretty awesome. You can follow them on Twitter as DCCpert and VladSapov. You can also follow the rest of us. I am Backlon. Chris is ZPower. Evan is Evan Rogers with a D. Although I'm sure the guy without the G is also nice. But you should follow Evan because he's awesome. We are all at Verge. You can leave a comment on this very post when, well, you can do it right now. You can do whatever you want. You can also talk to us in the forums. And we will be back soon, probably next week. And until then, we're going to miss you dearly.

It's Tuesday, February 25th, 2014. I'm Evan Rogers and if you need a surrogate for your beard transplant, I'm your man. This is 90 Seconds on the Verge. Just in time for Titanfall, Twitch is coming to the Xbox One on March 11th. But it isn't just live streaming your games or watching others. Players will also be able to jump right into the Xbox One games they're watching. And think of it this way, instead of paying $60 for a new first person shooter, you can now live vicariously through someone else for free. Google is focusing its lobbying efforts on stopping the political focus on people who aren't focusing on the road but are instead focusing on Glass. According to Reuters, the company is speaking to legislators in Illinois, Delaware and Missouri in an attempt to derail distracted driving bills that would include wearable computers like Google Glass. Google runs one of the biggest lobbying operations in the tech world, so being heavily involved in the lawmaking process is nothing new for the company. The company believes that making people more familiar with Glass will help ease their concerns, saying that the device will help connect them with the world around them. Got milk? Not anymore. The US milk industry is dropping its iconic Got Milk tagline as part of a rebranding effort to promote milk's health benefits. The new slogan, Milk Life, will focus on nutrition in an effort to boost declining sales. The shift marks a return to the industry's nutrition-focused Milk Does the Body Good campaign, which was retired in the early 90s. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I start rebranding other beverages. OJ, don't drink it after you brush your teeth. That's not pee, that's apple juice. Hot chocolate, it's like coffee for toddlers. Coke, it's just as addictive as Coke. Hot coffee, it's like toddlers for chocolate.

Hey, this is Aaron of The Verge and this is the Huawei TalkBand B1. It's kind of a cross between a fitness tracker and a Bluetooth headset, so it can show you the time, the number of steps you've taken in the day, the number of calories you've burned, and also how much sleep you've had. Aside from that, there's not much else to the fitness tracking aspect, but it's also a Bluetooth headset. So you just click that button and I think, yeah, pull it out, and it's a pretty standard Bluetooth headset. That goes in your ear and to answer any call, just push this button. Apart from that, it also does NFC, so if you pair it with your phone using the Bluetooth, you'll just be able to hit your wrist down to make a payment. It charges over USB, which is at the end of the strap, and they say it's good for seven days of use. It's pretty limited when compared to Fitbit or the Nike Fuelband, and it's also thick, although at least it's light. The display is the flexible OLED, much like Samsung's new Gear Fit, and it's easy to read. Huawei says it will cost 99 euros in Europe and Asia next quarter, but it hasn't decided if or when it will release the TalkBand in the US.

A hundred years ago, the Bowery was one of the roughest places in New York. It was the eastern border of Five Points and home to the Bowery Boys, one of America's first street gangs. A lot's changed. Now it's an arts center, home to a bunch of restaurants, a handful of artists, studios, and importantly for us, the New Museum. Inside the museum, things get pretty weird. Right now the second and third floor are devoted to the Polish sculptor Paweł Altomare, and Paweł himself is wandering through the building, stripped naked to the waist and covered in yellow body paint. The fourth floor is open to the public. Anyone can paint whatever they want on the walls. The fifth floor is decked out to look like a Soviet spaceship. They pride themselves on showing off the newest, most innovative art in the city, but this month they're launching a project that's really unlike anything a museum's ever done. It's called New Ink, a kind of half-workspace, half-incubator that's being set up in a building next door to the museum. They've already signed up the experimental architecture program Studio X from Columbia, and Rizome, an arts and tech organization that's affiliated with the museum. Starting today, they're looking for designers, creative coding projects, basically anyone doing cool things with a computer. All of these people, their common thread is that they're kind of working with technology in an experimental way. By placing all of these different disciplines in a small space together, new ideas might emerge through the sort of creative collision of all of their different practices. There's a really rich tradition of art on the Bowery. Artists like Maya Lin and Bela Bartok have had studios just across the street. Arts have also launched here. Kickstarter's first offices were just a couple blocks away. Part of the point of the incubator is to bring those two traditions together. If all you need is a workspace, it's easy to find a cheaper one. New Ink is going for something more, a cross-pollination between art, tech, and design, the kind of magic you get when a lot of smart people are all doing exciting things in the same place. The interesting thing is that's happened on the Bowery before. Whether it's 70s punk or 60s pop art, this one street has seen this kind of neighborhood renaissance over and over again. In the end, New Ink is betting on one more renaissance that designers and coders can piece together another golden age.

This is Dan Siever with The Verge and we are here in Barcelona, Spain checking out the Project Tango developer device. This is built by a company named Movidius, been in partnership with Google to develop this thing. And really what's cool about this is it is taking the motion tracking and computer vision technologies that we've seen for a few years, maybe in things like the Mars Rover project, to use mapping surfaces and shrunk it down into a device that you can hold in your hand and be powered by a mobile battery. As far as technology goes for it, really the key here are the cameras and imaging sensors. It's got a standard 4 megapixel camera here which captures full color images and then it's paired with an IR sensor and receiver here to capture the depth and measurements of spaces and rooms and other things. And then you've got a tracking camera here which is a low resolution tracking camera for tracking objects. Google is actually releasing this for developers to be able to take these technologies and build applications on, to take the data that's being pulled in from these cameras and sensors and then build applications. Some of the things that you can do are pretty cool. You can actually in real time map the depth of a room. This is a pretty basic demo that shows further objects are in blue, where closer objects are in red and you can see that kind of changes as I move the camera around. From there you can extrapolate things like distances and other things so if you're mapping the size of a room and creating a 3D model you can get accurate sizes. Other things that you can do is a depth sensor as well. You can see this is blasting an IR pulse across the room to measure the depth of the room in a matter of seconds and it's able to feed that information back to the camera and back to the phone and then can be used in an application. It almost looks like a sci-fi type of scanning going on. One of the other things that you can do is capture real time 3D modeling of a room. It's able to capture a low resolution picture and then it uses the motion sensors and the vision sensors to build a 3D model as you pan around the room. You can see things that are further away and closer. In front of us here we've got a table and you can see it's building that table just as I pan around with the camera. Google is looking to get this into developers hands in the very near future within the next month or so and then it's really up to developers to come up with cool applications that take advantage of all of this technology and all of this data that's on tap. We've seen some companies already have announced and come up with apps that are able to map out a space and build a 3D model for room planning and other features but it should be interesting to see how developers are able to take advantage of all of this technology and make it useful to us. So there you go, that's a look at the Google Tango device with some really cool computer vision technology.

Welcome to The Verge Live. My name is David Pierce. You're Chris Ziegler. I am Chris Ziegler. Is it Ziegler or Ziegler? Ziegler. Can you say it's Ziegler? No E. Pretend the E isn't there. Okay. Done. And we are here. This is The Verge Live. It's Mobile World Congress. It's the first day. And what just happened is Samsung just announced, kind of in typical Samsung fashion, all of the things. All of the things. So before, we're a little late getting started here because we wanted to get Dan Seifert, who's actually in Barcelona, watching Samsung unveil all of the things. And we are going to have Dan tell us things right now. So Dan, all of the things. What was your favorite thing that Samsung just announced? Not like the most interesting, but your favorite. My favorite thing is actually the Gear Fit. That thing is really, really cool. Yeah, so I mean, was it clear that this was going to be cool and exciting and interesting? Because that seems to be the overwhelming reaction from everybody. I don't... You know, Samsung had announced the Gear 2 and the Gear 2 Neo a couple days ago with a press release, but it just kind of dropped this Gear Fit during this announcement. And it's got this curved AMOLED touchscreen display. And it's seriously the first time that I've seen a device with a curved display and actually been excited about it. It's like if Samsung finally figured out a place to put this curved display technology. This is Dan Seifert with The Verge. We're here in Barcelona, Spain. It looks huge. Is it huge? Like I saw it on the guy's wrist as he was standing there. And like, it's smaller than the Gear, granted, but is it huge? Not really. It's not really much bigger than the Fit 4. It's, you know, three quarters of an inch wide, two inches long or whatever for the actual unit itself. It's actually really light and really comfortable. I was surprised. What's the deal with the screen orientation? Because I feel like, you know... It's backwards, right? Yeah. Are you going to have to hold it like this to do anything? Yeah, it's aimed away from you, right? Yeah, it's like confusing at first. When I first put it on, when I actually used the device, I think I put it on upside down and backwards. And I took it off and flipped it over. So the way that I found that I was most comfortable to wear it was to have the display so that if I held my arm out in front of me, I could read it. So I guess that's... I don't know how to really describe that, but, you know, I could read it if I'm just holding my arm out in front of me. The first glance or the first inclination was to do it the other way. So I think the band kind of like directs you to do it the other way. But... Okay. I mean, it was comfortable either way. It's just a matter of how you want to read it. Yeah, fair enough. So the... I guess we should talk about the GS5 because that's like the thing, right? This is probably the most significant important phone that will be announced this year. It's like this and the iPhone are the two that ultimately matter the most. I guess it's important, right? Well, I mean, so that's the thing, right? Is this seems to me to be really not that new or different or exciting, but you've held the thing. So tell me what you think. Right. So in terms of importance, Samsung made a big point to like say that they've sold 200 million Galaxy S phones over the years. So it's like, yeah, it's very important. It is, you know, the world's largest smartphone maker's flagship smartphone for the year. But you're right. It doesn't really look that much different than the Galaxy S4, especially if you're looking at it from the front. When I first saw it, I was like, oh, they're showing us another Galaxy S4 because it uses the same exact design language, very similar size. You know, it's very similar. But the big difference is on the back. They finally gotten rid of that glossy, nasty, slimy plastic and they've replaced it with this soft touch dimpled finish, which is exactly like the finish on the original Nexus 7, which actually feels pretty good. It doesn't look great in photos. I know a lot of people have been telling me that, like, you know, they're seeing it in photos and it's not, they think it's pretty unattractive. In person, it's a little bit better looking. And I think the black and the white definitely look better than the other two. You know what really doesn't look good in photos is the gold one because the gold one looks horrible and just like deeply upsetting as a phone. Is it, have you seen it? Is it as bad as it seems? Yeah, you know, the gold one isn't my favorite. I'd say of the four, the gold one is definitely the ugliest. It looks like a bandaid. Like, I don't know. It looks like a bandaid. I guess that's cool. In person, it kind of shimmers more, I guess. So it's kind of like an in between gold and bronze. So it's not like champagne, but it's not like pure gold and it's not like a full bronze. It's like that in between. Fair enough. So from the, it seemed to me just watching the stream that Samsung really doesn't want to talk about things like software or interface because they're, you know, they're famous for screwing that stuff up and they don't want to, they just don't even want to talk about it. But was that, what's new here? It seems like they've scaled some stuff back, but I don't know what's new. So, you know, they did scale some things back. They mentioned, you know, they've got a revamped settings menu that has like cleaner, flatter icons and it's a little easier to navigate. And the lock screen is a little bit cleaner and not as cluttered as it used to be. But, you know, really this is a Samsung Galaxy phone. It looks like a Samsung Galaxy phone on the software. It feels like a Samsung Galaxy phone on the software. It doesn't feel that much different than say the Galaxy S4 software. And so, you know, there's been a lot of rumors saying that, you know, Google's influenced Samsung to change its software designs, but I don't think we're really seeing it here on the Galaxy S5. Okay. So what's the vibe like in that room? Like the Samsung has this weird history of doing really horrible massage. Strange events. Yeah. And this one was kind of simple and straightforward. And what was it? Were people excited? I mean, they played it as straight as could be. It was, you know, they talked about the devices, they talked about their strategy with them and there was no theatrics and no other stuff going on. It was kind of like, you know, the last year's Galaxy S4 event was kind of the peak of their absurdity with events, I guess. They had the Broadway actors come out and do skits and vignettes and everything. It was really belabored. But, you know, this year they kept it straight to the products. They let the products speak for themselves. I think, you know, it's a more effective way to present your products rather than distract with all this other stuff going on. You know, they had probably five or six thousand people in this room wrapped attention to this event. So, you know, it seemed like the people were there to see the products more than the Samsung show. Okay. I mean, first of all, I think you're giving Samsung way too much credit when you say that that was the peak of it last year. I had this odd feeling things are going to get better and weirder and I really hope so. But this felt to me like an Apple event. They just got up and they were like, let's talk about features. Let's talk about features. With the possible exception of the 15 minutes of orchestra at the very beginning, which I couldn't tell if that was intentional or not. It seemed as though maybe they were delayed a bit. So they just told the orchestra to keep on rolling. Maybe it was intentional. I'm not sure. Fair enough. So, Dan, the gears. That's the other thing that they… This seems to be something Samsung is really interested in burying too. It's like, they just, I don't know, I get the sense from Samsung that they're kind of trying to hide a lot of this and they figured out that the gear fit is really cool. So they want to talk about that. And then the rest of it, they're just kind of glossing over because they're like, we're going to sell a ton of them. Here it is. The end. You know, I think they didn't sell a ton of the first gear. And it was like, you know, it received a lot of criticism. We really disliked it for a number of reasons and so did a lot of other reviewers. And it seems like Samsung actually listened to a lot of the complaints that were with the original gear and applied them in the gear too. You can now change the bands, which you couldn't do on the first one. It's thinner, it's lighter, it's way more comfortable on your wrist. It doesn't look as obnoxious. You know, they've done some things with the interface where it's easier to navigate. It's more responsive. They have a home button now, which makes a lot more sense than the gesture based stuff they were doing before. So hold on, hold on. So this is, I'm just looking at this video now and it still looks really, really humongous. Like is it, like this is the old gear and it's the largest thing that has ever existed. Is the old one, is the new one actually like nicer? Is it, cause like the Pebble Steel, right, is the one that we look to as sort of the closest thing to a nice right-sized watch. Is this anywhere near that? So it's still definitely bigger than the, than the Pebble Steel. It's, it's, it's like thinner and lighter than the first year, which isn't, you know, hard to do, I guess. But it does give you, you know, this, this bigger full color display that the Pebble Steel doesn't have. The other thing they did is they say that they now get two to three days of battery life, which is like, you know, two to three times longer than they did with the first year, which was one of the biggest complaints. You know, we'll have to test that when we get to the new device. But if they're able to fulfill these claims, have this performance, have this, you know, battery life that they say they have and things like that, you know, the gear just became a whole lot more attractive than it was before. I mean, you think, you think like this is actually something people are going to be interested in now? I mean, because it was like a funny joke the last time it seemed like was everybody just kind of looked at it and was like, well, this is a thing that Samsung made. Right. It was, it was like, it was like Samsung saw the wearable market and was like, we need to dive into it and we're just going to do a thing and throw it out there. I think this one shows, reflects a lot of them listening to consumer feedback on to what they actually want in a, in a, in a, in a smartwatch. And, and, you know, maybe they'll be able to fulfill that. We still don't know how much it's going to cost. So there's two versions. There's a gear two and the gear two Neo and the Neo is kind of stripped down. They, they took the camera off. It doesn't quite look as high end and it's supposed to come out at a lower price point, but you know, we don't really know how much this is going to cost. If it comes out at $300, like the first year, then it's, it's probably still dead in the water. Yeah. Well, at least in the U S I suspect what will end up happening is we'll see a number of carriers either bundle them with devices or do promotions where they say, well, if you buy a note three or a GS five, we'll throw in a, you know, a gear two Neo for free. Yeah. They did that briefly with the Neo or excuse me, the, the note three and the original gear. And I think that's why I ended up seeing so many gears on the street is because people caught onto this one weekend promotion where everyone bought a note three and then they had this thing on their wrist. Yeah. They didn't know what to do with it. Fair enough. All right. So Dan, I think we were, we're going to have to let you go. But before we do, you got to actually spend some time with this thing. So we're going to run this video that you shot yesterday or today or sometime, whenever you shot it years ago with the galaxy S five. So thank you, Dan. And you know, stay safe in Barcelona, I guess. Eat some ham for us. Eat some ham for us. Oh, I will jam on. All right. All right. Check out this hands on with the galaxy S five. This is Dan Sievert with the verge and we are here in Barcelona, Spain checking out the Samsung galaxy S five. This is the company's latest flagship smartphone. It really looks very similar to the S four. It's got a very similar design language with rounded corners, a metal trim alongside. The only major difference with the hardware here is actually on the back. The back features a new soft touch finish with a dimpled pattern. It really feels a lot nicer than Samsung's older glossy finishes. It feels very similar to the note three without the leather look. But otherwise it feels pretty much just like the galaxy S four in your hand. Hardware wise, it's a little bit different. It's got a five point one inch display. They got a capacitive button for multitasking here and a new fingerprint scanning home button on the front there. On the back, it's got a 16 megapixel camera, an LED flash and a new heart rate sensor that uses your fingertip to measure your heart rate. You can still take the back cover off to access the battery. The SIM card slot, it's got a micro SD card slot as well. 2800 milliamp hour battery that Samsung says gives 20% better battery life than the galaxy S four. Inside the galaxy S five is a quad core processor. It's 2.5 gigahertz, two gigabytes of RAM. It's really fast and responsive. From our brief tests, there's really no lag that we can particularly see. The interface here is definitely very familiar to Samsung users. There are some slight differences. If you swipe over from the home screen, you can access the My Magazine feature which was available with a swipe up in the Note 3. Otherwise, it's a pretty standard home screen. The settings menu looks a little different. The tabs are gone for a more icon based approach. It is running Android 4.4.2. Otherwise, it's definitely a Samsung phone. It's got all of Samsung's apps and helpers and things like that. The new thing here is S Health has been greatly improved. In addition to the heart rate sensor on the back, it's got a new exercise coach and pedometer and things like that. It has the ability to be expanded with third party apps that can tap into an SDK that Samsung will be releasing soon. The heart rate sensor uses the sensor on the back here and you just place your fingertip on it and then it will give you a reading for your heart rate in about 5 to 10 seconds. You can see my heart rate there. Samsung is going to be releasing the Galaxy S5 in a variety of different colored backs. There's blue, black, gold and white. Depending on which market they're going to release, depends on which color will be available. Initially in the United States, we're going to see the black and white models. Samsung doesn't have a pricing announced for the Galaxy S5 but it says that we should expect it to see it on shelves in April. So the Galaxy S5, 5.1 inch 1080p screen. It has a 2.5 GHz processor. It has the newest version of Android. It has a heart rate thing, a fingerprint sensor. It has all of the things. It seems like Samsung this time instead of doing lots of crazy software went for lots of crazy hardware. Is that a good move? Well I think what they really needed to attack most of all was the, I think they needed to present a fresh industrial design which they failed to do because we've seen... Yeah, I'm sort of surprised. I would have thought after like the HTC One, Samsung's really good at going back to the drawing board and saying, okay, somebody beat us, how are we going to do that? There's the famous story about the iPad. Right, right. They went back to the drawing board after they saw that the iPad 2 was like 1 millimeter thinner than their tablet, canceled it, and re-released it like two months later. So we saw basically the same ID on the GS3 and GS4. Now here we are with the GS5 which frankly unless you knew what you were looking for, looking at the front, so I'm not sure you'd be able to tell the difference. It really does look like exactly the same. And then like Dan said, the software is basically the same. So I think this is going to be a particularly tough sell for existing GS3 and GS4 owners. I will say the fingerprint sensor is kind of cool. Like if I have a GS4, I'm with you, I'm not upgrading here. But the fingerprint sensor and especially because they're doing all the things that it seems like Apple sort of wanted to do but hasn't really pulled off which is like pay everywhere and lock folders and all this stuff where it's like that makes a lot of sense. There's the private mode which is for porn. But it's also, it makes sense. That's actually a really great thing to have on a phone, especially for people who, I would think it would make more sense on a tablet for people who like share it with friends and stuff because most people don't use my phone all that often. You can see how that would also tie into like Knox which Samsung is pushing really hard for business customers, right? So yeah, I mean that is just one of the bog standard features. This time a year from now, virtually every smartphone that you see on the market and the end of the market that the Galaxy S5 plays in is going to have a fingerprint sensor. It's just where things are going. Yeah, it's really true. I mean, and I guess the one big thing that everybody said last year was that the GS4 felt terrible and I guess they didn't go like above and beyond in solving that but it sounds like they may have solved that and so if nothing else, I'm going to be less angry at it which will help. As a member of the public who actually didn't mind the plastic on the GS4, I get that a lot, let me just say that I'm not stoked at the GS5. I don't want like a pleather back on my phone. Fair enough. I don't see why not. But fair enough. So if they had just carried over, if they're going to preserve basically all the ID, I would have actually preferred that they carried over the quote unquote slimy back too but they didn't. But either way, I think we can both agree the gold version is not, it doesn't look like a winner, right? Am I right? Yeah, I mean, you're not wrong. You're not wrong. I mean, the idea of a soft touch gold back does not appeal to me. You don't remind me of... A soft touch gold anything is just not quite what I'm going for. Yeah, yeah. Who was it? It was, was it Carl Lewis or Michael John, someone, some really famous Olympian, his last race wore gold Nikes. Yeah. They were awesome. Yes. And that's what the back of this phone reminds me of. And not in a good way. Not in a good way. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Well, so in other news, in weirder news, I guess, and probably less relevant to most people, I guess, Nokia did some stuff today. Nokia did some stuff. So it's like deeply, I guess everything Samsung did, as unsurprising as it was, Nokia was incredibly surprising. Nokia trolled the crap out of its new owner. Yeah. Very strange, right? I mean, we kind of saw this coming for the past couple of weeks, but still weird. Yeah. So, and I think we have Tom Warren on the line who has been covering all of this for us for decades at this point, I think. Tom, hello. Hey, you hear me? Hey, yes. So, so what was the, what was the reaction like in the room when they started talking about all this stuff today? Well, I guess they started off with the Asha stuff, first of all. So it was kind of like going through the motions and stuff. And then they obviously, they didn't like, it was weird. Elop was on stage, but he didn't actually say, oh, this is the Nokia X. He was like, we've got this family, the phones, and we've got the Lumion. And they just like showed it up on screen. And then they started like, like going through the features and stuff. So it was, it was kind of like people trying to figure out what they were actually doing, was it Android and stuff. So it took them a little while to say Android. Yeah. Okay. So, so run us through real quick what it is they announced. So it's three phones, right? Essentially, there's the Asha phones, which are cheap phones for the developing world. And then there are these three new Nokia X phones. Take us through those a little bit. Yeah. So there's the X, the X Plus, and the XL. So the X is basically a four-inch phone, WVGO resolution. It's essentially, it's the same sort of hardware as the Lumia 520. It's got low storage. I think it's got the same amount of RAM and stuff, but it's, and a different camera, but essentially it's pretty much the same sort of thing inside. And then the X Plus like puts the memory up and the storage up slightly. Then the XL is like basically the five-inch version of the X. And they're basically, they're all Android devices, but they're Android devices in the sense that Nokia has created their own forked version. They will run Android apps, but they will come from a Nokia store, maybe from Google Play. And the message that they were kind of saying throughout the day, even when they mention Android on stage, every time they mention Android, it came like seconds later. It was like Microsoft services, like literally every time. It was like someone apologizing to their dad. It was like, dad, I'm doing something bad. I'm sorry. But so Tom, Tom, the official story, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the X line slots vaguely, nebulously in between Ash and Lumia. Is that right? Yeah. And yet the X starts at 89 euro, tops out at 109. Which is crazy cheap. It is crazy cheap, but what is the Lumia 520 unsubsidized? Tom, do you know offhand? I don't know what it goes for in euros now, but I think when it first debuted, it was actually like 110 or 120, around that mark. So it was definitely released back then at a higher price point. But it's the same specs, so I'd be interested to know if they built the Lumia 520 today, how much that would cost. Right. But yeah, I mean, it retails for a lot less than that. They're really splitting hairs now with the price point. I mean, I think the official message is that the X is designed to kind of like carve this little niche between the very low end and the Lumia line. Is this to do with the Verge? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think the way that they kind of explained it today is that, like they said this on several occasions, it was like, we want people to get on Microsoft services and I think it's kind of like designed to be a feeder device into the Lumia. But I think at the moment, it feels like a weird stopgap. And I think personally that it's almost a reaction to the fact that Windows 10 hasn't pushed down as far to the low end and been as flexible as perhaps Nokia wanted it to be. Because they definitely worked with Microsoft and they kind of schooled Microsoft on like, we're making these phones into like mass volume and we need to do these certain tweaks to your OS. And I think there's a little bit of frustration that that didn't happen sooner because they needed devices to replace the ones that, you know, like the Simbin devices that they were phasing out and they just weren't getting like the sort of volume that they were used to. So I think it just feels like a weird stopgap. So do you see this as something like a warning shot from Nokia being like, hey, this is something we could do because the timing is all wrong, right? Because they're about to get bought by Microsoft and presumably then Microsoft will be able to... Like in days they're going to get bought by Microsoft. And presumably, you know, Satya Nadella will be able to exercise his authority and say, nope, you don't make Android phones anymore. So I don't totally see the point of doing this. Like why is Nokia doing it and why now? Yeah, I mean, I guess I think looking at it, it looks like it's just going to be like an Asha replacement, which in that sense it makes sense. But at the moment, because the specs are so aligned with like the sort of devices that you could do with Windows phone, it's kind of in that weird gap and that old area. It makes sense if they can push the X down to lower devices. But like when we played with it today, like opening apps is real slow and like navigating around is not that great. So they've got some performance issues there already. And it seems like they've been working on this for like at least a couple of years. And to Nokia's credit, they did also show today a 45 euro touchscreen only Asha device. So they do have some wiggle room there between the bottom of the X line and the top of the Asha line, right? Yeah. But I think this Nokia X and this sort of strategy is perhaps the reason that Microsoft brought Nokia. Because if you're Microsoft and your main partner that's shipping 90 percent of your Windows phones is experimenting on the low end with Android, then that's going to freak you out a little bit, right? Because this is a test of the low end. But if they hadn't have done it in the way that they're doing it with like tying it to these Microsoft services, which is clearly like obviously they can't work together right now, but it seems like there's something weird going on there like the whole mention of Android and Microsoft services. Like it seems like they're just trying to keep that cool there at the moment. But I think if they'd introduced this without Microsoft buying them, I think it would have been slightly different. I don't know that they would have put the major focus on Microsoft services, put it that way. And then if they're experimenting in the low end, which is all that Windows phone is growing in at the moment, then that's going to alarm Microsoft. And then it could have led to eventually an experiment in the high end, right? So yeah, I think Microsoft probably got wind of this some time ago. And I think it's probably one of the main reasons that they decided they had to go after Nokia. Because I don't think they really wanted to be a phone OEM. I don't think that's how they started off. They wanted to be like Android, right, across several partners and stuff. And they're struggling to get the partners. Although they did announce some new ones at the weekend. But I just feel like this was one of the things that pushed them over the edge. Because they needed to secure Windows phone. So Tom, what's your honest take of these devices? You've used them. Do they suck as bad as I suspect they do? Or are they amazing? Are they somewhere in between? Tell me what you think. Yeah, I mean, they're amazing. I could say they're amazingly bad. But they're not that bad. But they're not the device that you're going to go out on and load whatever stock version of Android you want on there. I mean, the performance on them, that is pretty bad. I tapped on Facebook today, and I probably counted about six or seven seconds until it started loading, like actually loading on the screen. Well, if you were choosing between, say, an X Plus and a Lumia 520, which would be the better choice? Well, I think the 520 at the moment. Stop it. I mean, just because you actually... Re-evaluate your life. But I mean, I think the risk here also is that they're pushing this as a way to get people into the Microsoft ecosystem, which definitely needs to happen because everyone's got Android devices. They're signing into Google accounts, or everyone's got an iPhone, they're signing into iCloud. And no one's really signing into devices on Microsoft accounts and stuff. So to get that ecosystem buying and stuff, they kind of need stuff like this. But the way that I see it, it's not like a lined Windows phone. It's not all integrated in. So what's to say that people are not going to just buy this device and then just not use OneDrive or just use the Android apps that they actually want to use? And people just go the complete opposite way. All right, there's no Google services there. But I mean, who knows what Google... I don't know if Google would ever release them outside of the GMS services and stuff. But I mean, who knows? It's just a really weird device. Cool. All right, Tom, we got to let you go because Dan is eating all of your ham in Barcelona. But thank you so much for joining us. And we will see you soon. See you soon. So the other thing that happened today... Was it the other thing? There were a lot of things. HTC did some nothings. They had some phones. But their real phones are coming later in March. But the other actual announcements in terms of good phones today was Sony. And Sony, I think, is sort of a little under the radar compared to Samsung here. But I think may actually have just come out with a better phone. Yeah, well, the same thing happened last year, right? We actually have a Z1 right here. And it... Which is just covered in fingerprints. I don't know if you can see this here. Just covered in fingerprints. Completely covered in fingerprints. But it was definitely one of the sleeper hits of 2013. Universally well-reviewed and well-liked. But just didn't get the traction of a GS4 or even an HTC One. Wasn't on every US carrier. So if they can right those wrongs with the Z2, which is what they announced today in 2014, they're off to a good start. Yeah, so Vlad Zavov spent some time with the phone. And we have a hands-on, so let's check that out. Hey, guys. This is Vlad with The Verge here at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona. And Sony just concluded its press event here. And it's shown off its new generation of Xperia devices for 2014. This is the Xperia Z2. It's access to the Z1. And there's also an Xperia Z2 tablet. There isn't much new about them in terms of industrial design. The Xperia Z2 very much looks like the original Z1. However, the screen is now 5.2 inches. It keeps the same footprint, but the screen is larger. And the really big upgrade with the display is a new live color LED IPS screen. So the viewing angles are much, much improved. And Sony actually claims that this is the widest color palette of any mobile device. This applies to both the Xperia Tablet Z2 and the Xperia Z2 smartphone. It is very impressive. I've asked Sony. They said that it's an even wider color gamut than Apple's iPad and iPhone. So that's quite cool and impressive. The camera is still the same 20.7 megapixel sensor as we've seen on the Z1. Quite a powerful camera. But Sony has added 4K video recording to it. They're saying it's borrowing technology from its Handycam range. And it's added some more augmented reality tweaks and such things to video now, which you could have had previously with just photos. Also, there's a new 120 frames a second slow motion video recording at 720p resolution. That's a very nice and impressive feature that Sony demonstrated to me. And I'm quite happy to have it. But that's the Xperia Z2. It's a pretty decent upgrade. However, relative to the Z1, it's really all about the display. It's still a quad-core Snapdragon. Now it's 801 processor, but really it isn't that much of a big leap. And it ships with Android 4.4 in March. Now, moving on to the Xperia Z2 Tablet. Again, it's very impressive in terms of the display. It's full HD 1920 by 1200, I believe. But it's those live color LEDs and the IPS display that really mark the difference between this and the original Z tablet from Sony. And also the thinness. This is a 6.4 mm thin tablet, which makes it one of the thinnest. It's certainly the thinnest that is waterproof. The Xperia Z2 smartphone is waterproof as well, naturally. Unlike the Xperia Z2, this is glass on the front, but it doesn't have glass on the back. It's actually quite a grippy, matte surface. You can have it in black or in white. It feels very good to the touch, and it's extremely thin and light. This is thinner than the iPad Air, even though it's pretty much the same size, it's 10.1 inches. And physically, it's a very impressive device. It also has dual front-firing stereo speakers. There's something Sony calls S4 surround sound. And it has new digital noise-canceling technology, which works with a bundled headset, which comes with both the Xperia Z2 and the Xperia Z2 tablet. Other than that, this also ships with Android 4.4. It also has a Snapdragon 801 processor. The only difference really between this and the smartphone is that it has an 8 megapixel camera rather than a 20 megapixel one. And you have a very subtle Sony skin on here. It's almost entirely stock Android. It's just little tweaks, such as the quick settings, brightness, etc., that are customized by Sony. It's still very familiar, but really, it's all about the new industrial design with this new Xperia Z2 tablet and the new displays with the Xperia Z2. And that's our first look at them here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. So I really think the Xperia Z2, not well-named, but the Z3 is going to be cool. But anyway, I think it might be the best phone we've seen so far. And Vlad made a big deal about the 4K, and that's awesome. But I think the most important or most interesting thing might be the 4K video recording, which I can't decide if it's just a total gimmick or really cool. I think that it's... I mean, remember, Katsuraya just last month at CES himself. He loves 4K. He loves 4K, but he also said that it's, what, six years out from broad consumerization. So I think that in the short term, it's a gimmick feature. I mean, sure, it's nice to have, and we're hearing stories of 4K phones coming next year. But to me... I guess that's true. You're going to want to play your video back from a year ago. Right. I love seeing Sony in this challenger position, because I feel like they feel really forced to make just amazing phones right now. They're not in the Samsung position of, oh, we can just phone it in and do an S4+, which is basically what the S5 is. They came to the table last year with just an amazing phone on the Z1. The Z2, by all appearances, is even better, and I just hope that it's going to be on the carriers that matter. I hope so, too. So we actually have Vlad, Vlad Savov, the one and only. So Vlad, here's my question to you. Is the Z2 the best phone at MWC so far? Hola, amigos. Can you hear me okay? Hello. Yes, we can. Am I awesome Spanish? Yeah, I mean, your Spanish is fantastic. I was always... As is your beard. That's what I meant to say. Your beard is amazing. Thank you. What can I say? That wasn't in the hands-on video already. I just feel that way. Now that you've seen the Z2 and the GS5, I think we have a pretty good sense of what these two companies are doing. So how do you feel about what Sony's up to now that you've seen what Samsung's up to? Ladies and gentlemen, please join us upstairs in the unpacked lounge for refreshments and a wonderful day's pizza. So apart from the overhead announcement, I do actually feel that way. I do feel like the Experience Z2 might just be the best phone of the show, which was quite odd because it was announced at an incredibly early time here in Europe and middle of the night in the United States. Just because... I mean, first of all, it's waterproof. Samsung got a big round of applause at its GS5 event for being water resistant, but the Sony is waterproof. And it actually does have that cringe-worthy statement that Samsung made modern glam look. I do feel like the Z2, as a modern look, while still being waterproof, and that combination is incredibly hard to achieve, in my opinion. And the same is true of the Z2 tablet. These devices, in terms of industrial design, are just amazing. They really are amazing. The Z2 tablet in particular really feels like the closest thing you've ever seen or felt to just an interactive screen. You really feel like it's just a display that you can interact with. There's no sense of technology because it's just that thin. My only reservation, though, I have to say this, with the Z1 cameras, and hopefully the Z2 is an improvement on that front, is the focus. I saw somebody taking some photos of the crowd here at the Samsung event with a Z1 Compact, and the focus was struggling. It was going back and forth, and it just wasn't focusing correctly. And I knew that person's pain because I reviewed that phone. And it's the biggest problem that Sony really has at the moment. It's just a few imperfections away from really delivering an amazing phone. Yeah. So actually, I'm curious about the tablet because it seems to me that Sony's always kind of half-assed its tablet strategy. It's like, well, we figured out how to make this thing at five inches. Let's just do the same thing at 10 inches. Do you get the sense that this is a real thing that Sony cares about, or is it just sort of a weird add-on for them to make a phone? And they're like, well, tablets. Here's one. I think that's unfair. I think from Sony's internal perspective, they're being consistent. And like I say, to make this thing 6.4 millimeters in thickness and still retain a 6,000 milliamp hour battery and stick in this new live color LED display that Sony has, to me, is just in technical and industrial design terms and engineering terms, is hugely impressive. I still don't find a terribly good use for a 10-inch Android tablet. That's consistently the issue with these devices. But if you're going to buy any one of them, this Z2 tablet is absolutely the one. Okay. So why aren't we talking more about Sony at this point? I mean, it seems like Samsung has so completely dominated this market. Is this enough for Sony to get some actual play and discussion here, or are they too far out of it? Like, what's sort of the vibe on Sony versus the world here at Barcelona? I think there's a lot of inertia that goes with this. If you think about Sony a decade ago, it was riding high on its success in the 90s. Whatever the company did, people gave it credit, gave it attention and time because it was Sony. And frankly, that's Samsung's position at the moment. So Samsung is being more iterative than Sony in between generations, but that doesn't impact the attention that the company gets because it's just so huge at the moment. Right. So, give Sony time. I mean, Sony's biggest flaw with its smartphones was its displays. For an enormously long time, it's had really terrible displays, far behind the competition. It's corrected that in a big way right here at MWC. Give Sony time, give it a few months, give it the next generation. I think the hype will start building up around its products again. Yeah. I mean, and they just continue to splash it with water at every possible opportunity. Never mind splash it. That's the point. This is where Sony can make its push. Samsung can take splashes. Sony can take a whole dive. That's true. I mean, you just wrote Sony's marketing campaign, is what you just did. Wait, so I'm going to ask you again about the display because you're getting me all excited and I just need to know, is it really, is it perfect now? Like, is it every bit as good as the Sony display needs to be? Because this, the Z1 is really great except for the display, which is really not great. But you're saying this is... Yes....completely solved this problem. Yes. The Z1 display is garbage. It is mediocrity, a few points below mediocrity. It's just not acceptable to me. The viewing angles are terrible. This new one is right up there with the best ones. I am not ready to get on board with Sony to say this is the best color palette that we've seen on a mobile device. I feel like the LG G2 AGC displays have very strong competitors in the Android ecosystem and Apple obviously has its high devices. But it is right up there. That's what Sony needs to be. It needs to be up there with the latest. Yeah. Okay, so I want to ask you about Samsung before we let you go because you reviewed the Galaxy Gear for us and had not exactly favorable things to say. So as someone who has been forced to spend a lot of time with this thing, are you actually, are you impressed with what they're doing? Is it better? Are you excited to review the next one or are you still staying away? Excited about what we're doing at Mobile World Congress. In terms of the Gear 2s, I can't say that I am. But I'm looking at the Gear Fit right now and all I can say is if the Gear Fit is everything that it promises to be, there is not going to be a Gear 3 because the Gear Fit looks like where we need to go. How so? Well, you look at the Gear 2, they put a home button on it. That is smartphone-sized hardware. You know, they're trying to cram too much. They put in a camera, speaker, microphone in that bezel. I'm sorry, I couldn't hear that. Sorry, keep going. I'm just saying, they're trying to cram way too much with the Gear 2. They're essentially again trying to do this shrunken down smartphone thing. If anything, Android has taught us, you can't take a smartphone and just expand it or blow it up to a tablet size. I don't think you can take Android or a similar experience and then shrink it down. Even if it's Tizen now with the Gear 2, the UI is still pretty much the same. The Fit, on the other hand, to make a pun on the name, it seems like a much better fit for your wrist. And that curved display is pretty gorgeous, I have to say. So that's exciting. Good. Yeah, I agree. I hope that that ends up being just the Gear and they lose the name otherwise. So Vlad, this is the big day, right? Most of the news or most of the big news at this point is over, but there's still several days left of Mobile World Congress. So what are you looking forward to? And Chris, you know as much about this as anybody too, what should we be looking forward and paying attention to over the next several days? Vlad, you first. For example, I think we're going to take a look at the new Yota phone, which is that dual display phone with a color LCD on one side and an e-paper display on the back. They're upgrading it now with two touch screens on both sides. I'm curious to see how that will work. Is one of the screens still e-ink? That's correct, yeah. Oh, cool. I mean, the premise with the Yota phone is really if you want to have an article, you have low battery life, and you don't have Samsung's amazing ultra power saving technology, you take an article on your color display and then you flip it onto the back, onto the e-ink display, and then you switch off the power consuming display and just read on the e-ink. I mean, that sounds amazing. What about you, Chris? What are you looking forward to this week? I think that the remainder of this show is as much about what isn't announced as what is. We have two pretty significant mobile announcements coming up here that weren't at Mobile World Congress and aren't going to be. One being, of course, HTC's new flagship, widely referred to as the M8, and we're expecting that at their March event. It seems like, of course, HTC and Samsung and all these other guys kind of play this chess match that's ongoing to make sure that they're getting sufficient spotlight for their device. I think that HTC probably could have shown the phone here, opted not to knowing that the GS5 was going to be shown here. That's probably a good move. It was probably a good move. Of course, the One was really well-reviewed, so seeing what they're going to do with that next generation device is important for them, especially since they're kind of on the ropes. And then the other being the rumors of this Google smartwatch. Right. Eric Schmidt, who has... Could that be happening this week? I don't think so, because Eric Schmidt keynoted Mobile World Congress for a number of years, didn't this year in favor of Mark Zuckerberg. Who did nothing. Who did nothing. He just stood up there silent for an hour and then left, as far as I'm concerned. That's right. Flash his packs and left. So I think, I suspect that if Google was going to do something with that here, they would have blown it out. They would have at least had someone on stage for that keynote. So we'll see. The rumor is March, but of course they have IOU coming up in June as well. They're just going to drop it at South by Southwest. They're just going to roll up with watches on and be like, hey, guys. South by would actually be a pretty good place for that, when you think about it. All right. Awesome. Well, thank you, Vlad. Really appreciate you joining us. And that, I guess, about does it for us. This is a big day for mobile stuff. We have lots more coming over the next several days. But for now, you can follow us on Twitter. We're at Virg. I'm PierceDavid, for which I am deeply, deeply sorry. Your Z-Power, for reasons I don't totally understand. Zed power, as the Canadians in the British say. Zed power. You're right. I apologize. Thanks to Dan Seifert and Vlad Savov and Tom Warren for being here. They're all on Twitter, but I don't know what they are on Twitter, so you can find them there. We'll be back on Thursday with the Virgcast. We'll have lots more of the news. Is the Virg mobile show? Is that tomorrow? Is that happening? The Virg mobile show is tomorrow. Hopefully. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. Assuming. So there's this joke about Barcelona that their whole internet is held up by two DSL routers that duct tape together somewhere in the middle of the city. I don't think that's a joke. I think that's very real. Fair enough. So assuming the connectivity holds up, we'll have lots more coming from them. And that does it for us. So thank you so much for watching, and we will see you soon. Bye.

It's Monday, February 24th, 2014. I'm Ross Miller, now rugged and waterproof. Well, so long as I plug my nose and wait 45 minutes after eating. Anyway, this is 90 seconds on the verge. This is Samsung's year in mobile. Well, the first half at least. The company today unveiled the Galaxy S5, its incremental update to the flagship S4. More interesting, however, are the three new wearables. Both the Gear 2 and the camera-less Gear 2 Neo will replace Samsung's current smartwatch. Then there's Gear Fit, its first fitness tracker that includes a curved glass display, notifications, and a heart rate monitor. Also at Mobile World Congress today, a new line of Nokia Android smartphones and Sony's new flagship Xperia Z2. As for HTC, we'll have to see that next month. In a classic cable streaming shakedown, Netflix is now paying off Comcast. The US cable giant announced a deal allowing the video streaming service a more direct route through Comcast's network, but wouldn't disclose how much Netflix is paying. Comcast may be the first, but it's probably not the last. Both AT&T and Verizon said they expect Netflix to pay for better streaming. Finally, save the tree leader, save the world, rinse and repeat. What is? Heroes is coming back. Four years after being canceled, NBC revealed during its Olympic coverage that the show will return, now called Heroes Reborn, for a 13-episode miniseries running in 2015. First 24 and now Heroes. Things are looking really good for that venerable science fiction classic, The Chevy Chase Show. And that's it for today's top stories, but coming up tomorrow, I write my wrongs and get out of this repetitive nightmare.

Hello everyone, this is Samsung Unpacked 2014. Let me take a moment to say we are very grateful. We only succeed when customers choose us. Here is the Samsung Galaxy S5. Comes with full LTE coverage. It gives consumers the top three most wanted camera features. Our real-time fitness coaching services together with the gear can be tailored to each user. You will get longer operating time with the Ultra Power Saving Mode. We provide a variety of color options to express each user's personality. Samsung's Gear portfolio has three new editions. The Samsung Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo are chic. Ladies and gentlemen, the Samsung Gear Fit. The Gear Fit will be an ideal method to check your heart rate when you are exercising. Our innovation will never stop. A smartphone has never felt better. The back cover is perforated. The shimmer you see here is the heart of its modern glam look. The Galaxy S5 will also come in a shimmery white, a charcoal black and copper gold. A 5.1 Super AMOLED screen with full HD. We have significantly increased the battery capacity. The Galaxy S5 has a new fast autofocus technology. A new HDR mode for pictures and videos. And new other features like selective focus, 16 megapixel sensor. This is the fastest ever autofocus for a smartphone. Download Booster marries this enhanced Wi-Fi connection with LTE. That means your full HD movie is ready to go before your microwave popcorn has finished popping. The Galaxy S5 is water and dust resistant. If my Galaxy S5 is down to only 10% of battery, it can still last up to 24 hours in standby. Finger scanner uses your fingerprint as the ultimate password to validate your identity. Also, finger scanner unlocks private mode where images, videos and other types of files are kept secured. So let's focus on five key areas. Where the smart style. We moved the camera, the speaker and the mic onto the bezel. So we added a home button. We have more watch face options and you can set an image or different color for the background. You get calls, messages, schedules and application alerts. Plus, you get your heart rate. The Gear 2 is also a standalone music player. The Gear 2 can independently connect to and control your television. Gear 2 has a longer battery life lasting up to three days. It's water and dust resistant. This is the world's first curved super AMOLED touchscreen display on a wearable device. The Gear Fit weighs in at 27 grams. You can swap out the straps. You can stay up to date with instant notifications on your Gear Fit as well. You can also interact with your Galaxy device. Gear Fit is compatible with 20 Galaxy devices. This is the world's first smartphone equipped with a heart rate sensor. We've worked out the workout. On April 11th, we will release these incredible devices in nearly 150 countries. Thank you all for joining us tonight. It's been a pleasure.

This is Dan Seifert with The Verge. We're here in Barcelona, Spain checking out Samsung's new gear lineup of wearable devices. It consists of the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo, and the Gear Fit. The Gear 2 and the Gear 2 Neo are updates of Samsung's Galaxy Gear smartwatch that was released late last year. They feature a lighter and thinner design, refined user interface, and the ability to change out the wrist strap. The main difference between the Gear 2 and the Gear 2 Neo is the Gear 2 has a camera while the Neo does not, mainly because the Gear 2 Neo is a lower cost alternative. The Gear Fit is a new fitness tracker device, very similar to maybe a Fitbit or other type of wrist-worn devices. It features a curved AMOLED touchscreen display, which is one of the first applications in a wearable device that Samsung has used. It also has a heart rate sensor built underneath it so you can monitor your heart rate in real time, as well as getting coaching while you're working out and other activities. It also supports full smartwatch functionality for notifications, so you can get your notifications for new emails and messages and phone calls right there on the device. The Gear Fit actually feels pretty nice. It's very lightweight. It's comfortable to wear. It's got a very simple clasp here on the bottom. It is possible to change out the band for different colors if you'd like. The Gear 2 is a much slimmer and lighter design than last year's Galaxy Gear. It also features interchangeable wrist bands. It's got a 22mm mount so you can swap out the wristband to something else that you'd like. It takes a standard watch band. It's got an integrated heart rate sensor and an IR blaster up here next to the camera. The camera's been moved off of the strap onto the body itself, and the watch has a new homes button in addition to the touchscreen interface. There are a couple of things that you can do without the Gear attached to a phone now. You can listen to music and monitor your heart rate without having your phone connected. There's four gigabytes of internal storage here to do that. Samsung's going to be releasing this in a variety of colors, including silver and gold and bronze, as well as a lineup of different designer wrist straps. Samsung isn't announcing pricing yet, but we do expect to see it on the market in April.

This is Dan Seifert with The Verge and we are here in Barcelona, Spain checking out the Samsung Galaxy S5. This is the company's latest flagship smartphone. It really looks very similar to the S4. It's got a very similar design language with rounded corners, a metal trim alongside. The only major difference with the hardware here is actually on the back. The back features a new soft touch finish with a dimpled pattern. It really feels a lot nicer than Samsung's older glossy finishes. It feels very similar to the Note 3 without the leather look. But otherwise it feels pretty much just like the Galaxy S4 in your hand. Hardware wise it's a little bit different. It's got a 5.1 inch display. They've got a capacitive button for multitasking here and a new fingerprint scanning home button on the front there. On the back it's got a 16 megapixel camera, an LED flash and a new heart rate sensor that uses your fingertip to measure your heart rate. You can still take the back cover off to access the battery. The SIM card slot, it's got a micro SD card slot as well. 2800 milliamp hour battery that Samsung says gives 20% better battery life than the Galaxy S4. Inside the Galaxy S5 is a quad core processor. It's 2.5 gigahertz, 2 gigabytes of RAM. It's really fast and responsive. From our brief tests there's really no lag that we can particularly see. The interface here is definitely very familiar to Samsung users. There are some slight differences. If you swipe over from the home screen you can access the My Magazine feature which was available with a swipe up in the Note 3. But otherwise it's a pretty standard home screen. The settings menu looks a little different. The tabs are gone for a more icon based approach and it is running Android 4.4.2. But otherwise it's definitely a Samsung phone. It's got all of Samsung's apps and helpers and things like that. The new thing here is S Health has been greatly improved. In addition to the heart rate sensor on the back it's got a new exercise coach and pedometer and things like that. And it has the ability to be expanded with third party apps that can tap into an SDK that Samsung will be releasing soon. The heart rate sensor uses the sensor on the back here and you just place your fingertip on it and then it will give you a reading for your heart rate in about 5 to 10 seconds. You can see my heart rate there. Samsung is going to be releasing the Galaxy S5 in a variety of different colored backs. There's blue, black, gold and white. Depending on which market they're going to release, depends on which color will be available. Initially in the United States we're going to see the black and white models. Samsung doesn't have a pricing announced for the Galaxy S5 but it says that we should expect it to see it on shelves in April.

Good morning everybody. Good morning. Thank you for joining us at Mobile World Congress 2014. Today ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to show you a number of new things that we're doing for people around the world. The new Nokia 220, our most affordable internet ready mobile phone. At 29 euros, the Nokia 220 costs less than a month's broadband service. The Nokia 220's design is durable and colorful and comes with a 2.4 inch display. The Nokia 220 is available in single and dual SIM variants, a battery with nearly a month's standby time, 2 megapixel camera, 51 hours of music playback, 2G internet and some of the world's most popular social applications. Available immediately for just 29 euros for the single SIM version, introducing the Nokia Asha 230. At 45 euros, the Asha 230 is a stunning addition to the family. Starting in April, people can get a software update that will bring a whole new experience to all Asha devices, including those that were introduced last year. The Nokia Asha 230 goes on sale immediately around the globe for just 45 euros. We see a different but complimentary opportunity to introduce a stunning, surprising new family that strengthens our affordable smartphone portfolio. Ladies and gentlemen, the new Nokia X and the Nokia X Plus. Both of them run Android applications. They include unique Nokia experiences and they include a wide array of popular Microsoft services. The Nokia X and X Plus have a generous 4 inch touchscreen. Both the Nokia X and the X Plus have fluid navigation and it includes an enhanced fast lane user interface experience. The Nokia X and X Plus are built on the Android open source project software, which means people have access to hundreds of thousands of applications right out of the box. People can access free applications from the Nokia store, but as well, you can access applications from other application stores. People can sideload applications using an SD card with our file manager. The Nokia X takes people to Microsoft's cloud, not to Google's cloud. This was very deliberate because the Nokia X family with this Microsoft will be able to reach people it has never talked to before around the world. I'm pleased to announce that we have a third Nokia X device, the Nokia XL. It has a 5 inch display and a 5 megapixel rear facing camera with flash and auto focus. The Nokia X will be available immediately for 89 euros. The Nokia X Plus will be available in early Q2 for 99 euros. And the Nokia XL will also be available in early Q2 for 109 euros. The devices will be available broadly around the world, starting in growth markets. Nokia has connected billions of people around the globe. Microsoft has put a PC on every desk. Together, we can connect and empower people with one experience for everything in their life in a world where it is mobile first and cloud first. It's time to go forward and reimagine what it is possible for our teams, our developers and our customers to achieve. Thank you very much for joining us here today.

This is Dan Seifer with The Verge. We're here in Barcelona, Spain looking at the new Nokia X. This is Nokia's actual Android phone that they're using in emerging markets to be able to try and capture the growing smartphone demand that's there. For specs, you've got a four-inch WVGA display. It's a dual-core, one-gigahertz processor. It's very much a low-end device, but it's targeted for an emerging market, and at 89 euro, it's pretty low price as well. The home screen here is actually very inspired by Nokia's Lumia phones. You can see it's got a very tile-like interface. You can do things like resize tiles and make them larger just like you can on Windows phone and the Nokia Lumia devices. It does support full Android app compatibility. Many developers are said to be able to add their apps to the device without making major changes to them. Here you can see Facebook is running on it. Below that, you've got a single back button that works as both back and home, so if you open up an app and you can long press to go back to your home screen, or you can just step one step back. The other thing that Nokia is doing here is what they call their fast lane, which is kind of like a combination of notifications and your recent apps, and you can take a look at your upcoming appointments through it as well. It's coming over from Nokia's Asha line, and it's Nokia's version of a notification center. But there's no real app tray here. All of your apps just kind of get installed down at the bottom as you install them. There's no way to call up an alphabetical list or anything like that. You can make folders like you can with other Android phones, and it does support full Android widgets, so you can install widgets on the home screen itself. As far as this particular model, this is the Nokia X. It's one of three. There's also the X Plus and the XL. This one has a three megapixel fixed focus camera with an LED flash. It's dual SIM support, so you can have multiple SIMs running at the same time, and it's got a removable battery in there too. Metro this interface is actually pretty responsive. It's more responsive than we expect when you're navigating the home screen. But as you can see, opening apps can be a little bit slow and a little bit less responsive than you might expect from a more modern device. So in addition to the Nokia X, Nokia has announced the Nokia XL, which is a larger screen version of the device. It steps up to a five inch display. It's still WVGA, so it's still pretty low res for this day and age, but it is a much larger display. It's a bit nicer looking as well. You've got better viewing angles. The device itself is actually, feels thinner than the smaller model. It's a little bit nicer to hold in your hand, but it is quite large. The other major improvement that they've done is they've upgraded the camera to a higher resolution and you've got an LED flash on there. Nokia will be selling the XL later this year in many markets across the world for about 109 euro.

Hey guys, I'm Vlad with The Verge here at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona. And Sony has just concluded its press event here and it's shown off its new generation of Xperia devices for 2014. This is the Xperia Z2, the successor to the Z1 and there's also an Xperia Z2 tablet. There isn't much new about them in terms of industrial design. The Xperia Z2 very much looks like the original Z1, however the screen is now 5.2 inches. It keeps the same footprint but the screen is larger. And the really big upgrade with the display is a new live color LED IPS screen. So the viewing angles are much, much improved and Sony actually claims that this is the widest color palette of any mobile device. This applies to both the Xperia tablet Z2 and the Xperia Z2 smartphone. It is very impressive. I've asked Sony and they said that it's an even wider color gamut than Apple's iPad and iPhone. So that's quite cool and impressive. The camera is still the same 20.7 megapixel sensor as we've seen on the Z1. Quite a powerful camera but Sony has added 4K video recording to it. They're saying it's borrowing technology from its Handycam range and it's added some more augmented reality tweaks and such things to video now, which you could have had previously with just photos. Also there's a new 120 frames a second slow motion video recording at 720p resolution. That's a very nice and impressive feature that Sony demonstrated to me and I'm quite happy to have it. But that's the Xperia Z2. It's a pretty decent upgrade, however relative to the Z1, it's really all about the display. It's still a quad core Snapdragon, now it's 801 processor but really it isn't that much of a big leap. And it ships with Android 4.4 in March. Now moving on to the Xperia Z2 tablet, again it's very impressive in terms of the display. It's full HD, 1920 by 1200 I believe. But it's those live color LEDs and the IPS display that really mark the difference between this and the original Z tablet from Sony. And also the thinness. This is a 6.4mm thin tablet, which makes it one of the thinnest. It's certainly the thinnest that is waterproof. The Xperia Z2 smartphone is waterproof as well, naturally. Unlike the Xperia Z2, this is glass on the front but doesn't have glass on the back. It's actually quite a grippy matte surface. You can have it in black or in white. It feels very good to the touch and it's extremely thin and light. This is thinner than the iPad Air, even though it's pretty much the same size, it's 10.1 inches. And physically it's a very impressive device. It also has dual front firing stereo speakers. There's something Sony calls S4 surround sound. And it has new digital noise canceling technology, which works with bundled headset, which comes with both the Xperia Z2 and the Xperia Z2 tablet. Other than that, this also ships with Android 4.4. It also has a Snapdragon 801 processor. The only difference really between this and the smartphone is that it has an 8 megapixel camera rather than a 20 megapixel one. And you have a very subtle Sony skin on here. It's almost entirely stock Android. It's just little tweaks such as the quick settings, brightness, etc. that are customized by Sony. It's still very familiar, but really it's all about the new industrial design with this new Xperia Z2 tablet and the new displays with the Xperia Z2. And that's our first look at them here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

This is Dan Seifer with The Verge and we're here in Barcelona, Spain checking out some of the latest things that Mozilla is announcing for its Firefox OS platform. This particular device is a new ZTE smartphone that's going to be released very shortly within the next month or so to a variety of emerging markets across the world. What's most significant about this phone compared to the earlier Firefox devices is it's got a much better quality display, it's a higher resolution, it's much faster than the earlier devices but it's still very much an entry level device. It's going to be priced around the entry level, it's going to be marketed to the first smartphone customer and there's a good chance that we're not going to see this in developed markets such as the US or the UK. The other thing that we're looking at here is the latest version of Firefox OS. This happens to be version 1.3. It's got a new launcher on here, it's powered by the same technology as what powers Everything Me which is an Android launcher that's been around for a while. So it's able to do intelligent searches that search both the phone and the web to give you access to shortcuts and various things depending on the context that you add to the search. A couple of the other things that they are adding to this is new ways to multitask between various apps. Mozilla doesn't have it in this version yet but the next version will allow you to multitask by swiping across the screen to other open apps. But right now you can hold down the home button and then access your open apps in sort of a card-like view. Overall the entire OS just feels much more complete and faster than we've seen before especially compared to the first Firefox OS devices that were announced here in Barcelona last year. The lag is not nearly as great as it was on earlier devices. You're able to open apps and change apps much quicker than before. It really is a much better experience even though it is still considered an entry level device. We should see more from Firefox and Mozilla over the course of this year but we can expect to see devices such as the CTE and others from Huawei and Alcatel hitting markets next month.

Hi, this is Blaire with The Verge, I'm here at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona and taking a look at LG's G Pro 2. It's a 5.9 inch 1080p device which the company is unapologetically describing as a phablet and it wants to give you the ultimate phablet experience. It follows up from the LG G Flex which is a 6 inch device, it's roughly the same size and it has pretty similar specs, it also has a quad core Snapdragon processor inside it. Physically it's very similar in terms of dimensions, though obviously it lacks the curvature, but also the two devices come with new features, one of them is called Knock Code, which is being simulated here on the G Flex, which is essentially a way to unlock your phone while the screen is off with a pattern of taps or as LG describes them, knocks. You can see a demonstration of that right here on the new G Pro 2. It's quite a neat little feature and aside from that you really don't get many buttons, a lot of it is screen interaction, you just get the power button and the volume rocker in the back as is typical with LG's G series at the moment. A couple of other new features that the company has added is a split screen view, so when you hold the back button you get to split screen between two apps, so you can have the internet browser up top and let's say YouTube down at the bottom if you want to look at the two side by side and then you can adjust which one gets more screen real estate. Another thing is if the 5.9 inch size is too big for you, you can actually swipe and shrink it down to a mini view which you can then resize and expand to your preference. Also LG has put a one watt set of speakers in here, it describes them as hi-fi sound, so that's an upgrade there. It also has a new set of camera applications and camera features which include a new mode which lets you adjust focus after you take a photo. This is pretty much the same thing as Nokia has with its Lumia cameras where you take a series of photos and then you can select your focus distance after the shot is taken. As you can actually see from this illustration there is a time delay between the photos, obviously because they're taken one after the other, but it does give you the option to focus further or closer after you've taken the shot which is more flexible than just taking one single picture. Aside from those new features, this is still pretty much a relatively standard tablet. It's quite large but as LG points out it has even thinner bezels around the sides than on the company's flagship smartphone, the G2, and is relatively compact, pretty nice in the hands for such a large device. So aside from those extra added features that LG has put into the software, this is still pretty much a standard Android phablet, the likes of which we've seen from both HTC and Samsung and even Sony. There isn't that much to distinguish it but LG hopes that good performance and extra few features will give people a reason to buy it.

It's Friday, February 21st, 2014. I'm Chris Sigler, and today our very own Nathan Seidkirk is going to eat a thousand jelly beans before this show is over. You ready, Nathan? It's 90 seconds on the verge. We're days away from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and in case you haven't picked up on all its very blunt hints thus far, Samsung has now just come out and said it. The next Galaxy device will be unveiled on Monday. All signs point to a Galaxy S5 smartphone that's more fitness-centric and possibly weatherproof. Samsung is expected to showcase new Galaxy Gear devices as well. Mobile World Congress starts in earnest on Monday. Fingers crossed on that whole Nokia Android thing. Abraham Lincoln, a butterfly, and now Steve Jobs. According to a document obtained by the Washington Post, the late founder of Apple will appear on a postage stamp beginning in 2015. Other deceased icons receiving their own stamps that year include Elvis Presley and famed Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. Any member of the public can nominate someone to appear on a postage stamp, and an advisory committee of ordinary citizens reviews all suggestions. So get ready, America, for 2016. Finally, Ron Burgundy is returning to the newsroom, but things are going to get a little dirtier. A new R-rated version of Anchorman 2 is coming to theaters for one week only. The new cut has replaced every single joke from the original PG-13 theatrical release. The R-rated Anchorman 2 will be released in theaters on February 28th, before being made available on DVD and Blu-ray alongside the original version on April 1st. And that's it for today's top stories. Tomorrow we try for 1500 jelly beans.

Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast. It is the week of February 17th, I had to look down to check it, 2014. I am Dieter Bohn. I'm David Pierce. I'm Ellis Hamburger. It took you a while. Yeah. Are you okay? I'm sitting in Josh's seat. He's not here. He hasn't been here for a while. If you weren't aware, Josh has a big announcement that I guess I'm making for him. Yes, you are. He's been tweeting about it. It's out there in the world that Josh had a baby. And it is a baby. And so that is... He still has it. He's not going to leave and not with us, except in spirit. Basically, all I know about Josh's baby is that Laura keeps tweeting. It's still there. It's still there. He's probably watching right now, so be careful what you say, Josh. Laura just keeps being like, we got a baby on Tuesday. Laura's very mad the baby can't read. I mean, what fun is it until it can read? Come on. Were we supposed to talk about the Verge baby vertical or is that still a secret? That's such a good idea. No, it's not. Just apps for babies? Well, it's about implants. Diaper reviews. Oh, I see. Diaper reviews. That's not bad. You can monitor the baby's vision and make sure their eyes are on the prize for their whole life. We don't want any losers. So it's basically like if you really are hell bent on getting your kid into an awesome preschool, you're all over Verge babies. Yeah, they all go to the Montessori schools, that kind of thing. No, no, no. I don't know about Montessori schools. Verge babies isn't about babies. Verge babies is about the same thing that the Verge is only it's staffed by Muppets. It's the Muppet babies version of the Verge. We all speak in high squeaky voices. We're perishingly adorable. But we cover the same thing all the time. I'm into it. Like the NSA, we just get really angry, but it's babies. So what do you think? It's adorable. They're so cute. They're so angry about the neutrality. Oh, prism. Crib neutrality is going to be the hot topic, I think. Oh my God. Okay, so it was a week. Yeah, it's been a week. It seemed like it was not going to be a week and then Facebook decided to make a week out of it. No big deal. Yeah. So they bought WhatsApp for a billion, no, I'm sorry, 16, no, maybe 19 billion. It's $16 billion in cash and stock plus $3 billion in restricted stock that vests over the course of three years. Okay, explain that in English because I have gotten this tweet a thousand times. That's all it is. Basically 16 billion upfront and 3 billion over the next few years. Is that so that the founders and employees will stay at the company? Among other reasons, yeah, I'm not totally sure on the structure of it. All that really matters is that it's the biggest deal to ever come out of a venture backed startup in history. Yeah, by a pretty wide margin. Yeah. And the even bigger deal is that WhatsApp is arguably Facebook's biggest real competitor for people's attention on mobile phones across the world and now they own it. You think? Yeah. I think WhatsApp is Facebook's biggest competitor. 450 million users right now? Active. Active. That's monthly, but then like some like over half are using it like once per day. Yeah, 70% just are using it every single day. But isn't WhatsApp like a fundamentally a one to one messaging thing, which is not what Facebook has ever seemed to have that much interest in? Not necessarily. The point is that it's private. Whereas Facebook, everybody has these ballooning friends lists that they cannot maintain, which you know, in some ways is a strength. You can post an update about it. Was that like a, I have a lot of friends humble brag? Yeah, it was. I was making sure. I think you and I both, we've been on Facebook since like a certain time during late high school, college when you watched your kind of social life bloom as you just added friends, friends, friends on Facebook. Sure. And it was like there was definitely a period of my life where every single person I met just like instantly added them on Facebook. And now we don't talk to- Who I saw at a bar, let's be friends on Facebook. And now we don't talk to almost any of them. No. Which in a way has kind of diluted the value of the ability to post to everybody. So what a lot of people are doing is using Snapchat, share with just a few people or especially around the world since Snapchat isn't as popular globally quite yet, they're using apps like WhatsApp to communicate with one person or with a group of people and they're posting the same kind of stuff like photos of friends and family, but they're posting it to private groups and there's no feed, but people are getting it all in their pocket. There's no desktop component. Everything is very, very urgent. And that's part of the reason that it's so sticky and so addictive. And they were one of the first apps to really take your phone book and turn it into your social graph. You know what's super weird to me though? So everybody is vital. What you just described is also Google Plus and that didn't work at all. The thing that's different about WhatsApp is it's not social in the way that we traditionally think of social. It's just, it's a utility app. It's pure. It's a messaging app. It's a texting app. Fundamentally it does other stuff, but it's a texting app. But it does it pretty well and it does it for a buck a year after the first year. And critically it works on everything. They made a solid J2ME app for feature phones. They've got it on Android, they've got it on Blackberry, they've got it on Windows phone, they've got it on iPhone, they've got it on Symbian. Is it really on Symbian? Yeah. I feel like all you did to say was Symbian and it'd be like, oh, it's everywhere. It's on every platform on the planet. And what they did was- Is there a Blackberry app? It was such a sleeper hit over the years. Everybody's been saying- How long has it been around? It didn't get much press. I think 2009. Yeah, yeah, okay. And it was one of the first true BBM replacements on iPhone. And they were actually on iPhone before push notifications even existed within iOS. So back then it was a status system so you could see what your friends are up to, just like kind of your AIM status. Just like Twitter. That was the original idea for Twitter was like status of the broadcast thinger. Right. And what they did was they made themselves a replacement for SMS, which made it really easy to understand. You don't have to explain to anybody in all these countries where WhatsApp is really critical to people's lives. You don't have to explain what it is. You say, you're spending a lot of money on SMS right now. Switch to this, your friends are on it, that's it. Yeah, I mean, that's the easiest thing ever, right? Is like I did some research on this yesterday and the SMS is $120 billion industry every year. That's a crazy number. And like most of that, I don't know this for sure, but I'm sure most of that is outside of the US. And it's all at some point going to be eaten by digital database. And texting is like the fundamental way people communicate a lot of places. Like you hear these stories about like people in Africa, there's all this infrastructure for sending money over text messages. And it's huge. And if you just show up and you're like, Hey, want to do the same thing, but for free, it's like, why not? That's what's kind of crazy too. It's hardly changed. So we should talk about the scale here. Cause like you, every year we look at like Apple's quarterly results, Oh, lots of billions and you kind of lose track. So I hear $20 billion and you just think, it's insane. So like, how can we put that in context? It's what, what percent of Facebook is it? It's just less than 10% of Facebook's market cap and it's 35% of the cash they had on hand. That's a giant number. That's crazy. And a board seat, which is also an investment. That's a big deal. So Apple's market cap is $474 billion. So this would be like Apple dropping $45 billion on something. Comparatively. The point is Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars and then it tried to buy Snapchat for 3 billion. And when those events took place, people were like, just like you did Deater. This is huge. A billion dollars. And then now this is multiple, multiple like degrees bigger than that. And I think that the reason is like with Instagram, there were a lot fewer users, but the engagement was good. And this, as Zuckerberg said, this is not only half as big as Facebook in terms of active users, just about maybe a half to a third, but the engagement is so high. Mark Zuckerberg said that this is the only app on the planet that has higher engagement than Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. He keeps, he kept on saying we're going to, they're going to hit a billion users. We see it coming and you look at the graph, their user graph and that seems obvious. Yeah. It's insane. This graph in this post that you wrote, which is really great, is just wild. Like it just hockey stick. Yeah. I just wrote this great post about it and you know, Zuckerberg's like mission statement for Facebook is connect the world's people. Right. And when we were talking about this piece, I was like, I always listened to that and heard like a mission statement snoozed. Oh, this is just words that some committee put together. I don't care. But it's supposed to be as broad and as vague as possible. Right. But it's not a mission statement. It's a threat. Like we were playing around for headlines for this thing. One of the headlines was like Facebook is no longer the social network. Facebook wants to be just the network. Yeah. I like, I look at Mark Zuckerberg now and I'm like, oh, he's going to control every way that most people communicate on the planet. And great. It's not just like he's the biggest social network. It's everybody has to, every, every, every has to talk through Zuck. As the mobile guy, Dieter, how many people in the world have phones? Do you know? Man, why you gotta put me on the spot like that? So I'll throw out a statistic that people were talking about this week is they're expecting 5 billion people to have like a mobile device by 2017. And now Facebook and WhatsApp are in better position than anyone to capture that opportunity. And so essentially what that says is, especially to investors, since Facebook is a public company, it says this is a huge opportunity to capture that just pure communication, talking to your friends. Like even if Facebook for some people is stale, this is something that's never going to be stale. And I think WhatsApp success proves that. Well, I mean, and you just like, you're, you're defining Facebook as like this one particular thing. And like, this is Facebook being like much more than just Facebook, right? Like Facebook.com might die, but like Facebook's never going to die. Right. So what does that look like to you? The next version of Facebook? I mean, it's Disney. Like Kara Swisher wrote this really great piece about this and she compared Facebook to Disney, which is brilliant. And just like Disney has all these different companies and like they find, you know, smart ways for their companies to work together. Like there's ESPN stuff at Disney World, but ultimately those two things have nothing to do with each other except that they're both owned by Disney. And like what, what they can do is that just brings them so much money that they can buy other things. And then some of them don't work. And Disney doesn't let them jeopardize each other. No, they don't. They're, they're totally separate companies. Disney, the only thing they have in common is like the CEO of Disney makes money from them. Right. With Facebook and the, and perhaps the infrastructure. And when Facebook acquired Instagram, people really were doubting whether Mark Zuckerberg was going to let Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom maintain control. And they did add ads, but if you look at the Instagram sign in screen, there's not even a sign in with Facebook button. Yeah. Okay. So there's clearly, and I think this is what's interesting about WhatsApp is there's, there's like, I see people's Instagram pictures all over Facebook now. They're everywhere. And it's like, there's, there's a really easy connection between those two things and they, like they win together. And I think there's huge opportunity for them to do that with WhatsApp where it's like, if you know, I don't think they're going to, I don't think they're going to as well. I think, I think Jan is no ads. He wants to stay independent. He's got a seat on the board. I'm saying like what Facebook offers them is, is a value ad. What Facebook can say is like, Oh, you want to talk to all your friends? You know who has all of your friends is, is me. It's right here. Yeah. And I can just plug in all your friends. I don't, you don't have to, you can use it however you want. And this is what happens. This is what Instagram is too. Like you can plug, you can say Instagram together as much as you want or not. And that's really smart. I think you are risking your brand when you put Facebook next to whatever, whatever it is that Facebook just bought. I mean, whenever it was WhatsApp, by the way that they just, yeah. Well, well I'm talking about any company that Facebook. Tell me more. What's that? I noticed that when a massive company, let's say Google or Facebook buys a smaller company that people somehow think that the smaller company, you know, maybe for good reason, they think they're selling out for $16 million. Basically they basically raid the app store comments saying, how dare they? I'm quitting right now. People don't want Facebook. Yeah, but people hate everything. I think that's this tiny, there's this tiny little group that forms the a hundred thousand people strong against the new Facebook and they get 38 people to like it. And that's like, but we, you know, we, we see that and that's like, I think most people, a, I think most people really like Facebook and B most people don't care. Like I don't think it's going to change anyone's WhatsApp experience. So that's it. There's, there's two things. One is it going to ruin WhatsApp? And I don't think so. I think it's going to hold up. I don't think it really does. They've killed a bunch of apps. Like they bought dropio, right? I really liked dropio and then they bought it and just immediately shut it down. I was pissed about that. So they've never kept something alive and ruined it. Yeah. The second question is, is this going to fix messaging? Like we, Ellis and I always complain like, Oh, messaging is fragmented. There's hangouts and there's WhatsApp and there's cacao and there's line and there's Google talk and whatever else. What was that third one you said? Yeah. I don't know. Cacao. Is that a thing? Yeah. Oh, it's huge. In South Korea, really everyone uses cacao talk. Yeah. Fair enough. All your friends. So with Facebook money, are they going to be able to like, I, I want the messaging fragmentation problem fixed, having one company in control of it isn't really my ideal solution, but at least it's a solution. If everybody just uses WhatsApp from now on. Sure. But there's no other way to solve your problem except that. No. Dieter, you're going to complain because WhatsApp isn't on desktop. You know who doesn't control? You want email. Yeah. That's what you want. I want email. You want in, you want faster email. I want SMS that doesn't gouge me. You want a federated standard that everyone agrees on, which is never going to happen again. We forgot how to make those. Right. Yes, we did. We just, they're slow and nobody can agree on one thing. Nobody can agree on what they want the standard to be, what they want, how they want it to work. Right. And that's why it's not going to happen. But so you, you just said WhatsApp. I feel like, I feel like you'd be pretty upset if everybody switched to WhatsApp and you couldn't text from your computer. Yeah, I would. That's the only reason I use an iPhone. Yeah. I message from my computer. I love texting on my computer. I just took SIM card out of my iPhone. Really? Yeah. Cause I broke it. Oh yeah, you're back. I dropped it. That's fair. Yeah, you did. So let's talk about some stats. Combined, combined these two companies command in the, an absolutely enormous portion of the world's photo uploads. Yeah, but that's a crazy number. Like I'm sure their Venn diagram is like. And, but you know what, you know what WhatsApp also has is 200 million voice messages sent per day. Yeah, that was surprising. And Facebook's calling has been, I don't know, a soul that uses it. Yeah, I forgot about that. People are happily. I got a voice message saying it's insane. I forgot about that. Yeah, people. I'm going to give away. I'm going to just keep going. You can't do it on the web for some reason. It's in their messenger app and you can hit the little I button in the messenger app and call somebody, but I don't know anybody that uses it, but this is clearly working for WhatsApp. And I think that this kind of hints at like a future where like Dieter was saying, Facebook controls, you know, all these communication pipes that people are using and Facebook doesn't care how everybody wants to talk, but they're going to buy any new company that develops a new way for people to talk that people love. And I think that that's the path that we're going down. I mean, Facebook is in some ways it's like too big to fail, but also too big to innovate in some ways, unless it's on a smaller scale, like with paper, which was built out of their creative labs. And people were saying the only reason they were able to build paper was because it was a group of like 10 people. So okay, huge ambition for Facebook. Insane. How pissed off is Google right now? So reportedly they offered 10 billion to WhatsApp and I think the information posted today that they were willing to beat Facebook's $19 billion offer. Really? Yeah. They real mad. I mean, if I'm WhatsApp, they made the right call. They absolutely made the right call. To go with Facebook instead of Google? Yeah. Google. I mean, you like, I ask you, Facebook has exactly. Google is the company that eats you. Yeah. Like they'd show up in four days later. They'd be like, just kidding. You're on the Gmail team. We'll never see you again. Bye. Like you get to deal with. Can I, can I pour a beer on the studio floor for Sparrow right now? Sparrow is exactly what I was thinking. Can I just do this right here? That was upsetting. My producer, John says I'm not allowed to pour the beer. Yeah. No, but it's like. Especially something like. First of all, I really do think, and actually if that's true and Google was willing to beat it, I actually think it says a lot about what WhatsApp is doing and what Facebook has brought to the table, which is to say, which is Disney, right? Like they, they have all this money to like here, you have all the money, all the resources and all the talent you could possibly need and also we'll leave you completely. I want, I want a Facebook theme park. That's the dream. It's like, give it time. Imagine Zuckerberg building Epcot Center. What if Disney just bought Facebook tomorrow? They're just like, well, you just bought Facebook and now we own Facebook. It's going to happen. You heard it here first people. It's not the Epcot dome, it's Mark Zuckerberg's teenage afro. It's just Mark Zuckerberg. No, it's his pecs. He just flexes. It's a giant building of his, nevermind. Yeah. I still really liked the story that they finalized the sale on Valentine's day. It was like Mark Zuckerberg's. Yeah. Yeah. Here's $19 billion. Congratulations. Happy Valentine's day. Wow. Mm hmm. Good Valentine's day present. So you guys use WhatsApp cause it's not, nobody in the US uses it. No. I mean, I also think that's partly what Facebook is buying. Like everybody talks about the next billion, right? And it's like, those are the people we want are the people. WhatsApp is currently there. Right. Right. And everybody is going to use WhatsApp and like it's already out there. And that's, I guess if you can't get there, just buy your way in and it's, it works. You really just need to look at one chart and there's this chart that, uh, that I found online sourced from a Onovo. Onovo. I don't know. It's a Facebook bought that too. Analytics. Yeah, they did. So what it says is, is countries, it basically has all the top apps in different regions around the world. So look at the United States, Facebook messenger is leading. But in a place like Spain of all the messenger apps, 97% of people use WhatsApp. Whereas 13% of people use Facebook messenger. And um, what's the, is there a name for this chart? Let me see if I can get the chart. Let me see if I can get it. I'm picturing it in my mind. Yeah, yeah. I'm sending it, I'm sending it over. No, but I think countries like Spain are not where it gets really interesting. Places like, places like China and places like India and places like Africa are where this gets interesting because those are the places that are now like really in a real way coming online fast. And there's this, I mean, we've sort of seen it with Facebook to some extent. Like there's this crazy inertia. Everybody talks about like, you know, you stop being cool and you die. And like, that's not true. Microsoft's not cool. Microsoft's doing just fine. Like Facebook's not cool in the US anymore and everybody still uses Facebook. That's why I think that all the companies that they're going to acquire going forward, unless they're like Aqua hiring or unless they're doing a, I think they're going to let them operate independently so they don't jeopardize what they built. That's kind of the conglomerate angle. Right. No, it's totally true. I mean, but I still think that like what part of what Facebook wants, this is that chart by the way, and this is wild actually. So you can see Facebook messengers, Facebook messengers. Look at that. Kakao killing it in South Korea. Killing it and then just nowhere else. That's great. What's funny, it's a big numbers and Viber, which are Rakuten just bought for $900 million. Come on. Isn't even on the chart. I don't see it. Yeah. I mean, like I, I do think this is the huge growth industry that nobody has been talking about for a long time because it's already so big. And there are billions more people to get phones in the next 10 years. And you know, everybody, nobody in Silicon Valley thinks about how important text messages are. Apparently they do. I mean, they do now. I mean, WhatsApp has been out there for a long time and even super popular for a long time. And like, I mean, even, even, you know, we, the press don't talk about WhatsApp. It's just like the huge company that nobody's ever heard of except that everybody uses. It's really bizarre. I don't, I don't talk about like my electricity bill either. Right. I mean, you know, ConEd in New York is the worst. My buddies all the time, by the way, if you, if you are listening to the show or watching the show and you work for ConEdison, I hate you. I hate you so much. So let me ask you guys, what other spaces, what other communication spaces could you see Facebook going into? I was just going to ask you that. What's next? What else? What other crazy popular apps out there? Now you have to, now you're on the spot. Yeah. There's nothing like, I don't know what's worth a bunch of money. Twitter, Twitter. Like I'm not totally kidding. What about video chat? I think they're too big at this point. Video chat? Like who cares about video chat right now? Skype is the only. Dude, teens man. Skype is like the thing. Teens are video chatting still. I don't know about you. I don't know about you. I think they're using weirdo apps like Oovoo. God, Oovoo. I was afraid you were going to say that. Doesn't Cisco own Oovoo? Not totally clear. I think they do. Yeah. Somebody does. But yeah, I mean that would be interesting except that I think, I mean that Skype sold for what was it, $8.5 billion? There's that. Yeah. Somebody beat them to the biggest player. That would be Microsoft. It would be Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what else there is. I think I could see them buying a really big social games company that has proven success. Well. Not just with one game. Yeah. I mean that's the Zynga thing. That didn't work out so well. Yeah, that went not great for them. I'm not talking about Zynga necessarily. I'm talking about something more like along the quiz up line of things that isn't freemium. That's more like- But is that- For Facebook at this point, is that a big enough play? It's about communications. You need to think of him as Zuckerberg as a robber baron. Instead of building railroads, he's building everything we use to talk to each other or buying it. No, I think, but- So games- Sure. If he wants to be everywhere all your friends are is really what it is. I don't think it's about friends. No? No, I think it's- I mean that's what Instagram is. Instagram is only sort of tangentially a communication tool. I think he wants to be the layer just above the pipes. Yeah. I agree. He wants to be between you and the wire. Is Facebook the next Comcast where everybody hates them and it turns out they run the world anyway? Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's upsetting. What's funny is that's what a lot of people think Facebook wants to be in developing countries. With Facebook for every phone, they're like, oh, I don't know what the internet is. I just know what Facebook is. Yeah. They build the login identity, but plumbing for a bunch of apps. People use it because it's easier to hit that button and create a new password for every single freaking app. Yeah. No, it's true. I logged into an extraordinary number of things with Facebook. Yeah. After you're like, no, I'm not going to do it. It's just terrifying. No, no. Then eventually you're like, fine. Once you do it that first couple of times, that's it. They got you. So you know, it's the fun underdog story of this is that the founders were rejected from Facebook and Twitter a few years ago as employees. And now they're like, what's up? And now they have all of the money. Sign that check. All of the money. Do we know how much the founders made? They probably don't split that up. I think they owned... They're definitely... One of them is going to Instagram picture their bank account. It's like six million for one of them. Yeah. I think Yann owned something like 35%. Because they only took a small amount of venture capital, right? So it was a very tiny number of people involved in this and they all made so much money. That's a pretty outstanding return. Yeah, they did good. Was it Sequoia that was the only company invested in them? So they invested, they had a $250,000 seed round from whatever. Sequoia invested $8 million. And then a little bit later, like, well, you know what? We should get an insurance policy. Let's get another 50 million. When they got the 50 million, the founder took a picture of WhatsApp's bank account. This is from a Forbes article and it was over 8 million. They hadn't got dug into any of that original investment. Wow. Yeah. Good company. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it was like 42 people? Yeah. It's crazy. They work out of some office with no sign. Hard to know who's doing anything there. They say just come around back and knock on the door. This is a front for the mob. I think that's what people were saying. It's definitely a front for the mob. I don't care what anybody says. Let's talk about something else that's fragmented and terrible. Wait, hold on. No, I have one more question and then we can move on. Got a good transition though. Wasn't that so good? Just come right back to that. It's too late now. Are you going to start using WhatsApp? Yeah. Yeah? For like two days. That's fair. Yeah. I'm definitely going to download it and be like, this is ugly because it is. It's so ugly. It doesn't matter. I hope, this is the one thing I hope Facebook pulls off is that they like, Facebook clearly has good design. Like the Facebook Messenger app is really beautiful. Well. It's really nice. And if they would just like some head of design at Facebook just needs to sit down with the WhatsApp guys and be like, listen, I understand that you're your own company. It's totally cool. You guys are green. I'm just going to punch you in the face every single day until you make your app better looking. Mm hmm. And then they're just going to do it. That's what I want. I think it's part of their charm. No, that's not a thing. No, it is. Look how ugly it is. It's so charming. No, no. Yes. Yeah, it kind of is. I think Snapchat's looks and bugs cultivated some sort of trust early on, I think, because you know, something is the underdog. Like it's very. Yeah, but if something is extremely polished and and, you know, you think the production value is big and you think there's a lot of money behind it and where there's money, people like there's trouble. Yeah. Right. Um, so here's what somebody just money. There's $16 million. So I have money. I'm not going to start using WhatsApp, but apparently it is so pervasive. It's everywhere in the world. It says you're busy right now. That's not possible. Well, I am busy sending you a message right now. I dare you. Are you on WhatsApp? Can I do it from my computer? No, I don't care. So somebody just tweeted at me, apping someone as in sending someone a WhatsApp message is in the Dutch dictionary. Actually I unless this guy completely made it up. Is this the verb now? I don't know. Do you app somebody? No. App me. No, I hate that. That's awful. But that's I mean, if it's in the dictionary, that's what it is. The worst thing about Google Hangouts is that I don't know what to say to somebody when I message them on Google Hangouts. Hang out with me. I'm like, hey, I hanged you. That's weird. Not going to say that. Like I outed you. Nope. That's not good either. That's not cool. It just doesn't work. I hanged you out. And Hangouts just doesn't work. I watched you. That's cool. It's so bad on iOS. I don't know, man. I'm going to app you. Definitely sounds like a deviant sexual act. Or like a sort of subtle thing you would say on the phone in case your phone is being bugged, but you're definitely going to murder them. This is all back to my theory that WhatsApp is just a front for the mob. And Facebook is like, they just bought the world's mob for $16 billion and now they can be in every country they want. That's my theory. I'm sticking to it. All right, let's move on. Loop wallet. So this is mobile payments thing, right? You had a good segue. You had a good segue. It's too late. It's gone. Let it go. It was about fragmentation. It was poetry. It was beautiful. I was excited about it. It's gone. It's gone. I only just learned how to spell segue. Seeg. That's how it sounds when you pronounce it. For those who don't know, it's S E G U E not S E G W A Y. The more you know. Ellis Hamburger, ladies and gentlemen. Fun fact. Okay. Loop wallet. So it's about loop wallet. Loop wallet. L O O P. Is pretty incredible. I guess it's really called loop. The technology at least. It's called loop. Yeah, yeah. The app's called loop wallet and there are two form factors out that you can order right now. One is a little square fob with a built in card reader and one's like a Mophie like case. Both of them have magnetic transistors inside of them that let you hold your phone up to any credit card reader. Not the ones with the little, you know, wifi sign on it that you're like, oh, what is that? Google wallet, MasterCard, PayPas. This is any credit card terminal. Well, over 90% of in the United States, you hold it up, you pick the card on your screen, you hit the button and it somehow beams this magnetic signal to the reader. It's all just like it's just a- It's like brute force, right? It's just like magnet. It thinks it's been scanned. I wasn't even aware that these reader heads could be communicated with over the air. So it'll work with almost everything unless you have to put your card in. That's great. But it doesn't actually work because everybody's like, what are you doing to my machine? Right. Are you hacking me? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's this shot in this video that we're playing now where you like, it might actually be this where you like lean over to the counter and you're like, it's cool. I got this. She was just pointing- I'm just going to touch your cash register for like 10 seconds. Look at her face. Look at her face. Don't worry about it. She's like, thank you. She has no idea what to do with you. This, you're like, it's fine. I'll just do it. She's like, what? She's like, you just robbed all of my money. No, in the cab that's cool. Just be like, you're not looking. Right. I mean, but the, I don't know. Like this, I don't know. So you wrote a review and I was editing this and we argued about this for like three days. I just, I am so unconvinced that this is even a good idea. So for like slim wallet people like me, I don't care. Right. And for people with really thick wallets- Do you have a George Cassanza wallet? Cause I do. And for people with really thick wallets- Although I do carry cash, so I have a little bit. I mean, you're a, you're, you're front wallet, right? No back wallet. What? No, get out of here. Come on. No. You're ruining your spine. You're destroying your spine. I actually, I, I, so I have to like buy new jeans like every three months because my wallet tears through the back pocket of my jeans. This is true constantly. Front wallet, man. No, that's ridiculous. You are just, where's, where am I going to put my chapstick then? So stop carrying chapstick around. Then what's no. Then my lips will fall off. I've been talking to people about Google wallet, like Chris Ziegler, and he was saying that when he tried to use it, even though it was officially supported at the stores he went to, they still didn't know what he was doing. Yeah. No, nobody does. And I think like that's the sort of conclusion you came to that I thought was really interesting is like, even if this works when you're like, Hey, can I pay with my phone? Somebody's gonna be like, what? No, it's not even just phones. Everything is broken and terrible in America when it comes to payments. We can't do chip and pin. Europe, everything is chip and pin. It's more secure. Explain what that is. I actually don't totally understand what chip and pin is. Your card has got two things on it. It's got the regular swipe, but it's got a little encrypted chip on it and then you tap it. So it's tapped to pay. So great. And then instead of signing, you have to punch in a pin. It's like two, two factors of verification. It seems incredibly logical. And they have so much less fraud than here. So much less fraud. And we're not doing it with no chip and signature because Americans. Signature is the most insane thing ever. Have you ever. I've never ever signed my name the same way twice in a row. It's never happened. I just walk up, I like scribble a bunch of things. Like if you steal my credit card, you can have all of it. My checkbook got stolen in college and they were writing checks to dominoes and whatever. So they were sending me the canceled checks after, you know, and they charged me for it. I'm dealing with the bank and it was the worst. And I like, you could tell instantly it was forged because they actually like signed my name in full and cursive instead of just like swirlies on the D and D trick. And yeah, I was like, come on, who does that? You're like, what do I actually sign my name? And then you're like, what did we just prove? I just told you it wasn't me. So so but chip and pin is coming to America, right? It's going to be a thing slowly. They're going to go chip and signature. So here's what's happening in 2015. At the end of 2015, this was actually also news this week, which was inconvenient for loopwad launch. It was like the same day, wasn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's not completely related because the magnetic part is only like half of what loops trying to do. But yeah, it certainly kind of undermines one of their one of their points. So what's happening here? Some camaraderie? She just loves me. That's all. He had a rogue wire that was starting to drive me crazy. So anyway, lost my train of thought. I was watching him at the same day. Bro Pat chip and pin. OK, so by 2015, end of 2015, if you don't buy a chip and pin reader for your grocery store or coffee shop, you are going to be liable for fraud and not the credit card companies. So that's basically a huge incentive for them to buy chip and pin credit card readers, which presumably by that point will also bundle in NFC readers as well. So this is what I don't totally understand is why and maybe I'm missing something here, but why have Visa and MasterCard not figured out a better way to solve this problem? Like they're just care renting money. So I guess they don't care. They care. But clearly, like where the those two things like loop wallet and the chip and pin thing make it very clear that the only people who can change the system are Visa and MasterCard. I mean, when you've got a duopoly, the no, but I'm saying VCR associations, right? No, but Visa and MasterCard can show up to the retail association and be like, hey, you're going to change everything in the next two years. And they're going to be like, oh, OK, yeah, we'll do that. So like Jack Dorsey rolls up and 80 percent of people are like, shut up. So you know, it's the full suit, bro. And then loop wallet shows up and they're like, what is that? Is Starbucks the only place in America where mobile payments are used as often as they are? I think I saw a quote. It was like more than 25 percent of its customers are using their phone to pay. I think McDonald's has a big thing. Starbucks is the biggest. People know what they're doing with Starbucks apps on their phone and it never ceases to impress me. You know how to do what? You know how to hold up a QR code to a reader and do this? I was like, I couldn't teach my friends how to do it. I have I have a bunch of friends. They don't use their phones. Any other stores? No, I have I have a friend who was like who makes a budget in Starbucks every month. She buys like a twenty five dollar Starbucks gift card, puts it on the app first day of every month, funnels it up. And then when it's out, it's out. She can't go back to Starbucks for the rest of the month. And I was like, that's the best system ever. And it's all on her phone. It's super easy. She hits the thing, pays with iTunes and it's done. And then like it's the best thing ever. And it's the same thing when you walk in, you hold up your phone and they know what to do. You know who else does a good job of that is movie theaters. And they're the only other ones that like when I walk in and I'm like, I have it on my phone. They don't freak out. Yeah. Otherwise everybody's like, why? Even like parts. I still get like I hand people my plane ticket and they like move it around and they put it on the reader and then this is it. It goes over. I just it's over here. And then it's like everybody behind me is pissed off. Like it's just not it's not good. So Ellis, you need to go, you need to head over. You're going to be on the news hour. No, no, no. I was, I was, I'm moved to a little bit later. We want you to get out. Just please, please, please go. If you want to get ZPower in here, that's cool. Yeah. We want to talk about a project Tango, which just got announced today and it seems completely terrifying and insane. It's like her. It's like what's happening in her where the person Scarlett Johansson inside the phone is seeing through the phone, popping out of a shirt pocket through his eyes and seeing the whole world. That's beautiful. This is the beginning of that, which is amazing, but also terrifying, which is like the best thing about everything that Google does. All right. So there's a, there's a video, I guess we're going to look at a little bit of it while, while you, everything at Google seems so friendly on the surface and now they've got the robo dogs with 3d vision. God, I'm in on that. I don't know. Sky nut. All right. Thanks Ellis. Oh sure. Let's check out this, this video. My name is Johnny Lee and I work in the advanced technology and projects group at Google. Our small team here based in California has been working with universities, research labs and industrial partners to harvest the last 10 years of research in robotics and computer vision to concentrate that technology into a very unique mobile phone. We are physical beings that live in a 3d world. Yet mobile devices today assume that the physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen. Our goal is to give mobile devices a human scale understanding of space and motion. This is going to allow people to interact with their environment in just a fundamentally different way. We can prototype in a couple of hours, something that would take us months or even years before because we didn't have this technology readily available. What happens if you have all of these pieces in a phone? How does that change what a phone is? We have created a prototype phone containing highly customized hardware and software designed to allow the phone to track its motion in full 3d in real time as you hold it. These sensors make over a quarter million 3d measurements every single second, updating the position and rotation of the phone, fusing this information into a single 3d model of the environment. We have a problem called navigation indoors and it's a solution to that problem. It tracks your position as you go around the world and it also makes a map of that. Imagine that you scan a small section of your living room and then are able to generate a little game world in it. I don't know of any other controller or gaming device that can do that at the moment. Putting all this together, they pulled in experts from all around the world and got them all working on the same project. People are very high caliber people. Why? It's very simple. I think actually people believe in the vision. Localization and mapping is there on your phone and you just use it. It's this ability to follow in other people's footsteps. And we can also benefit from what we do for the project back for the open source community. Use it for visually impaired, give them auditory cues on where they're going. You know, being able to map your home, check out, let me see how this furniture looks in my room. From windows to sort of different worlds. I mean, the possibilities are really endless. Over the next few months, we will be distributing dev kits to software developers to develop applications and algorithms on top of this platform. We are just in the beginning and we know there is a lot more work to do, but we are excited about where it is going to go. The future is awesome and we believe we can build it faster together. Well that was an inspiring and beautiful vision of our terrifying hellscape of a future where Google knows everything about us and our homes. And here to talk about it is Chris Ziegler. No, I'm still Ellis Hamburger. I look a little different. Google is so good at making videos. Yeah. It's unbelievable. I gave that in like, I'm actually super afraid of what's coming out of this. And I got to the end of the video and I'm like, yeah. So this is like, this is Google. Know about my house. It's ATAP. It's the advanced projects thing, which is part of Motorola. It's like the only part of Motorola that they kept, right? Right. It's got Johnny Chung Lee who was on the connect team and has done a bunch of cool. He did the thing with the Wii remote on top of his head. And Regina Dugan, who's like doing all the crazy tattoos to identify herself. They're the ones doing really insane stuff. Okay. So it's a phone that can map 3D space inside and using cameras and gyroscopes and sensors in the- Which is not especially insane technology. Like I met with a company months ago that had like an add on for the iPad that could do the same thing. And you just sort of, you like stood there, held the iPad and like spun around in a circle slowly and it would actually map the room. One Lighter has been doing this for, I mean, that's what Google is using for the self driving cars, right? You get like millimeter level accuracy. But to have it on a phone and like have it in your pocket and it's tracking you around. So the really obvious application to me, Google is being like intentionally very vague about where this is going to go because it's just a developer kit at this point. But you can see how this would have obvious implications for like street view and like whatever street view 2.0 is, right? You can see where, you know, you could just arm millions of people with these phones and you can map the interiors of buildings very easily and send that data back to Google. All of a sudden they've literally mapped every millimeter of every- Yeah. And the robots will know exactly where to go when they come to kill us. Right. Right. And they can just be like, I mean the crazy thing is like you can be like, I want Doritos and they can literally like direct you to Doritos. Right. And on the one hand that's awesome. And then the other hand that's super insanely terrifying. It is, it is. That is terrifying. But until they get to the point where they can direct me to a specific flavor of Doritos, does it even matter is the question. No, the answer to that question is always Cool Ranch. True. That's true. It just assumes that when you put in Doritos, it's like, did you mean Cool Ranch? Yeah. Did you mean Cool Ranch Doritos? Yes, I did. You put in Triscuits. Did you mean Cool Ranch Doritos? Cool Ranch is objectively the best flavor. I mean, that just isn't true, but that's okay. Well, okay. It's objectively the best flavor until like it gets in your head and I'm going to say this to you and you'll never eat them again. No, don't. Don't. Don't. Don't do this to me. Just a little flavor. Cool Ranch, if you just stop and smell it, you're like, Oh, dead fish. Just kind of rotting fish. Oh, that's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I can live with that. Just a little bit of day old salmon smell. Is this really just Street View though? Is that like, is that? No, that's just an obvious application of it. But this is a Motorola project, not a Google project. So it's not like they were planning for that anyway, but you can see how that would make a lot of sense. Sure. But I mean, okay. So I get the things that occur to me are indoor maps, right? So you go to Macy's and they like tell you what's nearby. This I mean, on some level to me sounds like it's almost something like I beacon where they can be like, you're near this. Let us serve you ads. So assistance for the visually impaired instead of just like, right, don't run into things kind of technology. It would be like you could, they could convert it to something you could see, you know, see the space and Cool Ranch Doritos. End game seems to be the other thing. Like Ellis, Ellis points out her and like you've, you guys have seen this movie, right? No, I have not seen her. You know what I have seen though is the first four episodes of season two of house. So there's a scene in her where he's there. He's sitting on his couch playing a video game and the video game is not on a TV. It's just like literally in front of him. Is this a spoiler? No, it's fine. It's cool. You should watch it. It's good movie, but he's sitting there and like to make the guy move, he literally goes like this to like make him run up a hill and things like that. It's like when you have actual awareness of your surroundings, you can start to build things like that. That's not that big a step from, I know what your house looks like. Uh, but that seems like a weird thing for Google to do. Right. But then there's like Ingress. I Google makes no sense to me. It's essentially where I'm at right now. I have no idea what Google is doing. That is the beautiful thing. Google has no mission statement. Like here's what we do. Google's like stuff is cool. Let's do that. But that is what makes Google such an amazing company is that they can literally fund anything they want using ad ad sense revenue. Google has all of the money. That it, yeah, exactly. And so they're just like, let's go do some cool stuff. That's why, uh, X exists. That's why they're doing self driving cars, which aren't even commercializable. Internet balloons, internet balloons. Um, internet balloons makes sense, right? Cause it's, it's for them. Like the one thing that I sort of universally get about Google is that the more people they put online, the more people who use Google. Right. And that the more people use Google, the more money Google makes, which goes back to Facebook too, by the way. Right. No, I agree. But so those things are, I get those steps. So like project moon is, is on the one hand like a, you know, a lovely thing to do for people who couldn't get on the internet otherwise, but it's also, it makes really obvious business sense. Something like this. It's like, I mean, other than the scary thing, which is serving me ads every step I will take every single day. I don't see how this makes any sense for Google. Well, you can see how it's a, it other than to be like a cool look at us for Google. Right. But if you look at it the same way as you look at project glass, it's a moonshot where it's not commercialized. I hate to use the word. Did you just say that you use the word, duh. Stay with me. You've broken me. You used the term moonshot and didn't immediately like call out that you were being a run on fire. No, no, I, no, I called out that I was being non-ironic about it. Like I hate to borrow their PR term, but, but no, no, no. That was a disruptive innovation you just spit out right there. Well, I'm going to pivot. Okay. So project glass is not a, not a near term thing, right? It's a near term thing for a thousand nerds, us included, but it's not a near term thing for the masses. But you can see how in 30 years everyone is going to be wearing some form of heads up equipment on their face that will look completely normal. They'll look like Dieter's glasses. Sure. Well, normal. I was going to say. I meant that in a good way, not a bad way. But again, that's the same thing, right? Like that puts more people online more of the time and that's an obvious win for. What about the robots? Explain the robots. Yeah, no, that's the same. Explain buying Boston Dynamics. No, but go back to, go back to. Or the self driving cars. Go back to Dieter's. Right. And there's a vision impaired example. You can see how Google could end up making a device that basically leads you to all these retail establishments that, right. A little helper robot. Is that what you're saying? A little, a little, a little dog robot. A next generation Sony Aibo. Right. That leads you around and tracks you and everything Google does makes sense. They've never done a single thing that I didn't understand. No, I get it now. It's all tied together seems like more than anything Google has ever done. This seems like the minority report move where you like walk around and their ads just blaring at you all the time. Yeah. Because if Google then goes to businesses and is like, Hey, we know exactly where people are in your store all the time. Give us some money. No, no, that's such an unbelievable win. Think about that. Like if they can accurately map right immediately on the device, the 3d space on a computer, they can on a heads up display accurately project stuff onto that surface. Right. So like, like they can literally put an ad on that wall and that curved chair and whatever else. Yeah. And it's just, it's, they own this whole stack for advertising and it's, that's super scary. I mean, it's the same thing. Like I met with Apple about iBeacon forever ago and my question kept being like, you know, this can be terrifying, right? And they were like, yeah, but it won't be. I was like, but you know, this could be terrifying, right? And they were like, yeah, but it won't be. It'll be fine. Are you excited about iBeacon at MLB this year? I guess. I mean, this is the same thing. Like there are ways in which it's super insanely handy where like I can, one of the things they were telling me about that I think it's just as a like high level possibility. I don't know if they're actually doing this, but they were like, we can figure out where the shortest bathroom line is or like where the right food is near you or we can, you know, figure out where you are if something goes wrong. And like, that's all really, really great. But you know what's going to suck is when you walk in and every single step you take, there's another ad from another vendor that's like, Hey, come save a dollar on your $13 beer if you come to our thing right now with your app, with your iPhone. I don't want that. Like I don't. But you, so you're saying you don't want to save a dollar on your beer? I don't want to save a dollar. No, I have no interest in saving a dollar. You just want to pay full price. I would rather pay a dollar more and not have them serve that ad. Fair enough. What ties together, I think a little bit, but definitely Facebook with that Disney metaphor and now Google. Sure. I mean, these aren't, we can't think of these companies the way that we used to. They're like, they're giant conglomerates now. It's like, I think you need to think of them like GE in the eighties that just did everything. Right. They bought NBC and everybody was like, yeah, okay, whatever. That's your GE. That's what you do. Right. Like that's what, like when Google does some crazy shit, we just have to be like, yeah, Google, let's do, we don't know. They got, I can't stop spending money and doing weird things. Yeah. It's weird that Apple is like the most cohesive of all of these and the biggest of weird, I guess. I mean, Apple, like of all companies to just how hard random things to see at Apple and be in charge of R and D and not just like release the weird crap you're making. Right. Exactly. Because they're, I mean, what's their, what's their cash on hand? Like $140 billion over a hundred billion. Yeah. Like Tim Cook could have rolled up with like a bunch of nickels and six WhatsApps. Yeah, exactly. Uh, and, and yet they, they don't, which is really interesting and I don't know why to be honest, because like this isn't, it's not a bad strategy. It's a conglomerate move where they're like, it's kind of a badge, but it's very high. It is, but Google and Facebook are both so big enough and their, their thing is so like fundamentally well known and well understood that there's no danger in branding. It's the same with Disney. Right. When you hear Disney, you think Disney world, that's just the thing. And they got so big doing that that they were like, we can do it. Everyone else we want. And people are going to think of our core. When I hear Disney, I think rescue Rangers. That's super weird. One of the reasons the GE, one of the reasons the GE has been around for a long time, I mean, for 140 years and still seems to be a fundamentally sound company is the fact that they have been hedged for so long. Like they're in so many different businesses that when one is up, the other is down and it just kind of all evens out. Yeah. That can't be said for a company like Apple, right? Which has virtually all of its eggs in one basket. Right. Um, and to your point, yeah. Well, they got like three baskets. Yeah, but three fundamentally similar baskets. GE's fundamental thing was light bulbs, right? Yes. And that's, see, that's the thing. I associate still with GE and like I, anything else that comes from GE, it's like, Oh, it's GE. They're like, they make light bulbs. Right. I don't even know if they make light bulbs anymore, but they were, they built a thing and did it and did it so big and complete that they then could do whatever else they wanted. Are you all known to remember their old tagline? Maybe we bring good things to life. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Checking. They used to have a really nice typeface too. Then they changed it and now their logo is terrible looking. I'm on their Wikipedia page. It's super. Is it still the curse of GE? Oh, that's awesome. It's a great idea. It's like a hundred years old, but it's like, it's also in like a washing machine and there's, it's like, I don't know. It's awesome. It's in a washing machine. It's in a GE washing machine. But yeah, so, so you can see how Google is just kind of like throwing stuff at the wall in every conceivable direction. And even if one of them, say for example, they figure out how to make people live forever, which is a business. Yeah, they're gonna be on the internet a lot if they live forever. Yeah. Is there anything that Google could do where you would seriously go like, I don't like really? If they bought Applebee's. If they bought Applebee's? Yeah. I don't know. I would, we would find a way that it made sense for them. They would just put fiber in all of the Applebee's everywhere in the world and you'd have super fast internet. You're right. And they would like kill the coffee shop office with Applebee's. By the way, can I just say that this, this seat where I'm sitting is Josh's seat and every Verge cast, he comes on and he complains about his hair. It's this seat. Cause mine just started going crazy. You didn't raise your mic at all. It's really upsetting. Like I don't even know how to look at your mic. Complaining about my mic. Yeah, no, but no, this seat ruins hair. I mean your hair does look terrible. It's just, be honest. What is going on with the, we should move on and talk about this is the worst. Should we talk about mobile world Congress? That's coming up next week. Well, no, we, we, we, yes, we should talk about mobile world Congress. We should talk about mobile world Congress. It's more exciting than the internet being the worst because the FCC has no guts. Can Google buy the FCC? Is that a thing? Oh God. Is that allowed? Kind of. Do I wish they would? I mean they capitulated to Verizon on wireless. They could certainly buy the United States in which case they would own the FCC automatically. That's a good point. How many WhatsApps do you think the FCC costs? Is this going to be the new thing? Everybody talks about it in terms of Instagram. Are we going to be like, they bought it for one 32nd of a WhatsApp. Yeah. Poor Kevin. That's awful. I feel so bad for the guys. Well, you know, it's funny the idea of Google buying the FCC because paying for it is actually the real problem because the FCC won't man up and classify broadband as a common carrier, like a telephone, like a telecommunications line. They're going for this middle path again and they're doing it because going the common carrier route would be World War III because of all the money from the cable industry in Congress. It is really funny that World War III is just like a bunch of really pissed off lobbyists. That's what they got to do. Like lobbyists throwing money at each other as World War III. If you look at, I think you can tell that Tom Wheeler, who is the recently installed chairman of the FCC feels very bound and tied by Verizon versus FCC, the ruling that came out recently, which we've written about extensively. Check out Eddie Robertson's coverage if you haven't already, because it's very good. She just writes like one really angry thing every 48 hours. It's really great. And it's great. Yeah. So you can tell that he feels unsure about how to proceed and he feels like the FCC is just like kind of dead in the water here. So he put out this long list. He had been saying for... See, you say unsure and I hear, I don't see that. I mean, I see that, but like behind it, I see fear, trepidation and something really slimy because he just came from the cable industry. The guy who used to be in charge of the FCC is back in the cable industry. I think that's a little unfair for a couple of reasons. I'm warming up to Tom Wheeler. There was a lot of trepidation about the guy when he took the office, which was totally fair. Well, you kind of need to consider the fact that when he was at NACDA, which is the cable organization, it was seriously the underdog, like all kidding aside, like the cable industry was a non-entity. Oh yeah, in the early 80s. In the early 80s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he left before they got big, but he was like fighting from the underdog position. And the same argument could kind of be made with the CTIA. Like he left in what, 2001, 2002, something like that. The CTIA is a wireless version of the cable industry as a group. Right. And then he's kind of been floating around in investment firms since then. Look, I mean. But anyway, my point, what I was getting to is that you put out this long list of things that FCC is going to do. And if you read through the list of bullet points, everything is kind of like, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see. We'll consider this carefully. We'll talk about this. But there are no- No, that's fine. But it's like, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see. You're saying that like it's a reasonable thing. No, I'm not. You're saying that like it's not completely obvious what the FCC should do here. Isn't it completely obvious what broadband is? Yes, no, it is completely obvious. So why does everybody see it except for who? Tom Wheeler. Tom Wheeler, chairman of the FCC and the cable companies. Well- I mean, I'm just doing the math. Right. I think that he is a realist about being a politician in Washington, DC. I mean, you've seen House of Cards. So that's what drives me crazy. It's all about the money. Yeah. Like that's, it just is. And they all have so much money. Yes, they do. So much money. He's being a realist. He's being very cautious is the way I- Sure. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Don't write him off yet. Okay. I have the tiniest, tiniest bit of non-desperate feelings. I'll take it. I won't call it hope. I won't call it- That's my love life right there. There's no question. There's no question. I think we can all agree without question that the state of the internet and of the internet industry right now as it stands is completely miserable and terrible, and makes us all want to die. It's a terrible thing. That's fair. And it's Tom Wheeler's job to fix that. And there's a lot of weight on his shoulders. Not just in the cable industry, but in the wireless industry, as there always is. Yeah. So we'll see. Fair enough. All right. Let's talk about Mobile World Congress. Yeah. So it's starting, what, like Monday? Sunday, Monday? It's going to be a bigger show than last year. Yeah. Well, we're expecting Samsung to actually announce something at the show, which we thought they were done. Some things, plural. Yeah. We thought they were done showing off big, important stuff at big shows. That's very surprising. And now they're like, nope, we're going to go ahead and do Mobile World Congress. I wonder if it's because Mobile World Congress was so bad last year that they were like, we can really take over the show and do it this year. No, you're absolutely right. It's cyclical. It's like when the shows get soft, they're like, oh, we can use it now. Right. When the show gets big, they're like, ah, screw this. We're going to do our own thing. Guess we're going to bail. So S5, the new Galaxy phone. Then apparently it's going to have a fingerprint scanner. We talked about this on the Verge Mobile show, which you should listen to. It's great. It's great. It's a fantastic program. It's terrible. Don't listen to it ever. We recorded it from a jail cell last week. It was amazing. We did. And then not one, but multiple Galaxy Gears, which didn't the Galaxy Gear just come out? Came out like three days ago. I mean, I guess good for Samsung for being like, OK, we screwed up. This is bad. Let's try again. You're giving them too much credit. There's no indication that the new Galaxy Gear will be any better. That's a fair point. This is like, we screwed up. Let's do it again. This is a company that had its second generation tablet ready to go. And then Apple announced the new super thin iPad that was the two that was ridiculous thin. And within a matter of like three weeks, they scrapped their whole tablet and came out with one of the same thickness. I mean, this is the insane thing about it. They just like turned it around. This is the insane thing about Samsung that is like the most underrated feature of Samsung is they can make anything unbelievably quickly at incredible scale. And so Samsung's ability to just like rinse and repeat is insane. And I think that's like eventually going to be the story of the Galaxy Gear. Like they're going to get to a point like they did with the Galaxy S phones where it was like it was bad, but then it was slightly better and then it was slightly better and it was good. And then it was really good. And they're like and now nobody cares because it's really good. And Samsung can do it so fast. It takes so many chances that it's not going to matter. Here's the difference though with the Galaxy S, the smartphone, the concept of a smartphone Galaxy S is pretty good too. Yeah, not bad. I captivate. But with the Galaxy S, the concept of what a smartphone was supposed to be was already well established. With wearables, there's still no clear indication what a wearable is supposed to be and what kind of wearable people want. Yeah. Samsung as leader is a lot less established. Samsung as fast follower is great. Sledgehammer to force people to... It's marketing Sledgehammer to get people to buy it smartphones. Like, okay, that doesn't affect my life. They've made such good ads for the Gear. Doing it with wearables though, I have to look at these stupid things. And PC people struggle with them. You don't like the digital boil? Dude, it's so bad. So anyway, multiple gears. It's the grossest thing I've ever heard. Multiple gears. Great. So you're saying that the PC is supposedly doing... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But we need to discuss new Galaxy Gear ties in instead of Android. It's not... No, I don't care if it runs Android or ties in. Just don't suck. I mean, my... Like, I don't want ties in on my phone because I want apps, but there's no app ecosystem for wearable. So I don't care what operating system runs. As long as it plays nicely with your phone. As long as it plays nicely with your phone. As long as it's really good, it's gonna pick up an app ecosystem. You know what's going to... It's fine. It's gonna be a pebble thought in your heart. I mean, that's what Pebble has done, right? Right. Like, they have... Theirs is their own thing. I'm gonna put a nightmare of a thought in your heart and soul. Pebble running ties in? No, even worse. What's going to happen is Pebble is going to develop such a lead with their app ecosystem that the killer app for the Galaxy... The next Galaxy Gear is going to be a Pebble emulator. It allows you to run Pebble apps. That would be amazing. I'm all in. And then Google will buy them or Facebook will buy them and I won't have any idea why. But so HTC's ones are supposedly what's happening is what I'm very excited about. They're doing the phone later, March 25th. But they're potentially doing a watch based on the Qualcomm talk that you reviewed forever ago. I did. And I'm really hopeful that if this happens, it will not use the same wristband, which is the worst wristband in the series. It's really insane. It's so bad. There are two things that made it really bad. One was the fact that the band was touch sensitive. So you would just randomly touch it and things would happen. And then the battery was at the very bottom of the band for no reason. So it was really uncomfortable. The only good thing about that Qualcomm talk, the prototype, was the mirror cell screen, which is... I've been looking at mirror cell technology at trade shows since I started going to trade shows. It's been six or seven years. You trundle over to Qualcomm's booth and they'd have this little postage stamp thing and there'd be no backlight. Like, oh my God, it's a color screen with no backlight. It works. Because every year the postage stamp got bigger and bigger and now it's big enough to be a watch. So if they get rid of all the crappy parts about the Qualcomm talk watch, which is literally everything but that display and they make something with that display. If they just get rid of it. Sure. It's a solid name. Talk's not a bad name. No, it isn't. It's pretty bad name for a watch. On the back of the package, if I remember correctly, it says tech and then it shows like an old school watch and then it says talk. That's pretty good. It's pretty good. Yeah. No, but I think like mirror salt is just objectively like good. It's great. It was amazing. It's fate was to be in a smart watch. Yeah. Basically. I also really like that we are, our piece says there's just a sentence in this piece which Rich wrote for us based on a Bloomberg thing, which says, also says HTC has two other wearable devices in the works, including an electronic bracelet that plays music. Like what? What is that? This is a company that can't afford to make a bunch of random crap. Google can do whatever it wants. They can make balloons, fly into space and give you internet. You know what this thing is going to be called? HTC needs to focus. This is going to be called the boom wrist. No, no. I guarantee it. The boom wrist. You're so right. Yep. This is the most upsetting thing. HTC boom wrist. It's just going to have Beats logos all over it. Yep. No, I thought they were done with Beats. You're never done with Beats. No one's ever done with Beats. You can never escape Beats. It's like the hotel California of sound systems. Never ends. And then a Google Now smart watch, which seems super obvious in this lot of stuff. Apparently none of this stuff is going to be shown to humans at Mobile World Congress. Oh really? It's going to be like backroom meetings where they try and sell it. Is what I think the Bloomberg report said. So do you think with the Google Now smart watch, do you think it's conceivable that this is going to be like Google's Nexus smart watch? Do you think this will be an official partnership? That would be interesting. Wouldn't it be weird if that came from HTC though? Do you guys use Google Now? Yeah, all the time. Really? All the time. I just started again because I realized that it got a lot better than the last time I tried it. But it's still like, eh. But it's like terrifyingly good now. I use it most when I travel. It's fantastic for when I travel. I'll load it up and I'll be like, yo, your package got delivered. I'm like, I don't even know what package you're talking about. Sometimes I have packages. It knows really terrifying things about my life that I don't know. I agree. And the thing that I love about now is the little bits of things that are happening. It just reminds me of things I have to do today or emails that I have. Or here's the game you forgot was on. Here's the score. Yeah, right. No, it's great. And it's so much better than it used to be. And we've been saying for forever that since the beginning of Google Now, it was like, oh, this would be good for wearable devices. It'd be so nice if I could just look at my watch and it's like, here's what's next on your calendar and here's how long it'll take you to get there. And you remember Google bought Wim not long ago to do, presumably, exactly this. Yeah. And Wim did a decent job really early on. Well, decent is strong. Wim's fatal flaw was not including Bluetooth in the watch. It had Wi-Fi, but no Bluetooth. Whoopsies. Wow. Sorry, guys. So the last thing that we're really expecting is the Nokia's X phone, the Android phone. And what are we expecting this to be? It's going to be a phone that runs Android. Got it. No, but is this like... It's going to be low end, right? And it's not going to... But this is Nokia owned by Microsoft's Nokia. Well, not yet. Not yet. That's the thing. So they're going to make this phone... Nokia engineers are like, we made this and we're releasing it. God damn it. They're going to make it and then like 25 minutes later, Satya Nadella is going to come up and just smack it out of their hands on stage and be like, you shut up. No, because it's for the low end. Who cares? Well, so devil's advocate. And Tom has been... And by devil, you mean... I mean Tom Warren. Android? Tom Warren. Tom Warren's advocate. Yeah, Tom Warren's advocate. Trepid Microsoft reporter, Tom Warren. They have so fundamentally stripped... Presumably they have so fundamentally stripped this version of Android of its Androidness and replaced it with Microsoft services and Microsoft UI that... Or Nokia UI, I guess, technically, that no one will know that it's Android and there's zero chance that they will mention the word Android on stage at the WBC. Then why do it? That's a great question. You're asking the right questions, David. You should be a journalist. Because Android can run on lower end hardware than Windows phone can. I mean, that's... That's gotta be... That's the only reason I can think of. No, but is that seriously true? Like if you look at the Lumia 520, it's so cheap. It is so cheap. It's so not very good though, isn't it? Well, yeah, but neither is low end Android. Well, fair. No, but I just... I know, I don't get it. Like I don't get why this is a smart move. It's a hate release. Like a bunch of engineers at Nokia were super pissed that they didn't get to build their own stuff. So they built their own thing and they brought Steve Neal up and he's like, I don't know about this. I don't know about the job at Microsoft. He's like, ah, screw it. Just put it out there. I don't care. Well, so we were talking about this just a little bit on the mobile show. I think what may have happened is at some point Nokia was seriously working on Android across the range as a plan B in case Windows phone failed. And that project got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually it was just like an Asha replacement. And then they're still using Windows phone on the high end, of course. But you can imagine how at one point they were like, yeah, we might need to bail to Android. That's a serious possibility. So they were exploring it across the range and now the scope just got smaller. I mean, but that ship sailed, right? Like they're not, they're not going to switch to Android. The platform was burning. They're all like Microsoft. They jumped into the ship and now the ship has sailed. I don't know. But it's still sort of slowly sinking as it sails. It's going very fast. And then it lights on fire because it's a burning platform. Yeah, right. It's like a Viking funeral. It's a burning sinking ship. Yeah. I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot about the ship. Yeah. I'm really curious to see how that goes down and even more than that to see how they talk about it. Because I think if they're like, they will never say Android once. You don't think? No, they will not say the word Android. What are they going to say? I mean, did Amazon say Android when they announced Kindle? I don't think so. Well, but they, they named it though. They were like, here's what, do you think Nokia is going to have their own name for whatever OS this is? Probably. Yeah. They'll call it X. I don't know. Just like every other phone out in the market. I hope something finishes completely unpronounceable. They should just call it Asha and just like hope nobody actually knows what Asha is and they just go for it. Yeah, they could. We were actually talking about... Asha is Nokia's low end phone line. Right. You remember, Dieter, I think you were at this Nokia world where they introduced Asha for the first time and they spent like half an hour talking about what Asha meant. Yeah. Like I can't remember what language it is, but it's like, you know, they described it. So yeah, maybe they'll do that. It's a lovely name. I Googled it and I get the American Speech Language Hearing Association. I don't think that was it. I feel like I'm close. I don't think that was it. Maybe not quite there. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, it's a weird move. We've been saying for years and years and years that if they had taken the Nokia like N9, which was their first new design language phone that was running Amigo, if they had taken that and just put like ICS on it, it would have been an amazing device. Yeah, we've been saying this for forever. Yeah. Like if they would just... Nokia builds better phones than anybody. We just reviewed the icon, which is not quite up to Nokia standards. Whoops. I can't say it for sure, so I can't like write it, but I am so sure that everybody at Verizon just like gets off on ruining good things. They're just like, oh, you made this really nice phone. No. Throw it in the dirt, make it twice as large and put 40 logos on it and then we will sell it in our stores. Make it an inch thick. Yeah. Or like they have some secret backdoor deal with Samsung where they're like, you can only sell ugly phones except Samsung. You know what, you're right. Think about the Samsung Continuum, which was the worst phone ever made. Oh God, the Samsung Continuum. Oh man. Wait, was that the one with the two screens? Yeah, it wasn't really two screens. It just had like a piece of plastic over the screen to make it look like two screens. Wait, okay, speaking of Samsung, I have a question for both of you. So I just reviewed this Galaxy Note Pro, the big tablet. Which is this big. It's a television. Yeah. It's right there behind your head right now. There it is. That is the Galaxy Note Pro. You used it as a literal like food tray. Yeah. In your review, which is amazing. You can carry things on it. It's lovely. But A, it's now just horribly broken. Thank you, Michael Shane. It's not his fault. I get to the end of this whole thing and I'm still like, this is what everybody thinks is about to happen, right? Is that we're gonna make tablets that are our primary computing devices, right? Like there are all these rumors that Apple's making a big thing or like somewhere between the MacBook Air and the iPad. Samsung's doing it. The Surface is sort of this like, is this a good idea? Do we want this? To make a reform factor? Are laptops dying? And eventually we'll just all have tablets and that'll be like the thing that we do? No. Yes. But like PC sales are down, right? Tablet sales are... I just, I don't know. We're at this weird inflection point where like people are writing that nobody cares about tablets anymore, but then tablet sales are growing and PC sales are dying. But here's what people do. And I just... But here's what people really want. They buy their iPad and then they buy a keyboard case for it. Just buy a laptop. Just do it. Just buy a laptop. That's the thing. But I think ultimately, I mean the trend seems clear that it's gonna be iPads and keyboard cases. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why for anyone who actually does anything ever. And I guess maybe that's my fundamental theory is that most people just want to like sit around and not do stuff. I know like this sounds fine. Like those things are different. Just buy a laptop. But if this thing right here, would have a little bit thicker screen and when you pulled it off, it turned into an iPad and when you put it on, it was a Mac. Would you not buy that? Yes, I would buy that. You would buy the hell out of that. So it's a hinge problem and it's a battery complexity problem. No, it's also a software problem. Right. If you can make a device... I mean, I also wanna like be able to chop off a corner and have it be my cell phone. But like, I don't know, all of these things, like I get... This is the Moto Atrix all over again. I said when the Moto Atrix came out, I was like, this is the best idea. This is the future. And I was just so wrong, just so wrong. Just because it was bad software. It was a terrible product. But what they did was they were like, we made a phone and you dock it into a tablet or you dock it into whatever you need it to be and then it works as that. But you also have weird feelings about the pad phone. I love the pad phone. I love it so much. I don't understand these feels. There's a new one coming and it's going to AT&T and I'm gonna get it. Don't, don't. It's gonna be the best. It's gonna be the best. I'm gonna use the pad phone station all day. Do not. All day. Don't do that. I learned what it's like to try and work on Android. You try, learn what it's like to work on Android that can actually let you have multiple things on the screen at the same time. It's not good. Yeah, I mean beyond everything else. It's not horrible. It's way better than what I expected. The multitasking on the Tab Pro is way better than what I expected, but I wasn't expecting much. Right. I mean, it's ultimately like I can sit here and like resize my browser and I can have eight apps open if I want to in there, however I want them to work. And it's just Android is a million miles away. You, I mean the bottom line is that. But if that thing, like if I could dock it into a keyboard and it would run Windows all of a sudden. Look at you try and drag Windows. That's so cute. That would be great. But that's, I don't know that that's possible. So that's like, that's straight up just a Haswell, it's a processor problem. Sure. OS problem. I mean this is also what like. And presumably we'll fix that. It's also the possibility of like Chrome OS and Android merging, right? Is that when I want it to be, it's an Android tablet and then I dock it in and it's a Chromebook. Right. But Chrome OS is only marginally more, in fact it's not even more functional than Android. In some ways it's more functional than Android. What? Like, come on. Like all I use is a browser anyway and to be able to have like a bunch of windows open and do stuff side by side and everything's a web app. I have a Chromebook. I love it. That's a window problem. It's not an OS problem. Yeah, but honestly I think at a, on some level the biggest productivity problems we have on these mobile devices are window problems. Yeah, lack of windows. Yeah. Like it's. Like button problems. Yeah. Like easy switching between stuff and window problems. And like Chrome OS is a small way of solving that. You're trying to make me say web OS aren't you? Damn it. It's true. No, we're going to look back in 50 years and be like, shit, they got it right the first time and then we just ruined it forever. No, it wasn't the first time. It was terrible, but not terrible, but not great. But that concept of panels that lost, that never got made. Well, it was the joke about the Irish. Like the Irish discovered civilization and then they had a Guinness and lost it. It's like, that's what web OS was. Well, Dieter, you're going to buy an LG TV for this very reason, right? No. Oh yes you are. Don't lie. No, I'm not buying an LG TV. I'm buying an LG TV for five years easily. I've got a TV that's like two, maybe three years old. No, it's two years old. I've got an Xbox one plugged into it now for Titanfall. Yeah. Which I can't play anymore, which I'm really bad at. And I didn't know the beta was going offline last night and I didn't play. And then I tried to play and now I'm really sad. I'm terrible at that game. I'm terrible. Just awful. Also the Xbox one is embarrassingly large. It's not. It's so big. Put it next to anything else. A cable box. A TiVo. I've got the, you know the... I could definitely live in the ocean on my cable box. IKEA is replacing an Expedit shelf line, which has got all the hipsters angry because it's perfect for holding records. And we use it as an entertainment center. Oh yeah, we wrote about that. Yeah. We use it as an entertainment center and we use it to have... We've got records in it because you have to have records if you live in Brooklyn. But underneath... You just moved here just immediately and bought a bunch of records. Yeah. And it had a little Expedit slot with an Xbox 360, a Wii and an Ouya. Everything was in there. I already don't trust you. It was cold. It was fine. This conversation is going south. I took all three of those things out and I'm like, I'm going to place all this with the one. It's going to be awesome. Nope. It has to sit on top of my entertainment center. Maybe that's why IKEA discontinued it. Yeah. Because they were like, crap, it doesn't fit the Xbox one. We got to try something else. It could be why. No, that thing is large. It's very large. Stupidly big. Yeah. It's super loud. It turns out. Yeah. Especially when I'm playing type. Literally every component of it has a fan. The power supply, the Kinect has a fan and the box has a fan. That's true. The Kinect fan is my favorite. Yeah. Wow. All right. I feel like... I think we're done. We're wrapping up. Yeah. So if you want to contact us, you can. You can email us. The email address is thevergecast at theverge.com. Is that right? Just Vergecast. There's no the. Just vergecast at theverge.com. We're also on Twitter. I want to thank Ellis Hamburger who was here earlier. He is at Hamburger. She's awesome. Which is the best. David Pearce is at Pearce David, which is the worst. Yeah, that's true. Objectively the worst. Just I'm telling you, please everyone berate whoever at David Pearce is on Twitter. He's actually a very nice guy. Don't do that. We've talked a few times because sometimes I berate him into trying to give me his Twitter. Very nice guy. But please everyone berate him into giving me his Twitter handle. Thank you. Chris Ziegler is asepower. I am at Backlon and there's a really good story behind that, which I'd love to tell you sometime. But until I do this weekend, your family keep Joshua away from.

It's Thursday, February 20th, 2014. I'm Addy Robertson and I too have binge-watched all of Home of Cards. House? House? What the hell was I watching? This is 90 Seconds on the Verge. Siri has a new competitor and it certainly isn't her first battle. Microsoft is adding a new personal digital assistant to its Windows phones called Cortana. Named after Master Chief's assistant in the Halo games, Cortana will animate when she's speaking or thinking. Cortana will ship with Windows Phone 8.1. While Cortana can talk you through the world around you, Google is working on a phone that can actually see it. Project Tango, the latest initiative from Google, has built a prototype Android phone that can learn and map the world around it. The company says the phone will learn the dimension of rooms and spaces by being moved around inside of them. Google expects to ship 200 developer units by March 14th. And finally, it looks like the Fantastic Four reboot has its four. The film is expected to star House of Cards Kate Mara as the Invisible Woman, the Spectacular Now's Miles Teller as Mr. Fantastic, and Billy Elliot's Jamie Bell as The Thing. Meanwhile, the YR star Michael B. Jordan, coming off acclaimed film Fruitvale Station, will play the Human Torch. The Fantastic Four reboot is currently set for release on June 19th, 2015. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I sell my messaging app to Google and make billions. Enough goofing around, Addie. Upstairs, now. You got it, Ross. Action. Well, a girl can always dream.

I'm David with The Verge and this is the Galaxy Note Pro. Samsung's great at copying other companies and mimicking their cool features, but it had one really good idea that no one's been able to copy yet. Making everything huge. This is a 12.2 inch tablet, one of the biggest I've ever used. And for all intents and purposes, it's just like every other Samsung Galaxy Note tablet. Except, you know, bigger. The Note Pro is 11.6 inches wide and 8 inches tall. It honestly feels a little like I'm holding a television. It's surprisingly thin, actually, at less than 8 millimeters, but at 1.6 pounds it's just about the heaviest tablet you'll find. It's made of Samsung's traditional cheap plastic, either white or blue, but it feels a lot better than some older tablets. It has this fake stitched leather coating on the back that doesn't look or sound like a good idea, but it makes the Note Pro a lot more comfortable and pleasant to hold. It's thin enough that you can kind of dig it into your palm and hold it in one hand, but that gets tiring really fast. This thing is meant to be held in two hands. And probably not even held at all, but used on a desk. It's also meant to be used in landscape mode. The 12.2 inch 2560 by 1600 display is really beautiful, though it's the same resolution and a little larger than the Note 10.1's screen, which looks a little better as a result. For watching a movie, having so much screen real estate is really great, though it can actually be too much for a game. I got dizzy playing Asphalt Airborne, which was just stuttery enough and so close to my face that I got a headache. The screen is, obviously, ridiculously tall in portrait mode. There is one time it's useful, though. If you hold the tablet in portrait, play a video in the bottom half and do something else in the top, it's almost like you're using two tiny tablets side by side. It's great. The Galaxy Note Pro runs a heavily customized version of Android 4.4 KitKat, with Samsung's TouchWiz software layered all over it. The most useful addition is the multitasking. The Note Pro actually lets you run up to four apps at once. Dragging them all into place one by one is kind of a pain, but once things are set, they're really easy to move around and adjust. It's not exactly smooth all the time, but it's honest-to-goodness multitasking, which a tablet like this, which is clearly designed for getting things done, really needs. The other useful addition to the standard Android tablet experience is the S Pen, which has always been the hallmark feature of Note devices. Here it's the same tiny pen as ever, and it works impressively well. It's responsive enough that both writing and drawing are smooth and accurate. The problem with the S Pen, and actually with the multitasking, too, is that there's just not enough to do. The multitasking only works with a handful of apps, so you can't pin Evernote next to a browser and take notes that way. There are only clunky workarounds. And with the pen, the only real benefit over your finger is if you're using a few Samsung-blessed apps like S Note or Action Memo. When you first pull the pen out of its slot in the top corner of the tablet, it pops up the Action Command menu, which offers a few things you can do. You can draw a rectangle on the screen and open an app in that space. You can take a screenshot and draw on it, or quickly pop up a notepad. It's handy, and I found myself using the pen basically constantly when I was using the Note Pro, but it's still way too limited. In almost any other app, I'm stuck just tapping and swiping. There's also basically nothing here taking advantage of such a gigantic display. Samsung's flipboard-powered, live tile-style Magazine UX home screen is neat, but it's huge and just shows news or your calendar. It's like Windows 8 but without a lot of the options or customizations. Samsung did make some changes to the OS itself to better suit such a big screen. There are bigger settings menus, a huge notification pull-down, and a horizontal multitasking window across the bottom of the screen. And of course, that's all in addition to the standard blooping and rippling of Nature UX. Samsung's real focus here is on the business-friendly features that seem appropriate for a device with Pro in its name. There's a utility built-in for sharing your laptop screen on your tablet, one for sharing your tablet screen on your laptop, and a couple of apps for running meetings. The Note Pro is designed for work, and it does feel more productive than most tablets. Its keyboard is huge and easy to type on, the pen is handy in spots, and the multitasking helps too. But this is not a replacement for a laptop, or even really a competitor for something like the Surface Pro, which is a full-fledged PC in a tablet body. It's just a tablet. Basically, it's the same thing as the Note 10.1, only bigger. It's fast and responsive, thanks to an Exynos processor and three gigs of RAM. The RAM also helps a lot with multitasking. But there's nothing that really differentiates it from any other Samsung product other than its sheer size. And starting at $749, you're paying a lot for a little more screen real estate. It's not going to replace a laptop, or even really let you leave it at home. The Note Pro is great for meetings, and it's great for watching movies. And for everything else, it's just exactly the same as any other tablet, only bigger and heavier and more expensive. There's a million-miler businessman out there who might get a lot from the Galaxy Note Pro, but most people won't get nearly enough.

It's Wednesday, February 19th, 2014. I'm David Pierce and I'm excited to be the one to premiere the first full-length trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy. Kimmel? Why does nobody tell me these things? This is 90 seconds on the verge I'm hosting. Facebook just picked up multi-platform messaging service WhatsApp for $16 billion. Over 450 million people use WhatsApp every month. Its total messaging volume, Facebook says, is nearly the same as standard text messaging. Facebook's been looking for a killer messaging service for years and it may have just bought one. Facebook says WhatsApp will continue to operate independently and retain its own brand, which sounds a lot like how it's been treating the Instagram acquisition. Google Glass is still new to most of the world and because of that, Google has a few general etiquette suggestions. The company has posted a list of do's and don'ts for members in its Explorer program and it's largely based on feedback from the current group of so-called explorers. The do's include taking advantage of voice commands and using screen lock to prevent anyone from using Glass without permission. Google's main point, however, is to not be a creepy glass hole saying all it takes is one person using Glass the wrong way to turn off business owners and curious onlooker. Finally, Kanye West is teaming up with author and professional internet troll Brett Easton Ellis for a movie. While the script has since been written, Ellis isn't providing any additional details saying, quote, it's in Kanye land. I can only imagine the kind of beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy nightmares that go on there. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I audition for the role of Hawkeye in the upcoming MASH musical. It's gonna be specta- I almost had it. It's gonna be specta-

There are about a million mobile payments apps promising to revolutionize the way I buy things, and I've tried just about all of them. Google Wallet, Level Up, ISIS, Square Wallet, PayPal, and others let you purchase your daily cup of coffee wirelessly over Bluetooth or NFC, but they're all kind of useless because they don't work everywhere. I'm Ellis Hamburger with The Verge, and this is Loop. Loop's hardware lets you pay wirelessly at over 90% of existing credit card terminals in the US without retailers having to do anything. Is this the mobile payments service I've been asking for? Loop is a magnetic conductor that emulates the swiping of a magnetic strip credit card. At launch, Loop comes inside a Mophie-like charge case for your phone or a square plastic fob you can hook on a keychain or just keep in your pocket. After loading your cards into the Loop app using a supplied reader, you can hold the charge case or fob up to a credit card reader, press a button, and the reader accepts the transaction as if you'd swipe your credit card. It's kind of amazing. Loop transfers magnetic pulses that emulate the swiping of the max drive card. Those are the same magnetic pulses organized the same way as the data on the max drive, and the terminal reads it just like the magnetic strip. And therefore, we are compatible with any max drive reader today. Expecting the retail to change, expecting a new network to arise, is somewhat optimistic. Given the history of point of sale, where equipment life cycles are on the average seven years, we are not going to see a major change. I took a Loop charge case and Loop fob around town to see if terminals could read it, and of course to see if cashiers would actually let me use it. I gave a cashier at the local deli my fob and asked her to hold it against her credit card reader and press the button on its side. She was pretty skeptical at first, but she tried it and it worked. Loop worked at a bodega too, though the cashier was equally confused. It even worked in both taxicabs I tried. Worked better in fact, since I didn't even have to convince anyone to let me touch my gadget to their credit card machine. Both Loop devices, however, were foiled by subway ticketing machines and ATMs that require you stick a card in to trigger a switch, which in turn reads the card. I'm incredibly impressed by the Loop technology, but not by its first two form factors. The Loop fob is the more reliable of the two, but it can only transmit one card at a time, and at nearly an inch thick, it's more annoying to carry around than a few credit cards. The Loop charge case is the more logical form factor since it also charges your phone and doesn't require you to carry around anything extra. But its build quality leaves a lot to be desired. Its plastic body feels much less sturdy than a Mophie, and it's also fatter than a Mophie even though it's shorter. The charge case connects to your phone using Bluetooth where you can pick which card you want to transmit at any time inside the Loop wallet app, so it feels a bit more advanced than the fob. Neither Loop form factor is right for me. After all, aren't mobile payments about killing the wallet and limiting the crap you're carrying around? But Loop most closely approximates a future where payment tech is truly integrated into our phones and works everywhere. Embedding this technology in a handset is very easy. The core cost relating to the magnetic transmission is well under $1. Indeed, if the phone is already embedding wireless charging, we can reuse a lot of the components used in wireless charging. Loop shows that even when your tech works on most readers, trying to rely on one mobile payment service is still too cumbersome. With a big marketing push from Samsung or another top phone maker, Loop could become well known enough that I wouldn't need to explain it to every cashier I run into. But for now, pretty often I just wanted to pull out my credit card, swipe, and be done with it. Even if mobile payment services are smarter, are they actually easier to use than a credit card? The answer is still no.

From Studio 8B at Vox Media, it's 90 Seconds on the Verge! Featuring Story 1, Story 2, and a special appearance by Story 3. Now here's your host, Nathan Sykirch! Ah, big day of news. Let's get to it. HTC announced the unveiling date of their new flagship smartphone. It's March 25th. Rumor has it they'll call it the HTC One and it'll have a dual sensor camera and a larger screen. Dual sensor camera and a larger screen, or as my mom calls it, what? Wait, is it really just gonna be one? Not next one? I want this one, not that one. No, not that one. Not that one either. But this one. That one. That one right there. But just one. Ah, what else, what else? Oh, sad news. Bioshock developer Irrational Games is shutting down. Really, shut down. Shut down, yeah. I am shocked. I am bioshocked. And finally, Guardians of the Galaxy. I'm excited for this one. Marvel released a 15 second teaser of the new film today, featuring Chris Pratt and Groot, the sentient tree played by Vin Diesel. If you haven't had a chance to look at it, we actually have a clip of Groot. Let's take a look. Yeah, he's a real Groot. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, we sit down with Dean Cain and hear music from Chumbawamba. We'll see you then. Good night, everybody.

Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show, live from New York and another city in New York and also London. I'm Dieter Bohm. I'm Chris Idler. Why did I go right after you? I was in New York. My cadence is off. Dieter said something and I just jumped right in. I was feeling it. I'm sorry, Vlad and Dan. I totally stole your thunder. Look, sometimes you just feel it. Like you feel a really good slice of pizza that you can get in New York. Don't even start with me. I'm Dan Seifert, by the way. And I'm completely out of order, so obviously I have to cut off. Vlad, that is a luxurious beard you're sporting. A luxurious and compulsory beard now. That's right. By legally binding agreement. So if you guys aren't familiar, Chris Idler started a change.org petition to prevent Vlad from shaving his beard and it worked. How many signatures did we get? 110 or so. 110 signatures. The thing to remember is it only takes 110 people to do something meaningless and trivial on the internet to make Vlad do anything. Look, can we start a petition to make Vlad permanently follow me on Twitter? Well, I don't think Vlad would... That was gonna require a thousand. I'm sorry. That's a real stretch goal right there. So Vlad, real talk, are you gonna keep the beard? People have spoken. Well, I can't let them down. I think I might have to trim it because it's like covering my lips now and it's just getting really terrible. I mean, I'm not a beard professional like you, Chris, so I'm completely out of habit of eating with so much fur on my face. I wouldn't call me a beard professional. There are people in our organization who are beard professionals. Evan Rogers has been known to sport a really, really lovely beard. You know who has the best, I think, in our organization? At least out of our New York office. Christian Mazza, one of our video producers, has like the perfect beard. It's a nice beard. This is the Verge Mobile Show where we talk about Verge staff that you may or may not be familiar with. You should be familiar with all of them though because they're all lovely people. This is our Octogenarian episode, it's episode number 80, and we are in the week before Mobile World Congress and it is sort of the calm before the storm, although there have been a bunch of leaks and rumors and very well-sourced reports on what we can expect out of Samsung. The obvious thing is the Galaxy S5, we're starting to get dribs and drabs of what to expect with that. I'm hearing 5.2 inch screen, we've already talked about how the interface should be a little bit chiller, and now there's a rumor that there's going to be a fingerprint sensor? Holy cow! No way! Apparently it will be used to unlock your phone, launch apps, authenticate yourself. Because we haven't seen that idea before. No, it's completely original. Apparently at one point people thought it would be behind the screen, which is insane, and now the rumor is it's going to be on the home button, but it's going to be a swipe. That worked out really well for the Atrix guys. And it worked out really well on, what was it, the One Max? But the position of the sensor on the Atrix was insane. Yeah, well, yeah. It was pretty insane. Also, it doubled as the power button, which was completely ridiculous. I thought it was kind of awesome. The theory of it was awesome, but it was hard to press. Literally the theory about everything with the Atrix is awesome, and the execution fell apart on almost every front. The first dual-core Android smartphone, it had the lap-dock thing that was awesome, and it had the fingerprint scanner. It was like, on paper, going to be the most awesome thing ever. It wasn't the fo'zeal core, by the way. Well, I don't think you could buy the LG in the US, so. Yet. Whatever. It was one of the first. By the way, I just want to point out that Dieter and I literally look like hostages with this blank white background. It's like, we're being treated well, we hope our government works to secure our freedom. I mean, this really does look kind of scary. We need a decoration of the camera. How can we point the camera that way with the cool poster? Yeah, we have a great e-boy poster. We're in Josh's office right now, actually, and he has a beautiful e-boy poster on the opposite wall. It looks great. You guys should see it. It's amazing. Unfortunately they can't. It's pretty obvious from your background that you're in the interrogation position opposite Josh. I'm sure there's a throne. He's standing right there, he's glowering at us, he's very mad at how unprofessional this podcast is, and I can't blame him, honestly. So S5, I mean, what else? That's pretty much everything we know. I think it's going to look the same. No, at one time there was a rumor that it was going to be made of metal this time, right? Yeah, but that's not going to happen. Maybe, I mean, they can't just put out another phone that looks like a GS5, or a GS4. Why not, Chris? Chris, I would like to introduce you to a company called Samsung. Well, yeah, but consider this. And I know that Samsung does a very good job of siloing their different divisions, but if you look at their televisions and how much they've evolved in the past five years, their ID, originally they were just a thick black bezel, and now they've moved to this insane transparent one millimeter thick bezel with the little aluminum thing at the bottom that says Samsung on it. So they know how to iterate ID. They haven't done it for a couple of years now with the Galaxy S, but maybe this is the year. In that respect, they have. The bezels on the Galaxy S4 are like the smallest, like they made the Galaxy S4 the same size as the Galaxy S3, but increased the screen size. So like, they're shrinking the bezels just like they've done on the TVs, but you know, it still has that greasy, slimy plastic back. I think that it's more likely that instead of maybe a metal phone, they'll probably apply some sort of idea of that faux leather back that they do on the Galaxy Note and those new tablets, and they even released a version of the Galaxy S4 in Korea and Russia with that faux leather back. So I'd be surprised, or not be surprised if the Galaxy S5 had that. Yeah. I mean, I am unreasonably excited for the S5. I know it just feels super iterative, but I mean, I'm using a Nexus 5 as my Android phone, I'm using an iPhone as my main phone right now, and I mean, I've seen the rumors for what HTC is probably going to do, and I'm not super excited by that. I know LG doesn't have anything in the pipeline that really gets me excited, so when it comes to like Android phones that are going to like float my boat, get my heart racing, it seems like for the next while the S5 is kind of going to be at the top of the list. But you're kind of achieving your excitement by process of elimination. You're saying everybody else stinks, so let's hope Samsung doesn't. I mean, can't you just be content with the Nexus 5? You know, I can be content with the Nexus 5, especially if I had the Vermillion one, but I don't. Is that the official name of it? No, it's officially Red. Great Red, I think is the official name. It's officially, hey guys, I'm Red. It's officially F you Red, is what I think it's called. No, I can't be excited about the Nexus 5 because the camera is terrible. Right. But you know, that's a, that's a really, the one thing we know nothing about with the new Samsung GS5, which is the camera. Right. And that's a big mystery. I think that might be in fact the deciding, at least hardware component for this new device. The big speculation for this year in general with smartphones and Android smartphones typically the spec race is that they'll switch to quad HD or QHD or whatever the spec is for resolution, which is like 2560 by 1440. So a 5.2 inch Galaxy S5 with that sort of resolution seems reasonable and likely, particularly for the time span that we're looking at being announced let's say a week from now and then maybe launching a month from then. But I don't think that display resolution is going to be anything like you say that floats people's boat or really differentiates it from the older devices. The other thing that has me potentially excited is Samsung reinvesting in the camera because I know with the Galaxy S2 and the Galaxy S3, it was a real differentiating feature for me. You know, that's the thing that made it stand out because if we all remember, the Galaxy S2 is the spot where Samsung really took off and split apart from HTC. Up to that point it was really either Samsung is in the ascendancy or HTC. In fact, HTC and those are the strengths on which Samsung built its great popularity. It's having an awesome camera, having its own excellent processors, etc. So we can see a processor upgrade, we can see a screen upgrade. I don't think any of us are particularly optimistic about Samsung doing an industrial design upgrade that is really special or unique. So really the thing that leaves us hopeful is the camera, which is the thing we're not laughing about. Yeah, I mean the last couple of iterations of the Galaxy, the camera has been like not bad. It's been fine, it's been pretty good, but it hasn't been ambitious or risky and I would love to see Samsung try and do something ambitious and risky. I mean they've added a million features with the core camera technology and the core image processing. Yeah, I mean everything that Samsung did with the Galaxy S4 camera was in the software and it was all these weird software features that I don't know how many people use them. I certainly never use them really. I tested them, but beyond the review I never really found a place for them in my personal life. But the Galaxy Note 3 has an excellent camera, so I think Samsung actually can do cameras pretty well. It would be great. I don't think Samsung has released a camera with like an optical stabilizer or some of these other technologies that we're seeing the other companies do, so it would be cool if they integrated that. So the other thing that we are expecting out of mobile Congress from Samsung, thanks to interpret reporting by our very own Chris Ziegler, is not just one but multiple Galaxy gears. This is the rumor. I'm looking at my post right now to familiarize myself with it. The post that you wrote 15 minutes ago. Chris, am I going to be able to buy a Galaxy Gear for each one of my limbs? Well, I mean maybe. It is Samsung. The rumor is multiple new Galaxy Gears. My gut is that they are going to release – they're going to turn Galaxy Gear into a portfolio of products and this isn't just going to be about smartphones. My guess is that they might do a fuel band type thing. They might do a clip. Who knows? But I don't think they're going to just release a bunch of smart phones. I mean smart watches. What about a ring? Why not? Again, it's Samsung. So the other rumor with the Gear is that instead of running Android, it could run Tizen. Initially I went, yeah come on, no way. But then I kind of think maybe they could do that because why not. Well, if they can optimize it better than Android for low battery and let themselves have a smaller battery on it, then not only am I like, do I not care? I'm kind of pro-Tizen. I'm pro-Tizen. I'm saying it right, I'm pro-Tizen. I think that would solidify it as only compatible with Samsung devices. I mean it's already there like the Galaxy Gear only works with Samsung phones but if they actually do move it over to a Tizen platform, that pretty much guarantees it will never work with other Android phones. Yeah. Does it? No. I mean, unless Samsung would have to release an app that would make it talk to everything. I don't know, I mean if it juices sales, maybe they would. Right. I mean the problem with anything Samsung does in wearables is that they obviously have a large enough product and app ecosystem so that they have no interest or need to make their products compatible largely with operating systems. They can just make them compatible with specific Samsung products which is what they've done with the Galaxy Gear and I have no reason to think that these will be any different. But regarding the Tizen switch, I mean we've been reporting for a long, long time that Samsung is at risk of wresting control of Android from Google, right? And I think that that danger is as real as ever and Samsung continues to try to make Tizen happen and I'd like to flash the meme picture, stop trying to make Tizen happen, it's never going to happen. So here's the thing, on a smartwatch, it's sort of contained. You want a smartwatch to be simple and to do what it does, you want it to be like the pebble, right? So if Tizen gives them the ability to have a smaller battery and just do things and not crash because they control the whole stack and they understand how the whole stack works and they can cut out extra craft more easily than they can on Android, maybe I'm not crazy to say I don't hate Tizen. But is there, first of all, is there any indication that Tizen is easier on battery than Android? Yeah, I don't know. So we'll see. I mean, frankly, it doesn't need to be either. Oh yeah, it does. Why? I mean, it was the sort of wearables we were talking about, they could have some really basic tailor-made software. Yeah, they could do basic tailor-made software, but I'm saying it's got to be easier on the battery than Android. Sure. Then the Galaxy Gear is right now. It needs to be better than the Galaxy Gear is now for battery life. Right. And the whole slew of other things. Yeah. Frankly, I just think if this is correct, and again, there's no reason to doubt it since I'm reading on The Verge and there's this Chris Zeekler guy who wrote it, I mean, spreading the Galaxy Gear name around to me is like a terrible idea for Samsung. You've picked up a reputation which is pretty poor, I mean, I don't know how it is with the normal humans, but at least among the people interested in technology, Samsung has kind of been laughed at for the Galaxy Gear because of all its failings and because of its gimmicks and its half-day battery life and all of these shortcomings. And its price. So trying to stretch that out across your wearables portfolio, I just don't think that's a particularly sage idea. Like, you're kind of prejudicing people against whatever else you're doing, which might actually be good, you know? I mean, I don't know. The Galaxy Gear is a very young device at this point. It's only been six months since it launched. Yeah, it came out and there's a lot of things wrong with it and we panned it pretty hard in our view as did many other people and many other viewers. But it's not like it's been established for multiple years as a brand. I think that… Well, so it's more established as a brand than it is as a product. So the fact that they've had it in AT&T stores and in Best Buy stores like being advertised is almost as important as people buying it in terms of the ability of them to sell it in the future. And so when these new gears come out, assuming they're better, people are like, oh yeah, I've heard of that. Oh, it's the new version. Oh, okay, maybe I'll try this one because the first one was too nerdy for me. It could actually help to have it out there even though it was not very well reviewed and didn't have sales that lived quite up to Samsung's original expectations. And I'd wager that most average consumers don't really know the gear name all that well. They know Galaxy very well and so they might say, I want that Galaxy watch, just like they say they have a Galaxy phone instead of an Android phone. But I mean, unless you are really in the thick of things, you're probably not calling whatever smartwatch that Samsung releases a Galaxy gear. It's a Galaxy watch or whatever. Or a Galaxy fitness tracker, Galaxy smart ring. I don't know. And so Nokia will be there. They've got the announcement where they bird whistled the X pretty loudly. Do they know that Motorola used that name already? Everybody has used that name. There's the HTC One X, Moto X, and now the Nokia X apparently. There's already the Nokia X7. That's true, but that is a completely irrelevant phone. What we need is a new alphabet with more cool looking letters. Agree, agree. Greek. Greek is, yeah. Nokia Lambda. I'd buy that. I would buy that. Hell yeah. So what do you guys think, I mean. Rho. Rubber meets the road. What do you guys think about this product? Your Rho, R-H-O. I think I might have mentioned this last week, but Tom Warren tweeted that if you don't care about Nokia's Asha lineup right now, you're not going to care about the Nokia X phone. And I think that's exactly what it's going to be like. Everything that has leaked and all the stuff that we've seen point to this being a very low end device with 512 megabytes of RAM, WVGA display, single or low power dual core processor or something. It's not going to be interesting. WVGA? Yeah. What is this, 2000, just 2000? To be honest, that's a step up from Asha phones. So if they're going for that market, which it seems to be, that's very much what they're going for, this would be a step up. But for us who might be thinking of this being a Lumia running Android, it's not. And it's not going to be. It's not going to be that particularly interesting as a device. As a concept of Nokia producing an Android phone, very interesting. As a device itself, not very interesting. This is how the announcement's going to go. Stephen Elop, current CEO of Nokia, future whatever the hell his title is going to be at Microsoft now that he's out of the CEO race there because Microsoft has a new CEO. He's going to get up on stage. He's going to kind of walk out. Well guys, a bunch of engineers made a thing, whatever. Here it is. See ya. And he'll just amble off the stage. That's how I want this announcement. He just walks out there and is like, yeah, whatever, here you go. And then he leaves. That's what I want. Do you guys remember the Lumia 1020 event when we couldn't tell for like 10 minutes whether he was really there or not? Yeah, that was on me. I was live blogging it. And I'm like, look at this projection of him. Neelai is sitting right next to me. He's like, that's actually him. I hope he does that again. There's like this period of time where it's like, is it a phantasm of Stephen Elop or is it the actual Stephen Elop? The thing is, that is the least likely thing that Stephen Elop will ever do, the scenario that Dieter painted. Because this dude has spent the past however long he's been in. He's been for years actually since February 2011. You know, trying to paint a pretty picture or an upbeat picture about a company that has been struggling so mightily. But to bring us to the device, if it really is that low spec and low end as Dan describes it, I am going to be just angry. Because to me, it feels kind of like sabotage or like intentionally ruining the dream. To me, it feels like when you had a century ago, when you had the race between electric cars and oil powered cars, you know, longer than a century ago, somebody would produce an electric car and just do a really terrible job of it and say, this is why we shouldn't have electric cars. So to me, this is what the Nokia X would be if it's really shit. If it's got really terrible specs and it runs like garbage, it's going to be like, look, if Nokia went Android, it would have looked like this and you would have hated it. Whereas I don't think that would have been a good idea. I think the dream you're referring to is the Lumia Android phone and that dream just doesn't exist. Like that's not a real thing. Exactly. Like Nokia would never produce that. Microsoft would never let Nokia produce that and never let it sell a Lumia Android phone alongside a Lumia Windows phone and have them compete head to head. I mean, that's just kind of like never going to happen. Might as well get that out of your ideas now. It's not today's dream. I'm talking about something that we wanted to see previously, you know, quite a long while ago. The problem that I have, or the thing that this Nokia Android phone reveals is an interesting failure of Microsoft to build software. Because the whole point of this phone is to target the low end and to make the phones cheap and have them run on low spec hardware and you know, sell gazillions of them across the globe for next to nothing. Microsoft should have tried to do that, they did try to do that with Windows phone. And that was one of the points, was it the 7.8 update where they tried to trim the fat and push it down and work in the low end. I mean if Nokia, Microsoft's core hardware partner on a track to getting acquired by them, doesn't believe that Microsoft can push Windows phone down quickly enough in order to work on those lower end phones, you know, it's either Microsoft made a strategic decision that they would try and make Windows phone more high end and they wouldn't bother trying to reduce the software down to there again, or they tried and failed and Nokia said, you know what, we're doing it. So considering that some of Microsoft's biggest wins with Windows phone have been in emerging markets, my belief is that this project started as an exploration by Nokia as a plan B if the Windows phone deal failed. And it, you know, parts of that project continued on to this very day and we're ending up with an OSH replacement. So you know, I think that this has been a constantly shifting exploration for a very long time inside the company, but I don't think it started as Nokia saying, well we need something that can push lower than Windows phone can that needs to succeed OSH. I don't think that's how that, my gut is that that's not how that conversation started. We all know Nokia's not very good at canning projects once it's started. Yeah. The engineers that work on a project will work on that until there's a product on the market and then they'll give up. Or until they suddenly find themselves working at a company called Yalla. So let's talk about the Nokia Lumia icon, the new phone that's out on Verizon, which is the successor to the, this is the 925 I believe. Is that right? Sounds right. 928. 928. And then it is the horrible ugly version of the 925 which is a beautiful, amazing, well designed, feels great in the hand, feels solid, feels like it's of this age or slightly ahead of its age phone. And Nokia can make great phones, but as David said in his review, instead of making a great phone, they made this. Yeah, I couldn't. Can someone explain to me why it's like an inch thick? First of all. Why it looks like the battery has bulged, like exploded. Yeah. And why the camera button actually shakes and why the plastic back came off of its clips a little bit ago. Yeah, this is the worst. No, the worst about it is we know that Nokia can do better. Right. And they're not. Chris, can you pull your laptop screen down? It's like you're just hiding it right behind your laptop. Yeah, the camera's far away, but like… I'm the worst hand model ever. It's pretty bad. I know what I'm doing. You can see like they tried, I guess you could say they tried to keep the industrial design of their last phone, but it's not good. To me, what this reeks of is Verizon meddling. Exactly. No, this has Verizon written all over it, literally, multiple times. And you know, it's a shame, but they essentially… Oh my god, the phone is hovering mysteriously in front of the camera. So you can see those beautiful Verizon… What is going on? There's this floating hand. That's actually my hand. Like my right hand. I think Verizon saw Nokia release the I25. Thank you. Everybody, Evan Rogers, our esteemed producer. I think Nokia saw, or Verizon saw Nokia release the I25 with this beautiful metal band and this great design and stuff like that. And they're like, we've got the I28, can you put a metal band on that and make it a new phone and throw some more logos on it and take away some features? Like everything, if the phone looked good and wasn't so heavy and bricky… No, you stop right there. Don't continue that sentence any further. No, you would not buy it. No one would buy it. It doesn't matter if it looks good. That's Windows phone's problem right now. That could be the best looking phone in the universe. And you know how many people would buy it? Three. I wasn't going to end with buy, I was going to end with good phone, but okay. Yeah, but there you go. You're like, if it wasn't this phone, it would be a good phone. I just wanted to say earlier on, with respect to Nokia and Microsoft dragging Windows phone down, I just wanted to agree with Chris because it was maybe not this summer, maybe the previous summer where one of Nokia's developer chiefs was saying Microsoft isn't being quick enough dragging Windows phone down into lower price points. We're disappointed. That was a quote from him. By the pace at which Microsoft is doing this, I absolutely think the Android experiment, let's call it, has been an ongoing investigation, exploration like Chris was saying. It isn't something that just got sprung up in the past few months. And as Dan was saying, they invested that much time, the company and its phone division is going away, they might as well put something out there in the market. I think what solidifies that is the fact that you can buy a Nokia Lumia 520 unlocked in the US for like $69. That is a low end Windows phone and it runs like every other Windows phone pretty much. The camera might not be as good and it might not be quite as fast and the screen is probably WVGA, but that's a $69 unlocked smartphone. That's about as low end as smartphones are today. And you know, another point I just wanted to make. In terms of Vermillion Red phones, I have a Red 720, Lumia 720, which I don't use because Windows phone, but that is one of the most beautiful phones ever. I was thinking about the Red Nexus and I remember the Red Lumia 720 and to me that is so much nicer. And it just shows Nokia, like DT was saying, Nokia has no problems with design, it only screws it up when Verizon tells it to. And that's the disappointing thing. Because that 720 with a nice camera, battery life and Android, forget about it. I'm not going to be interested in phones for a couple of years if I had one of those. Well Nokia is hurtling Pelmel to its purchase by Microsoft which is moving along just fine and you know, Satya Nadella is going to fix everything. Of course, of course. I can't believe how thick this phone is. It's outrageous. Like this was acceptable in like 2008. So before the show started I had pulled this out of a drawer. It's a Nokia trio, I mean a Palm trio 650 from 2006 I believe. Dieter can correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know. Is that thicker than your headphones then? It's probably thicker than my headphones, yes. But you know, it's not that much thicker than the Icon. Oh, come on. I mean if you're on Verizon and you want Windows Phone then go to town. And you'll suffer through the brickiness of it but you know, apps are way better on Windows Phone and the screen I think is fine and the camera is totally passable. You know, it's a solid Nokia camera that does all the most, yeah we'll say all the Nokia tricks, all the ones that's not like a 1020 madness. It's the same camera as the 1520 as far as I understand. Yeah, and of course it feels fast because Windows Phone always does. So you know, just have fun carrying this around. Sorry. Just don't sit down when it's in your pocket. If you're going to go for like a massive, you know, crazy Nokia phone, just go for the Lumia 1520. At least that thing has an amazing… But you can't get that on Verizon. Verizon, bro. Yeah, if you're on Verizon, this is your only choice. Yeah. I forgot about your capitalist ways. Okay, can't help you. Sorry. Deal with it. Yeah. Okay, so HTC is not expected to launch their next phone at Mobile World Congress but they have announced, when they will announce, their next phone which is with the save the date thing for March 25th. Yay. That is almost exactly one month after Samsung's Galaxy S5. Right, it's a while after. This is always a chess match between those two. Like, well, I don't know that it is but like I can only assume that it is. I think it's more of a chess match for HTC. I think Samsung does its thing and HTC… Right. …moves. Right. The most disappointing thing is that the save the date invitation doesn't have anything, any hints that we can like try and parse out. It's just the date. No, it's on the 25th which is a 2 and a 5. So there should be two cameras. Oh my god. And a 5 inch screen and maybe, you know, it's going to be called the HTC One 2. And because it's in March, Marching is like walking which means it will have like some fitness features in it. Dude! Half-Life 3 confirmed, right Dan? Yes, Half-Life 3 confirmed. Dan, what was that thing you tweeted this morning about it? I pretty much just said it. March 25th, 2.5, two cameras, 5 inches. No, no, no, you had something about like a new movie or something. Oh, it was Half-Life 3. Yes. Yes, that's why I was reciting it and quoting Dan. Do you think this thing is going to support PlayStation Mobile? I mean Sony's supposed to support PlayStation Mobile. It's very possible because HTC already do. That's what I'm saying. Look, you guys trolled me with this. I had to have something. That's fair, that's fair. But guys, you know what's cool here? They can call it, I mean the rumor, the Bloomberg report from January which actually pinpointed the launch from March and I think that Bloomberg report is basically as factual as we've had and it mentions the dual sensor camera. That said, that is basically going to be called the HTC One again. What I'm thinking is… Wait, is it literally going to be called the One again? Because that would be amazing. The HTC One again. That would be a fun one. The One, again. See, I would actually like, if Peter Chow ever has a YOLO moment, I would love to see that happen, you know, just again. But what they can do is they can call it the HTC One squared, right? They can put the Two in superscript after the One because One squared is One. Justin, like, I always get published in journalism, journalists all the time. I like it. Vlad, you've convinced me that's a really good idea. Yeah. You see? What about a subscript Two? What does that do mathematically? Guys, can we not give them these ideas because I'm going to have to write about this phone for the next year? One prime. I don't want to have to put superscripts and subscripts into every article that I write about it. Ah, but wait, Dan, you will have to. You have to because all of a sudden now there's a trend happening. Because Samsung's Galaxy S5 teaser had everything to the power of five. And it's very possible that Samsung's branding is going to be Galaxy S5 as a superscript on top of the S, which is like, how the hell do you write that in an article? You ignore it and just write S5. But at the same time, LG pre-announced one of its MWC launches, which is going to do the L series, that mid-range Android nondescript series of handsets. And it's called the L series Three, where the Three is in Roman numerals as a superscript of the series. A superscript Roman numeral. That's amazing. Yeah. Just kill me. Just kill me now. Look, guys, at least there's fewer than ten words in these phone names. Like, we've moved ahead. We're approaching the point where they're going to start pulling an artist formerly known as Prince. Where it's a completely unpronounceable… It's just a glyph. Yeah. That's where we're going. No, we already had that. We had the smile. That's right. The smiley phone. It was the smiley first one. So, yay. Where? It was in the US only, I think. Yeah. They made a Samsung smiley. It was literally the smiley emoticon was the name of the phone. So the other thing… Just to point out here. I'm sorry, guys. Just to point out, I do feel like we need to give LG and Samsung a bit of a break because they don't use the Latin alphabet the way that we do. So when they decided to get, let's call it creative with that placement of Roman numerals and whatever, to them, I guess it's just more artistry with the language, which we're uncomfortable with, but then they're more flexible with because it's foreign to them. I go back to my earlier point that we should start using Greek letters. Yeah. Absolutely. You can't use alpha and beta because that denotes things about the quality of the product. But from there on, man, I would buy the hell out of a Samsung gamma. Yeah. Think about it. Absolutely. Epsilon, everything. And dude… Samsung Epsilon, dude. The LG Delta, come on. I like it. I like it. The other thing that HTT… I would buy three lambdas. Oh my god. Whoever makes the money, I would buy three of them. That is a great joke. If you guys get that joke, kudos to you, nerds. The only trouble with the Greek alphabet is that there's going to be a bunch of math nerds who will be like, no, no, that's been used for something else. We're already using that for… Yeah, but trademark law doesn't apply to mathematics as far as I know. Maybe it does. Maybe you can trademark a digit. Trademark law is all like, screw you math nerds. Yeah. The other thing that HTC… They just announced this thing called Advantage, which is US only. For six months after you buy an HTC One, if you crack your screen, they'll replace it. They'll even do like send a one to you ahead of time and you send your broken one back for I forget what the fee is. They're committing to using Google Drive to get free storage. I think it's Macs get 50 gigs, the other guys get 25 gig. And the third part of this is they're promising, I think you swear, I think you swear that they're going to update Android for at least two years on these models. Oh, please. How many times have we heard that? Excuse me. Just regarding the capacity promotion, the cloud storage, this is interesting timing because HTC's… Promotion with Dropbox with the, I believe it was the One X or was it the One? It's the One X. It's just now expiring for people. There's a two year deal where you got 25 gig if you bought a One X. So those people are going to start losing that storage now they're moving to Google Drive. Yeah, the screen replacement thing is clever. Yeah, it is. I mean it's a nice like free like add-on. The six months number is a little like… Kind of random. Yeah. But still it's a really good, because you know every single day of my life I'm walking down the street I see somebody holding a broken, a phone with a broken screen. Yeah. So people are breaking their phones left and right. This is a good way to like kind of encourage people to move over to HTC. HTC needs to get creative, right? Like they're not getting the market share that they need. So I think we're going to start to see more and more of these kind of creative solutions to the problem. Yeah, but I mean honestly do you think that this is going to sell a single more extra phone? It might only because broken displays are such a huge problem. I don't know if this is a global problem or if it's just Americans who can't hold their phones. But literally every day I see smart phones on the street with broken displays and it's a major problem. You can cut your hand on these things. So there might be people who say you know what, I drop my phone all the time. I'm now going to get an HTC because of this promotion. I mean… I think people should buy a Jiz One or whatever. Casio Commando, man. Casio Commando, I'm sorry where you're going with that. No, those are G-Zones, man. Yeah, the G-Zone, the Jiz One. Okay, no I wanted to take the opposite position where the guy said that this offer is clever and said it's completely and utterly dumb. Because it creates a moral hazard. Like I'm going to buy your brand new phone. I'm going to use it for five months and 29 days and then I'm just going to whoops, drop it. No, it doesn't work that way in practice because all you get in return is a refurbished one that is no better or worse than the one that you had before. And you're out of phone for a couple of days so you're just inconveniencing yourself. Okay, fair enough. But still it kind of makes you reckless. You essentially have a six month insurance for any weird damage that you do to it. Okay, unless you drown it. I don't know, it's no different than the insurances that carriers have sold for years except that you get it free for six months. I mean that's like you can pay Verizon or whoever $8 a month for the same type of insurance and they'll replace your phone if you drop it and break it. You probably have to pay a $50 or $100 deductible. But they're just offering this for free for six months. Exactly. Because it's free people are more reckless with it. There's more of a moral hazard. If you only spend like $8 on your Verizon insurance, you still kind of feel like you spent money. So I don't know. I mean look, to me I think that's a good gesture, a positive gesture. If you're going to try and get people to use your devices, this is really a useful bit of security, hardware security. And people invest money. People who don't review phones every day actually spend money on them. So I appreciate that. I'm just saying that every time we've seen companies do this kind of forgiven thing, the end result has tended to be that the company really just hemorrhages a ton of money because people exploit it. I don't think that many people would exploit it to be honest. I think that's a fringe case and there will be those people that do that, sure, but the vast majority of people aren't going to bother with that. I mean I'm hopeful that's the case. I would be happy if everybody does this. I think that's a good thing, giving you six months of security that you won't just lose all your money down the drain when you crack your screen. Should I care about the LG G Pro 2 at all? It's up to 5.9 inch display now. It's a little bit thinner. It has a cool like metal mesh back, but I just have a really hard time going, oh yeah, I can't wait for this to come to the US. 5.9 inches is like, I've actually unfortunately handled or reviewed a number of 5.9 inch phones already. And it's just like, it's at this size where it is, nobody can manage this size and not call it unwieldy. Well I mean so if you're going to have a phone that big, like Samsung handles it really well with the Note. It's just unapologetically like a little kind of mini tablet and they put a stylus in it and they like customize software. The software customization that LG seems to be offering is an option to literally shrink the display size down so that half the screen is unused so you can reach stuff with one finger. Seriously? Yeah. Yeah. Does it have? And nobody sees that and thinks maybe we should try making smaller devices sometime? Nope. I think these devices are made for a very specific market and that market demands bigger screens. I don't think they're made for the western markets at all. LG for a little bit, I have heard a rumor and I can't for the life of me remember where of a G2 mini. That excites me. I think LG itself said that, that they will be announcing a G2 mini at Mobile World Congress. Well that excites me because if it's like the Xperia Z1 Compact rather than the Samsung Galaxy S crap minis, that is something that I'm not sure. Except it will be running LG software which is like abysmal. Which we can fix then. Routing is not the answer to bad software, come on. Oh it always is. Because there's good people out there who can do this stuff for free. I call them angels. You know what I would like? I would like for Android to not require you to have to root your phone in order to do this kind of customization. Or just you know, I would really like for manufacturers not to release crap software that needs to be accessed. You know what, I can deal with it. Guys I'm feeling much more upbeat and positive about this than you are because Android is still pretty kick ass. Like the things that we can do with a phone nowadays are crazy. Just compared to a few years ago. And we are actually moving fast. We're looking at the nitty gritty detail and as usual we kind of lose track of how much things have advanced. But you can do a ton of things with Android. But having to flash the entire ROM, I mean isn't that kind of nuts? I'm trying to cram in a webOS reference here guys. Because you don't have to do this shit on webOS. You could just patch stuff directly. Well you still needed to break out a command line though. No you didn't. Really? You did not. Oh right you had to do up down left right left right. Yeah you type in the Konami code or the launch date. And then there was an app for Mac and PC that you would just load on the onboard software pre-ware. And then you would just browse the galleries. The repositories. The repositories. One of which I built. That's the thing with technology. And this is a great example. I've got here the Nikon DF. Oh let's see it. Instead of my face. Yeah. Every time I pick up a Nikon DSLR, particularly the professional ones, I have to go remind myself how to get it to use all of its focus points. So this thing is 39 focus points. It only uses the central one by default. So I need to find a setting where I can tweak them. I'm running around the menu. I can't find it anywhere. I'm looking around on Google. And finally I find it. And here's how you do it. You have to get. You have this little switch here between auto and manual focus. You have to press the button there and then use the toggle here to switch between focus emotes, which is like there is no way to intuit that. There is no way to guess that. To me it's exactly like economic code. Either you know it or you don't. Or you read the interstick manual. So a lot of technology has these. Yeah, because rooting an Android phone and installing a custom ROM is way easier. No, I'm not saying it's easier. What I'm saying is a lot of technology has these really weird hurdles that we have to overcome. But at the same time, would I use a Nikon Pro DSLR? Something like the D4 or the DF, of course. I'm just saying these are things. That's why I don't like using Nikons because they're such a pain to use. I feel like that whole sidebar, Vlad, was really just an excuse to brag that you have a DF. You know what? And I respect that. All I'm saying is that this is friction in our interaction and relationship with technology. And absolutely we need to get over it. We need to move beyond it. But the important thing is that these things are adding good things to our lives. As far as I'm concerned, Android is far and away the best operating system that I can have on a phone. Forget iOS. I'm just broken up with iOS until somebody fixes a ton of things with it. And Windows Phone hasn't grown up. So Android is so much stronger than everything else. And LG just does really good hardware. And that double tap to wake thing, screw you guys, I love it. So if LG does another really nice phone, makes it smaller, and keeps those things, I will deal with the... You know what's better than double tap to wake, Vlad? Is when you pull your phone out of your pocket and it's already awake, like with the Motorola. Okay, yeah, the Moto X is good things. I'm not going to argue. So the last thing I want to talk about today is this cat fight between the CEO of T-Mobile, John Legere. And, well, I don't know, is it really John Legere? No, not really. It's just T-Mobile. And they ran a promotion, get a new phone. If you have a Blackberry, they sent out the Blackberry users because they're obvious targets to upgrade their phone. And the Blackberry community got very unhappy about this. And it escalated to the point where the new CEO of Blackberry, John Chen, has written an open letter to T-Mobile wherein he, like, thanks his customers for tweeting angry things at their CEO. And I can assure you that we are outraged too. What puzzles me more is that T-Mobile did not speak with us before or after they launched this clearly inappropriate and ill-conceived marketing promotion. Because he has nothing better to do? Like, I don't understand this. Like, he's the CEO of a company that's like in a tailspin. Don't you have like more important things to do than like worry about this promotion, this like limited time promotion that T-Mobile tried to sell its own customers a phone and it doesn't sell any Blackberry phones, so it can't offer them new Blackberry phones. Like, I mean... Wait, T-Mobile doesn't sell any Blackberry phones? The only Blackberry phones that you can buy on T-Mobile's website right now are Furbish models. Interesting. It's just such a weird move. Like, finally to T-Mobile, I would like to remind you that our longstanding partnership was once productive and profitable for both Blackberry and T-Mobile. I hope that we can find a way forward that allows us to serve our shared customers once again. Not withstanding the current challenge, we remain very excited about Blackberry's future. Like... You know what would help is... Okay. T-Mobile needs to sell the Panana 982. Yeah. And then everything will be good to go. Hey, you Blackberry Curve 83 or... Blackberry, what is their low end curve? Was it like a 9320 or something like that? We think this would be a really great phone for you. It's $2500, the new Panana. With our T-Mobile Flex Pay program, it's only $79 a month. Blackberry is still... If I ever win the lottery, if I ever get some random person to invest in my mobile startup, if I ever get to make a phone, it will be called the Panana-nanana. Something. One to the power of two. Did you guys realize that Blackberry still sells seven Blackberry 7 models? Yes, it sells more Blackberry 7 models than it sells Blackberry 10 every quarter. Oh, God, it's so sad. Every quarter that it releases smartphone sales figures, it sells three times as many Blackberry 7 models as it does for Blackberry 10. Can you still get the Z30 from, what is it, Verizon? So, yeah, why isn't Blackberry mad at Verizon? Verizon won't even stock the Z30 in its storage. Yeah, the thing that John Chen, CEO of Blackberry, needs to do is grit his teeth, take his lumps, and move on, and not let the insane people that are mad at T-Mobile about a little promotion have him writing an open letter to another company like this. You get on the phone, you call T-Mobile and go, dude, seriously, dude? And T-Mobile goes, yeah, sorry, my bad. And then it's over. But instead, it escalated. They're openly beefing with the major US carrier. It just reeks of Blackberry hubris. Like, Blackberry hubris forever, and it still has it, even under a new CEO. It's the same company. I'm just saying, the last CEO on the planet that you want to start a public fight with is John Legend. That's true. He is not going to take this quietly, and it's going to be kind of amazing. I do love the fact that John Chen is stretching the definition of current challenge to its absolute limits. The challenge we've been facing since 2008. Yeah. I mean, look, just to kind of try and play devil's advocate and present his perspective, maybe from Blackberry's point of view, it feels like it has a very low community of followers and users. And by putting out this open letter, it's giving them a collective voice. It shows that it's on their side, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe he considers that part of user engagement. Yeah, that's fair. And that works for those people. But it's not a good look, man. I mean, we'll never know the answer to this, but I would wager that more people bought new iPhones based on this promotion than there were a number of people that complained about it publicly. Ouch. Ouch. Yeah, but right, but that's not a good look for Blackberry. No, it's not. That's kind of my point. Why draw attention to this? Why even acknowledge it as Blackberry? Well, because advertising costs money, Dan, and this is cheaper. Why does Evernote have a Blackberry version? Why not? Evernote is integrated in the Blackberry hub. The other thing I was reminded of here is HTC's two-year promise for Android updates. If HTC is at the sort of desperation point where we all kind of think that it is and we're struggling so mightily, I think it might as well make these bold promises because within two years, either the company was trading its shit out and it will be able to support devices or it won't and it would have failed anyway. So I kind of feel like Blackberry is in the same position. It's like you can just talk trash, you can do whatever you want because ultimately the fate of both of these companies, HTC and Blackberry, seems like it's going to be resolved over the next year or so. Yeah. They do not sustain the way that they've been going for much longer than that. No, Blackberry is going to be in a very similar position but with less cash in a year from now than it is today. I don't think that Blackberry is going to fold that quickly. I think their sales are going to continue to decline but they're going to be chasing after their new strategy and they're just going to keep chugging along. And they still have a ton of cash. They're like $2 billion or something. Yeah, they're bleeding through it very quickly though. Every quarter they're bleeding through a lot of that cash. I think it's going to be very dire in a year for them but I don't think that the cliff is around the corner. I don't think it's like next month. It does feel like they need to, I didn't mean to turn this into a Blackberry podcast, but it does feel like they need to do something a little more drastic than what they're doing right now, which is just redoubling down on QWERTY phones. No, it's the right thing to do. I mean, I'd like to see them do something more drastic but I mean, we need to lower our expectations of Blackberry. That's the thing that by going back to QWERTY phones and talking about enterprise so much, they're basically saying, hey guys, don't expect us to be so awesome anymore. We're going to be this size company. That's the saddest message for a company to ever deliver. I think that's a message they had to deliver and I also think it's a true message. You shouldn't be disappointed by Blackberry anymore because you shouldn't be expecting so much from them. Right. I guess maybe they're going to retrench to the enterprise the way that Dell did. Like, Dell kind of quietly pulled out of the consumer market after it failed, which was really a disappointment to me because, and this is an opinion that Neil shares with me, Dell's hardware designs on their Windows phone and Android phones, the Venue and Venue Pro, were really nice actually. They showed some progress. The story of Blackberry is the story of the coach who stops yelling. Like, when the coach yells at you, you feel really bad and then he pulls you aside and says, no, he yells because he cares. But it's when he stops yelling that means he's written you off. Like, it's time to stop yelling at Blackberry. And just let them do their thing. Well, that's all well and good, but that doesn't translate into profit, right? Like, I mean, just because we can all agree that Blackberry shouldn't be awesome, doesn't mean they can survive. That's the next trick. There were a lot of very drastic ideas that came up over the past 18 months from spinning off various divisions like BBM and their secure back end and all this, and none of that panned out, of course. And now they are still one company. Kynix, I think, or Kynix, however it's pronounced, if you were to take that as a separate unit, I think it's still profitable. On its own. Yes, but that ends up weighing down the rest of the company weighs down Kynix. So, yeah, who knows? They need another playbook is what they need. Man, just ultra burn. Listen, they need to realize amateur hour is over. Ah, yes, yes they do. They need to bring back, here's what they need to do. Okay, men's warehouse needs to bring back George Zimmer and Blackberry needs to bring back Lazaridis to bundle around on stage and talk about amateur hour being over and then you can pull out a new playbook. That's the key to Blackberry's success. I've solved all of Chen's problems on this podcast. That, ladies and gentlemen, is The Verge mobile show. If you want other sterling genius pieces of advice like that, you can follow Chris on Twitter. He's Zpower. If you want less sterling pieces of advice, you can follow the rest of us too. I am Bacalan. Dan is DC Seifert with an EI. Vlad is Vlad Savov. We are all at Verge. You can leave a comment on the post in which this podcast appears. You can also hop into our forum so you can shoot us an email, all kinds of stuff. Next week, Mobile World Congress, who knows if you'll see us. It's a mystery, but it will be fun. So keep an eye for live coverage, live blogs, live video, all kinds of stuff. Until then, thanks for watching. Cheerio.

I'm Addie Robertson with The Verge and I'm here at Toy Fair 2014 with the Nerf Cam CS12 Blaster. Since time immemorial, people have been putting cameras on their guns, real and plastic. So now, Nerf has actually just built this camera right into the Blaster. The Nerf Cam's major feature is obviously the record button right here. The Blaster's equipped with a fairly low resolution 0.3 megapixel camera for video and stills and a microphone next to the screen can record your color commentary. The camera records to a 4GB video card and some minimalist controls let you cycle through what you've got and delete the outtakes. Of course, you can also just take out the card and do all this on a computer. The Blaster works with other magazines from Nerf's N-Strike line, but by default it holds 12 darts and runs on two AA batteries, which power both the camera and a motorized shooting system. People are already attaching cameras to their Blasters and Nerf actually makes an official mount for your iPhone, but this is built right in and won't weigh it down. It's actually an idea we're surprised we haven't seen sooner. For those of us who haven't used anything from Nerf in a while, it's kind of like seeing a replay of your last death in a first person shooter, except that you're the one behind the sights. What we're looking at right now is a prototype, which means not only are there some bugs to be worked out, the controls are frankly kind of confusing. But presumably by the time it comes out this fall, they'll have at least put labels on them, which will help justify the roughly $80 price tag.

It's Monday, February 17th, 2014. I'm Flappy Shane and I'm headed to the App Store! This is 90 seconds on the verge. Beck's first album in six years is now available for streaming on NPR. Morning Phase is being described as a spiritual sequel to See Change, his 2002 acoustic album inspired by the breakup with his longtime girlfriend. Beck's last studio album, Modern Guilt, came out in 2008. Morning Phase is due out via more traditional channels later this month. Now, I don't really find time to play games, but the developers of Rock Band just might change that for me. Harmonix today announced Chroma, a music game that also happens to be an arena-based first person shooter. Weapons emit musical tones when they fire, and both combat and movement are tied to the game's soundtrack. If it's anything like the dubstep gun from Saints Row IV, sign me up. Chroma is still in very early development, but is slated to launch later this year as a free-to-play game on Steam. Come on. And finally, I love Back to the Future Part II, so you can only imagine how I reacted to Nike's announcement. During an appearance in New Orleans, Nike designer Tinker Hatfield suggested that Marty McFly's shoes from the second Back to the Future film, complete with power laces, will be coming soon, saying customers will see them in 2015. In 2011, Nike produced 1,500 pairs of the fictional Nike Air Mag sneakers, but they didn't lace themselves automatically the way they did in the movie. Now all we need are hoverboards and Jaws 19. Damn it! That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I finally reach 90! F*** this game.

It's Friday, February 14th, 2014. I'm Nathan Seigert, and I'm spreading the Valentine's Day joy in the city. This is 90 seconds on the verge. It's 90 seconds. Okay. It's nine... is it... 90 seconds on the verge? It's 90 seconds. Last December, the Xbox One was the top-selling console in the U.S. Well, now the PS4 has struck back. Sony sold nearly twice as many consoles as Microsoft in the month of January. The PS4 also continues to remain in first place worldwide. However, both manufacturers can expect sales bumps in the coming months. Next week, the PS4 will be released in Japan, and on March 11th, the Xbox-exclusive Titanfall will come out. Roland's TR-808, the iconic drum machine, has long been considered the only way to make real dance music. Well, until now. The Japanese electronic company has at long last released the TR-8 Rhythm Performer, the first true successor to the 808, which was discontinued in the mid-80s. Rather than reissuing the original, Roland has created a new digital version that faithfully recreates the sounds that made the 808 so famous. The $500 TR-8 goes on sale this March. And finally, nothing says Valentine's Day like betrayal, greed, and congressional horse trading. House of Cards Season 2 is here. All 13 episodes of the Emmy-winning show are now available for streaming on Netflix. Be sure to check out our live blog, where the now very tired Ross Miller watched the entire second season in one sitting. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I start prepping my Easter plans by handing out eggs to everyone on the streets of New York. I love this city!

Hello, my name is Trent Wolby. I have been a drum machine addict for 16 years and I have zero days sober and I am kind of freaking out right now and this is The Verge. In 1980, the Japanese electronics company Roland released the TR-808 rhythm composer. For a long time, people thought the only way to make dance music was with this machine. The noises that came from the analog circuitry inside made people go insane on the dance floor. But Roland stopped making the 808 after just a few years in the mid 80s. You can buy one on eBay now for around three grand or use one of thousands of hardware or software imitators. They all work pretty good but they have been, you know, just copycats. Paper rings, wax figurines, humble odes to a classic until now. This is the TR-8, the first true spiritual successor to the TR-808 but it's all digital and it has something to say to all the haters. Roland developed a totally new modeling language called analog circuit behavior to faithfully recreate the big sounds of transistors and diodes that made the TR-808 so famous. I am sitting here listening to it with my own ears and I can tell you this is not some marketing BS. This is indistinguishable from that 1980 kick. Actually wait a second, I can tell the difference. This kick sounds better than the original. Yeah, I said it and this one only cost 500 bucks. Eat it eBay. Thirty four years later, the company responsible for creating a generation of analog drum machine fetishists is killing off any reason to still be a fetishist. It's like when they remastered Seinfeld in HD. No one scoffed at the fidelity and bought a bunch of old VHS's in protest. To be real with you though, the kick drum wasn't the reason I became a drum machine addict. The funnest and most awesome part of using an old 808 is how simple it is to create beats with a 16-set sequencer. The TR-8 doesn't just sound like a champ, it's got this visceral, tactile experience with all the straightforwardness and get shit done mentality of its ancestor. But with a big old truckload of intuitive new control features that make it really fun to make music on. We took a short break to sit down with Brandon Ryan from Roland to talk about workflow. It's amazing to see people actually say, wow, there's no LED screen, how great that is. There was a time when of course everybody wanted a screen on everything. Computers are great for, that's the primary place people are making music is in computers. But there is a certain level of non-immediacy, a lack of immediacy when you're going and using these. Everything you kind of have to think about. If you want to add a step or glitch something, a lot of times it's a process you have to go through. In that amount of time, an idea can become lost or it could become just not worth the effort or you might not try it or experiment. Having one to one knobs, a knob that always does one thing and just reaching up and being able to play things. Just different stuff comes out. I think almost anybody, no matter how into computers and plugins you are, you put them in front of something like this and they'll do things that they wouldn't do in a virtual representation. Let's go in and hear that classic TR-808 sound coming out of the TR-8. Kick drum right here. Snare drum right there. Bring in the toms. Rim shot. Hand clap. Closed hat. Open hat. Crash cymbal. And the ride. That's all I had to do to make a kind of sick beat. If I do say so myself. But that's not all Roland is updating to the 21st century. Meet the new era family. This is the TV-3, the VT-3 and the System 1. Spiritual successors to the TV-303 bass line machine, the VP-330 vocoder and the SH-101 synthesizer. They may not have been as famous as their 808 big brother but they are every bit as important in shaping the sound of electronic music. Listen up y'all. Since all this crazy software started coming out and when I say crazy software I really mean Ableton, it's been kind of hard for me. I mean how am I supposed to crank out epic dance jams on the same machine I use to watch porn and like do g-chat and spreadsheets on? I just love boxes, you know what I mean? They're my little buddies. They don't make me feel like I'm at a goddamn office trying to be productive. I mean you can't do your taxes on a Stratocaster and you shouldn't be able to do them on a damn drum machine either. As sick as that analog circuit behavior modeling may be or as heavy as the kick on the TR-8 sounds, Roland knows it really only needs to manufacture one thing to turn on an entire new generation of addicts. AC

Hello, welcome to the Vergecast for the week of February 10th. I'm Neelay Patel, your host today. You might notice Josh isn't here. Josh is, he's like, look, it's cold outside, he's just never coming back. And actually, there's a big snowstorm in New York today, so it was pretty hard to get people here to the office. So we called in some help from SB Nation, some co-hosts. I have, from SB Nation's Olympic coverage, I have Chip Matthews and Boris here with me today. Hey guys. Hey, Neelay. How's it going? Oh, it's going well. Name's Chip Matthews, that's Chip with a C, Matthews. This is my rusky partner, Boris. Hey. He's okay by me. Yeah, because, so you guys have been in Sochi, you're covering the Olympics for real. Oh yeah, it's awful. Why is it awful? Oh, you got stray dogs running wild. You should see them drink. They can drink down vodka like none other. The dogs? Yeah, the dogs. Boris actually outdrank a whole pack of dogs on the way to the drone ride over here. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, you guys are there, you've been covering it. I mean, I'm hearing Sochi's just like a crazy hell world. What's your hotel like? Well, it's like an industrial orgy. I don't know what that means. Oh man, you would know when you saw it. There's beams everywhere, there's three toilets to a stall. Oh yeah, no, I've seen the pictures of that. That sounds incredible. I mean, I wouldn't say incredible, I'm incredulous. Oh, well, it's surprisingly beautiful to see three grown men team up in a way that you would never expect in a bathroom. Why would they, if they have three separate toilets, why do they have to team up? Well, you know, all for one, one for all. Okay, yeah, it's Russia, I understand. Win and Rome. So, what would you say the biggest story, I mean, you guys are covering the Olympics every day, you're doing the medal count. What's the biggest story of these Olympics? Well, you know, I've been in broadcasts for quite some time, I absolutely hate it, terrifies me. But they've been trucking in this snow, I have not seen this much powder since the 70s. Yeah. You know. So it's been a good time there, I hear you. It's been a good time? Yeah. He always seems to have fallen asleep. He had one too many nips on the drone ride over here. So big news overnight, we should talk about some tech news. Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable. Haven't heard either of those things. You are a broadcaster, how do you not know about Comcast? The term broadcaster, that's pretty debatable. You got a headset. Yeah, this is just leftover from my Radio Shack days. No, I mean, you're into technology though, what kind of cell phone do you have? Well, I've had the same burner for about 18 years now. You know, the point of a burner is to throw it away. It really just depends who you ask there, do you like? Okay, well, look, actually, John has reminded me that we missed the biggest story of the Olympics here, which I believe truly in my heart is the biggest story. Brian Floyd from SB Nation discovered that Pony by Genuine is the best song for figure skating. I mean, you're a big Genuine fan. Oh, absolutely. I toured with him in the late 90s. Sure, sure you did. So let's just take a look at this. It's Evgeny Plushenko just showing us what Pony is all about. Well, Plushenko really proved himself here. Yes, he can do a quad toe, triple toe, double loop, but he's starting to learn how to work an audience too. Watch this. We're back. Hi, everybody. I'd like to thank Chip and Boris from SB Nation. They're doing the Olympics coverage every day. The SB Nation Olympic medal count is, for better or worse, hosted by Chip Matthews. Boris, there's another one too, Duke Kensington, I think is his name. Oh my God, look, it's Dieter and Addy. Not puppets, or are we? I mean, really debatable. I'd like to thank the SB Nation guys for doing that with us. That's fun. We should have kept it going. We really should have kept it going. I think there's a lot to say about Comcast, I think, if you're a puppet. Yeah. Hey, guys. How does that work? All right. So this is the Vergecast where we discuss technology, technology culture. We're going to bring up Genuine again. I'd like to end the show with Genuine. That's really where my heart lies. But actually, there's a lot going on this week. It's like there was nothing going on, and then last night, everything in the world happened all at once. And so we should just start with it. Just start. Comcast. Comcast. Comcast wants to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion. They swooped in. Charter had been picking around the edges. Charter's been trying to buy Time Warner Cable forever. And apparently, Comcast decided, nope, we want to do it. Yeah. I mean, so Charter has been like, they wanted to replace the board of directors of Time Warner. So here's Time Warner and Time Warner Cable. They used to be one company. They split off, and they didn't change the name. So Time Warner Cable has been independent from Time Warner, which is further amounts of split. Yeah. Right. There's a family tree here. It's like it was AOL, Time Warner, and then they split AOL and Time Warner. And then Time and Time Warner Cable split. And then Time Inc. is now splitting from Time Warner, leaving only the media company in the middle, while Time Inc. is going to make magazines. So this conglomerate is just falling apart. And Charter was really interested in basically competing with Comcast by owning Time Warner Cable, becoming a much bigger player in the entire industry. And Comcast is like, nope, we're number one. We're going to buy number two. And in the process, I think telling a number of delightful lies. Addy, you've been- I mean, at this point, nothing a Comcast executive is saying is true. Well, that's the thing, though. I don't know if- so their entire call, I was just on a call, is basically about justifying how this isn't a fa- like this is not a threat for antitrust regulators because they suck. Yeah. That's what you're saying. They're basically like, our service is already so bad. It can't possibly get worse. They start with saying, OK, look, consumers don't have a choice anyways because there is no overlap between these two companies. These are the, they're like the two biggest cable companies that there are and they do not share. There is no point at which you can choose between them because you basically don't have any choice if you are- Yeah. And that's why I think that this is going to end up going through because there's not going to be enough consumer outrage because they already are like, well, I have to pick this one company because it's all that's available. There's a monopoly in my area and I don't really care if the name changes. Well, it's kind of like, I mean, if you have Time Warner Cable, particularly in New York City, you're probably like, man, it can't get worse than this. Right. Yeah. Maybe Comcast will come in and actually know how to run a cable company. Or you're just waiting still and you haven't gotten it installed and- Yeah. Chris Ziegler is moving to New York, moving to New York. I believe he wanted to have- And he can't, I guess the previous tenant of his apartment had not canceled his Time Warner service, so he can't get new Time Warner service. He's like trapped in like some hell world catch 22. Wow. And so in retaliation, he's brought Comcast with him from Chicago to just destroy the city. And the only other thing that they're doing is comparing it. They're saying, okay, look, this market is super vibrant because there's Verizon wireless. Well, there's Verizon wireless. And the other thing that they cited was Google Fiber. Yes. Which is ridiculous. It's a crazy experiment. They're in- They're in two, I mean, they make it up and say we were in a bunch of markets. They're in two cities. Yeah. Right. This is insane. I mean, the Comcast executives are lying, the idea that Google Fiber presents any meaningful competition to Comcast is such a bald faced lie. Yeah. No, that's not true. Google Fiber barely presents a meaningful competition to itself. Like it doesn't exist. It's so nebulous. It's like- I'm pretty sure Time Warner cable has also basically said there's no demand for the thing they're selling. Right. Yeah. No, the Time Warner cable, they've been running up and down. I mean, like, we could provide gigabit Ethernet, nobody wants it. And it's like, yeah, that's because you price it at $400 a month. Yeah, someone asked that question on the call and they said, yeah, no, we offer 50 gigabit Internet. It's just for business customers. They're the ones who want it. Yeah. By the way, we tried and this is a true story. The Verge launched in New York City. We had our first office here in Flatiron. We desperately wanted to get Time Warner Internet. We wanted a fiber line, we wanted fast internet and we couldn't get it. It was so bad. The service that Time Warner could provide us was like DSL service, which is awful for our whole office. We literally had to point a WiMax antenna at the roof of the Empire State Building and have internet beamed to us from roof to roof because Time Warner cable couldn't figure out how to give us fiber in our building. Also it went out whenever there was a problem. It was just like, yeah, it went well, yeah, I mean, it was a WiMax antenna. It was not the best technological decision. It was the only one we could make. But that's where we were at. Like, middle of Manhattan, Time Warner cable was unable to provide adequate service to us. They still call me from time to time and let me know that fiber is now available in that building. It's a little late. Thanks for that. It's nice. I mean, whoever is there now is getting really fast internet, I'm sure. Look, I think this is a disaster for a wide variety of reasons, but there is one tiny little weird silver lining, which is that there has never existed a national broadband provider. Or a national cable provider. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, the cable and broadband bundle. Because they're pitching this as a merger of cable TV companies. But what it, and that's, they keep on telling this lie, another lie, we'll have under 30% of the total cable TV market. But what they will have is over, it's like 34, 35% of the broadband market. Right. Which in my estimation is far more important than the cable TV market. Is that how they actually talk? They're also saying, you know, numbers of customers are dropping. Is that how they're justifying that is cable TV customers? Yeah. Yeah. So they're losing TV customers. But they're, I mean, I don't know anybody, like if you live in America, and you want to be a part of our current modern economy, you need the internet in your house. Yeah. And you need it fast. And the DSL isn't going to cut it. Right. For 90% of the areas. The phone companies aren't competing with you. So you need to get it from your cable company. Right. And your cable company in 19 of the 20 major cities in America is going to be Comcast. Yeah. That is a huge problem. Like, I can't even, that should just scare you straight out. Be like, you don't have a choice. Your choice is a capped wireless broadband from AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile, but probably not T-Mobile if you live in a number of cities that are smaller, or capped wired broadband from Comcast. Like, that's it. Those are your choices. So the reason that it's scary is you need to know what incentives there are for Comcast to do the things that we want it to do. And the bigger they are and the more markets they're in, the fewer incentives there are for them to increase speeds, lower prices, and not someday, you know, ruin the internet by giving up on open internet rules and net neutrality. Such as by, you know, offering to waive data caps on a major console. Right. Right. So Comcast's long time ago got in trouble by saying, we'll put our live TV app on the Xbox 360, and by the way, if you use it, you won't count towards your data cap. And everyone's like crying foul. And Comcast, their lie, beautiful lie. This doesn't use the internet. This uses a proprietary channel on our network. And it's like, is it really? How many of those do you have? Because I'd love to know more information about your proprietary Xbox video channel. And they just never came out. I will say Comcast has been progressive in like, they've waived most of their data caps. They're not doing that anymore for most of their subscribers. They are thinking of themselves more as a technology company. They are trying to do things like their X1 platform, and they're like X1 in the cloud, and all the stuff that big modern cable companies should do. Well, and they also, you know, you can't give them 100% credit for this because they agreed to them as part of buying NBC. Oh yeah, the other terrifying part of this. Yeah, right. But they also have seven years of following these open internet rules, which is basically like most of the core of the foundation of what we think of as net neutrality. So they're going to do that through 2018, which isn't long enough, but hopefully by then we'll actually have like real laws and regulations to protect that. But yeah, so they'll have 30% of the cable TV market, some larger percent of the broadband market. And they make, they're one of like the big six companies that make all of the media that 90% of people consider. Right, they own NBC Universal. So they make movies, TV shows, they make the news. You know what's going to be really interesting? Watching how NBC News covers this deal. Just flat out, that's weird. That's a weird phenomenon in this world. Two major corporations are going to spend $45 billion trying to buy each other, and they happen to also own like a major media corporation. All that to me is just flat out terrifying. Here's a disclosure, by the way. I'll probably let you know this, Comcast Ventures, with their venture capital arm, is an investor in Vox Media, which owns the purge. Oh, that's right. Yeah. That's cool. I mean, thanks for that, guys. It was really nice of you. Thank you for believing in me. Please don't buy Time Warner Cable. I don't know what else to say to you. Look, the level of, the only way this works is if the government gets seriously involved in what they do. And they say the way that the government got seriously involved with AT&T when AT&T was building a national network, and they say, like, sure, you can have a monopoly on broadband in America, but here are all of the rules you have to follow, and they turn them into AT&T, which I think is not great. I don't think that's a great answer. It's not the early aughts of the 20th century. It's not like 1920. Whenever the rules finally get set out- This isn't Rockefeller in a Washington, DC restaurant with tafts hammering it out. When AT&T's monopoly got blessed, we had just built the railroads. We knew how to regulate a national infrastructure network. We knew what was, we were putting electricity everywhere, and we understood, and the political forces were such that you could do that. We are not in that place anymore. And I think it's very unlikely that if this goes through that we're gonna see the government do the kind of work that it did before to create a national, help AT&T run the national phone network and open access laws. Well, and the thing it did after that was split them up. Which we also couldn't do. Yeah, we split them up, which was fun. And then they reconstituted each other like fucking T-1000. Slowly, yes. It's like I'm so angry I'm not acting angry. No, this is why it's gonna happen, because it's just like you're just gonna be resigned to it. It's just gonna be, you know what, this is terrible, but it's not- But it's not much more terrible than the status quo. Most people, like I'm saying, if you have Time Warner Cable, you're probably happy that someone's gonna ride in on a billion dollar horse and maybe make your service better, because clearly the people running Time Warner... The CEO of Time Warner Cable, he's a Gerald something. He was the guy who didn't know what Airplay was. Remember this? It was a while ago. Oh, that's right, that's right. And it was like, dude, really? You should maybe know what the hell Airplay is, because it is actually how I'm watching most of the Olympics right now, right? Because NBC is doing a terrible job of showing me anything other than figure skating in prime time. I hear there are other Olympic sports. What if they showed you figure skating in prime time, but only just dubbed Pony over it instead of- I would watch that show nonstop. I could probably make that happen in my house. No, I mean, the Olympics, I think, are a prime example. There's a huge appetite to watch them, and you can watch most of them using the awful NBC Live Extra app, but you can't actually Airplay that to a TV properly. You have to mirror. You have to mirror, which is terrible. So it's garbage. I have to sign into my cable provider anyway. Why? What business decision have you made here that makes sense to keep me away from this? Why didn't you make an Apple TV app? Why didn't you make an Xbox app? Comcast? You own NBC. Surely, you know how to make- Anyway, Comcast is the worst. All of the dangers here are super abstract and at least two years away from- I don't think they're abstract at all. I think it comes down to, imagine if your only choice for self-service in America was Verizon. That's where we are. That's what this is. That's where we've been. My only service choice was AT&T for a long time because it was the only place that did service at my house. Yeah. I mean, it depends. If you live in a rural area, your only choice is Verizon, realistically, unless you- I don't think those people- Look, Verizon is adding- This is like the T-Mobile argument. One day, I'm going to write this all down and put it on the internet. It's going to happen. Are you? Yeah. No, look. Here I have the thing that I've been asking for my entire life. A beautiful million- I bought this on a show last week and now I have it and I love it. It's funny how much a color makes me like a phone better. No, this phone is $350. It is competitive with the iPhone in a variety of ways. It is high spec. It's fast. I think it is designed, actually in this color, designed quite well. It has a great screen. All this stuff. 350 bucks unlocked. I bought a T-Mobile SIM card and put it in and I don't have a contract. That's the dream. The reality is that I was coming to work today in a car in New York City and I could not get service for most of the time. I've actually been using unlocked MVNO for a year and a half now. Yeah. A year, a bit more. Through Walmart service, actually, which is ethically horrible, probably. Yeah, probably. There's an AT&T SIM. There's a poor child somewhere frantically spinning a generator to give you cell service. Then anyways, it's actually worked surprisingly well. But you have AT&T. Is it AT&T MVNO? Yes, it's an AT&T MVNO. Yeah, okay. But the network underlying it is AT&T. I'm saying I have the dream from the national carrier and even in New York, it's not great. I get that, but at least there's that level of competition where I can pay less money and get worse service, but I at least have the choice to do that. For wired broadband, which is the backbone of the infrastructure of our economy, the verge doesn't work unless most people have wired broadband. It's not going to happen. The next five years of our growth, we can't make videos and count on everybody to stream them to their phones. We can't make our features if you can't look at them on a desktop computer. We'll get to the tablet stuff and we'll change it, but the biggest and best stuff we make requires you to be at a computer with a wired connection. That's actually the other funny thing about how they're comparing mobile to wired is essentially what they're saying is you do not need to use our service. Your two gigabytes is totally sufficient. It's funny because the wireless carriers, they don't like that comparison at all. If you go and talk to Verizon or AT&T, they're like, you need wires in the ground. AT&T loves to talk about this backhaul, which is if you're a reporter and someone's trying to pitch you a story about backhaul, you're like, please, please stop talking to me. This is never going to be interesting. And they do it. They'll call you up and they'll be like, we've got a great story. We've increased our backhaul capacity throughout Vermont. It's like, this is not a good story. I don't know why you issued a press release, but they do it all the time. Do we have Comcast Internet service in this? Okay, now it's working. Absolutely. They just shut me down. We pay for something very expensive. Yeah. It works 50%. Well, did you see that there's this reported Wi-Fi alliance? Google and Microsoft are going to try and spread out more Wi-Fi. Yeah, they've been trying this forever, right? And they keep on trying new white spaces. Wi-Fi forward. But apparently AT&T and Verizon are not participating. Well, why would they? Well, AT&T for a while was building the Wi-Fi network, but now they don't need it because they want to put people back on LTE. No, I think they still want that as a backup. But they want to run their own. I don't think AT&T wants anybody to use not their Wi-Fi. Right. Just whatever. Also, don't call it Wi-Fi forward, guys. Just don't. Wi-forward. Yeah, isn't it Wi-forward? No, there's the Wi-Fi forward. There's a Fi in there. Oh, God. Yeah. It's awful. Wi-Fi forward. No, I mean Google and Verizon, every major tech company that isn't a networking company has been pushing for more and different kinds of Wi-Fi because they want to break around the logjam of the wireless carriers. And what's amazing to me is we've done a really good job, I think, as journalists covering all of the problems of the wireless broadband industry. The only reason that's true is because there's conflict there in choice. Whatever limited, tiny amount, and there should be more. But no, it gets tiring to be like, you can't do anything about it immediately. You can't switch right away tomorrow to fix the problem, but it sucks. Just constantly saying that day after day after three days. There's no point in covering the wired broadband industry because there's no conflict. There's no choice. So, Ada, you actually were on all these calls today, you've been doing mostly reporting today. I've been on all of them. There were three. No, I was on one, I think. The middle one, right? The one I wanted to be on. The 1 PM one. Is there one after this? I was hanging out with puppets during that time. True story. What's your take? Where are you landing on this? I mean, I just, yeah, it feels hopeless. This is going to go through. It all feels sort of moot and that it's hard to tell that there are threats, but it's kind of hard to even conceptualize them. Okay. So, beautiful dream, hope of the future. Google is not going to roll into every city and spread fiber. Susan Crawford had this editorial in Bloomberg, I think it was, and I've heard her say this before that the trick is mayors. City by city. The city, don't wait for the government to do it, don't wait for big companies to save you. You're mayor, you're an executive at a city, you have the power to just go in and put fiber into your city and that will eventually solve the problem. Well, that's the funny thing though is that they were trying to do this with municipal Wi-Fi maybe four years ago and then they just, the company sued all of them. Well, so look, here's the, let me make the point as clear as I, I was talking about T-Mobile earlier and I forgot to actually say why. If you look at what T-Mobile has done, right? You can criticize their service offering a lot. I have it, I think you can criticize it a lot, but they have taken some customers from AT&T, they've spooked AT&T at least into lowering prices and jiggering their plans. They may have even spooked Verizon today. They spooked Verizon today into changing their prices and lowering their plans. That is the effect of competition, right? Something good is happening for consumers because if you get more people to pay you, you make more money, right? And that's, so they're all fighting for that market share, for that recognition, for consumer support and loyalty, for dollars. If you are Comcast and you're in 19 of 20 major markets and there's zero competition, you have no incentive to improve your offering. Right. Zero. Outside of the mayor of your city or the governor of your state or the president of your country saying buck up and do what I want. And that's where we are at. That's kind of like Crawford's whole point and her, I actually, I did an interview, hopefully we'll be able to pull it up. I interviewed her a while back and she talks about the mayor's thing and she's like, I've given up on the federal government. I've given up trying to get this policy. I think what you're seeing right now happening on the flip side of this with the net neutrality ruling with let's have the FCC kind of like twiddle its thumb and like sing a little song and dance about how they're going to do something, but we don't know what yet to maybe reclassify ISPs as common carriers, like all this stuff, like all this endless lawsuits, wrangling policy debate is going to play out in Washington. And her whole point is, or you can go to the mayor of a town and be like, we're going to spend some money on fiber or we're going to invite Google to our town to put in fiber and scare the other companies. And that's happening. And she, her whole point is you can do this, you can do this at a big level. You can do it at a state infrastructure level. It's Republican mayors are doing it. Democratic mayors are doing it because they know that ultimately this is how you build businesses in your town. Right. Is there a city that is sort of in the middle of this building a municipal like super fast internet connection? There's a few cities. I can't remember Seattle's one. It's the last one I remember. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's little cities, actually a much little city throughout the south. Yeah. And this is, I think this is like a moment where you see Seattle's plans are on pause. Okay. Well that's great. Every big city, Philly had a big wifi thing a few years ago. They like just got destroyed because Comcast is in Philly. I think Verizon has a deal here that they're supposed to eventually one day put wire. Los Angeles is planning something. Okay. So here's the big counterpoint. More T-Mobile stuff. AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile. Yeah. Hue and cry. I actually, I made the counter narrative that I thought would be interesting was you could say yes to this deal government, but you have to regulate the shit out of them. Yeah. And the government was like, no, we are not reducing competition in this already choked constrained market. I don't, there is a chance that the government will say the same exact, and they, you know, the FCC and the FTC have been making noises about the sprint T-Mobile. It's you know, it's vaguely in the air, which I believe is John Mulder's like ultimate plan is to sell the, it's true. I'm going to write this down and put it on the internet. I swear to God. And they've been, they've been saying like, no, you can't do that. We're not going to approve that. Why would they approve Comcast and Time Warner? Well, no, that's their entire argument though is that it's not a horizontal merger. That's bullshit. That's I think a thing that actually is a- Absolutely bullshit. It's not, it is an actual thing that exists for antitrust. So that's why it's going to go through. It doesn't make it, you know, morally or even- The FCC can only stop it if they can say this is the harm. And I don't think that they're willing to do that. Sure. But there's a level of harm that's beyond consumers there. If you're Disney and you want to sell ESPN to Comcast or you want Comcast to pay you for ESPN, you can't now say, well, Time Warner is paying us that much. Right. Well, fine. Turn it off. No, I'm not saying that the threats aren't real. What I'm saying is- That's a real, I mean, you don't think all of these programming companies are going to show up and say no. Do you really think that the FCC and the Department of Justice are going to be like, eh, no. Yes. I mean, they're doing it to Sprint and T-Mobile right now, right? But Sprint and T-Mobile, you can make a really clear case that they're going to, you know, they're choosing one or the other. That consumers can choose one or the other. That's the entire- But it's not just consumers. It's programmers. It's other internet companies now who, without open internet regulations, like actively politic- Like what you have right now is Comcast promising to not do bad things as opposed to being legally forced to obey the law, right? So my best case scenario is that it goes through and the government's like, if you're going to do this, these are the regulations. This is how it's going to work. This is how much fiber you have to fill. And so this is the tiny silver lining. But you need an activist regulatory interventionist government to do that. I do not- Not going to happen. You know, Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the SEC, you know his job was before all this? Yeah. Cable industry lobbyist. Yeah. Like that's terrifying. Yeah. That guy's going to regulate Comcast. He's going to regulate the biggest company in the game. No, he's going to go to dinner with, what's his name? Phillips? What's the- David King. No. Brian Roberts. The CEO of Comcast. Brian Roberts. He's going to go to dinner with Brian Roberts and hit the links with like every other lobbyist in Washington. And then he's going to go to dinner with Brian Roberts and drink scotch and like count their money. And then he's going to leave the SEC and go back to work for the cable industry. You might be a nice guy, Tom Wheeler. I just don't trust you that you're going to be what Susan Crawford calls a cop on the beat. Yeah. Right? These are the bad things are happening in this neighborhood. Like go fix it. And we're terrible at just identifying that the bad things are real because they constantly, nonstop lying to us, whether the bad things aren't happening or the bad things aren't as bad as I think they are. Yeah. And all you got to do is open your eyes and see like they have an extraordinary amount of market power through the reason that your cable box sucks is Comcast. That's why they can roll out X1. They can do all this other stuff, but the X1 still kind of blows. There's no real competition. It's still kind of huge. They're not delivering television over IP. Apple hasn't made a TV because they can't get deals with all these companies. So that's, that's the possible silver lining. Microsoft can't deliver a real TV solution. If Comcast has a national network, then Apple and Microsoft and Intel will have like, they can, they can hash out a deal with one player and then everybody else is able to fall in line instead of having Comcast and Time Warner and Charter and all the other people play off each other and blow up every TV deal they try to make. Could the silver lining be that like, yes, we have a horrible national monopoly that throttles our speeds and limits our access to free internet. But at least the interface is nicer. But we'll have an Apple TV to go with it. Right? Look, I can see the Comcast sitting in front of Congress and being like, yeah, we'll make some promises. Here's, we're going to open up our TV delivery system to Apple and Microsoft. We've had productive conversations and we look forward to working with partners in the future. This is exactly what Microsoft said when they launched the Xbox One. And John McCain will say, will my apps update automatically? And they'll say yes. Yeah, I'll laugh. Stamp. Proved. And like, sure, you can promise me everything in the world. You can, I'm sure that that is going to come up. Like a hundred percent sure that, you know, when they go and sit down in front of Congress and they ask, why should we let you do this? My service is pretty like, you know, Mr. Roberts, I live here. I live here in New York City and, you know, my Time Warner cable service is pretty awful. And you'll be like, well, we look forward to improving your service. And I just want Apple to sell me a TV. You know, can you work with a company like that? You know, something really innovative? Well, we look forward to working with all our partners in the future. And now that we have this expanded scope, you know, we really look forward to a new wave of innovation built on our innovative X1 platform. And it's like, like, just kill me. Like, I'm already dead. All right? Like, my body's just walking around looking sad every day of my fucking life. Yeah, I'm done. We should move on. Let's talk about, there's two more depressing things to talk about. Oh yeah, I was going to say, this is not getting any better. It's really not getting better. So one of the things, with net neutrality and with the NSA stuff, and now with this, there is a lot of conversation about like, how do we protest this? How do we stop it? How do we get involved? I think that question is really, really unanswered. Addie, there was just an NSA protest. It is still unanswered. It's still unanswered. But this is like, it's hard to do. So let's talk about this. This is the internet trying to stop spying. So very, very short background is that there have been a lot of protests already. One of them was called Stop Watching Us. And they recorded like Maggie Jelenhall and a bunch of whistleblowers and tons of people saying stop watching us, NSA, and had a big general protest last year. Maggie Jelenhall? I believe so. So anyways, this year, some of them split off and they said, okay, look, we have this bill in the Senate now and the House, and we should actually try to get people to pass it. So they decided to model this after the SOPA protests of 2012, thinking, okay, well, this is us stopping a bill. Can't be that hard for us to stop one bill, which is Dianne Feinstein's, and then pass another one. This didn't actually work. Well, it wasn't as extreme as the SOPA stuff, right? I mean, SOPA stuff was the first time sites actually shut down, actually put up black banners. In this case, like Reddit had a little thing in the corner. Like I was looking it up today. It's kind of hard because I don't think people collected definitive numbers on SOPA. But SOPA was some like 75,000 to 100,000 sites. At the beginning of this, they had 6,000. There were maybe like in the millions of calls placed through like Wikipedia, there were 50, no, it's like 70,000 calls placed. It was tiny in scope. I think getting people to say no to something is easier than getting people to affirmatively try to do something. Well, it's also that SOPA was one thing. SOPA wasn't like, oh, by the way, the internet is also copyright. They're going to take your car and say that it's piracy and do a bunch of other things. It's like this is going to do one thing. Yeah, one thing and then- And you can stop it just by stopping this bill. You'll win. And then they'll do something later, whatever. But this is one part of a huge mass of things and those other things are even worse. And if you do this thing plus this other thing, then you've got a pretty good chance of stopping this one tiny thing, but you're still not going to feel good about the rest of it. Yeah, there's no good pay. Like if you get this payoff, you're still going to think the rest of it is terrible if you're the kind of person who's going to join an NSA protest. Right. And to me, the question is, every time I talk to anybody in government about SOPA, they get like this weird like thousand yard stare. They call it the Arab Spring afterwards. Yeah. What? Seriously. I mean, I was reading an old interview and he says, no, this was like the Arab Spring. I'd never seen anything on this scale before. Yeah. And they're terrified of like- They have no perspective. Well, because they could also, I mean, they could really do a giant scorched earth campaign though because they made SOPA, like it was a bad bill. They made it a bill that was going to literally shut down the internet and everyone believed that and their name was like mud. Like everyone hated them. More, maybe even more than they- And it was barely even out of committee, right? Like never even- Yeah. So the SOPA protest to me was always, I mean, I wrote a thing at the time. I was like, you can only do this once. You only get to shut down the internet over something one time. Well, the funny thing though is that the EFF actually made a good point, which is that this was a giant battle because this was built on, was it COICA? Which was another similar bill that got rewritten into PIPA, the Senate version of SOPA. Right. So this was actually a long thing. It was just that COICA, like that all these things sort of got nipped in the bud and that they were one thing. And that they hadn't happened yet. But they're all, A, it's like those things are all coming back in bite-sized pieces now. They've learned how to do it. They've learned how to avoid this. But what they never, what the lesson they should have learned from SOPA and PIPA was there is an enormous constituency of people in the United States who have very deep feelings and thoughts about how the internet should be regulated, not regulated, distributed, billed, serviced, consumed. That is, as far as you can tell, a pretty unified block. And if you can bring them together in a SOPA-like movement, it's a lot of people. And that's overwhelming to our government. Like our government responded to the overwhelming number of people who were like, don't break the internet. That same group of people, you can't, you can get them all to say no to something. Call up and say, I don't want you to do this. How is your name on this bill that's going to kill the internet? It's harder to get them to call and say, I want you to support this bill that will stop the NSA. And I don't really know about the national security implications. I'm sure that you can tell me a lot of things about that. That's actually the funny thing is that, so the New York Times, I haven't been able to, I haven't confirmed this, but they were basically saying most of the calls went to Dianne Feinstein. Dianne Feinstein was the bill that they were trying to stop. So everybody did that. Because she's way out in front, right? Yeah, because it passed committee. The other one hasn't yet. But yeah, so they were trying to stop the bill by calling the person who's not actually going to ever back down. And like, I mean, I'm not sure whether people have changed, directly changed positions. It was really clear after. You just need to, I mean, literally, it's the question is, how do we, how do the people who use the internet who live their lives online, us, most of the people watching and listening to this, how do we talk to our government more effectively? And the answer is, we did it one time with SOPA. Yep. Ultra effective. The government remembers that. So the way that we do it- But if I moved home, you know, like, I don't believe that like, my congresspeople in my home state are like, aware of the internet or care about it in a way that like, is meaningful. Like, right. And that's the way that people need to talk to the government is forget about the internet. You've got to pick up a phone, you got to write a letter. Which was what actually SOPA did really well. And what I think this did well, too, is that we basically found out that you can automate this stuff. That's why that is the big lesson of SOPA, is that you could go to Wikipedia and hit a button and they will call your congressman basically. Right. And like, make sure that your senator gets this message. Like, that's a thing that you learned. Good. Social engineering will change the government. So you don't think the day we fought back worked? It seemed like nobody participated. I mean, people participated and I'm sure it worked to some extent. It's just, I don't think that it probably was fair. It basically just had bad PR and that PR was kind of all that it was. And that hopefully, you know, this gets the USA Freedom Act some more votes in Congress. Like that would be great. Do you think it's going to work? I mean, the USA Freedom Act seems like it has a decent chance. It's hard to say. It's like, you know what we need to do? I'm giving myself more homework that I'm not going to do. I'm such a bad at this. But we need to come up with like a position paper. Be like, here are all the things that need to change. Like stop Comcast from buying Time Warner. Like amend these two things. Let us see this stuff. The Vergecast Manifesto. The Vergecast Manifesto. Yeah. The Patel plan for a better internet. I'm not kidding. I should probably do this. I should probably actually make TC do it. There's a specter hanging over America. And then he would enact it in DayZ. The specter is the Vergecast. Look, the Patel plan for a better internet. I'm going to think about it and feel guilty for not doing it. We're going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. We're just going to change every other word. All right. Speaking of communism, let's talk about that Lumia. What? It was sitting there for me. Speaking of things that look steam powered and kind of shitty. Yeah, I was going to say things that look like they're going to be a thing. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. I'm going to use the language from the Communist Manifesto. 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It's Thursday, February 13, 2014. I'm Adrienne Jeffries and oh god, Valentine's Day is tomorrow. I mean, I knew that and I'm totally prepared. This is 90 seconds on the verge. Comcast has reached a deal to acquire Time Warner Cable for $45 billion. The cable giant will absorb 100% of Time Warner in an all-stock transaction. However, the merger must first be approved by federal regulators. Comcast Corporation CEO Brian Roberts isn't worried about the regulatory hurdles, citing the fact that Comcast and Time Warner do not currently operate in any of the same markets. Last month, Google announced it was selling off Motorola to Lenovo, and this month, the captain has announced he's abandoning his ship. According to the Wall Street Journal, Motorola Mobility's CEO Dennis Woodside is headed to Dropbox as the company's first chief operating officer. Woodside will be stepping in to provide oversight of Dropbox's growing business. Meanwhile, Lenovo's CEO claims he can turn around Motorola's business in less than a year. And finally, last fall we found out John Oliver would be getting his own show on HBO. And now we know when that's coming. The weekly satirical news program called Last Week Tonight with John Oliver will make its debut on Sunday, April 27th at 11pm. HBO says the show will be a, quote, satirical look at the week in news, politics and current events, something Oliver has plenty of experience in. But this marks Oliver's first real role as the lead of his own program. Last summer, he hosted The Daily Show for eight weeks, while Jon Stewart took a leave of absence. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I give my boyfriend that present that I got for him weeks ago, this cool new Frisbee.

It's Wednesday, February 12th, 2014. I'm Ross Miller and I have finally perfected the art of the perfect pour. No, don't! This is 90 seconds on the verge. A new Apple TV could be unveiled as early as April. According to Bloomberg, the company is actively negotiating with Time Warner Cable and other video partners. The report is not suggesting this would be a cable box replacement, however. If a new Apple set top does get unveiled, it wouldn't ship until sometime before Christmas, so it's still a ways off. With every passing moment, we are that much closer to playing Titanfall. The highly anticipated Xbox One shooter doesn't launch until March 11th, but would-be players can sign up now to try and get a limited, closed beta. The trial kicks off February 14th, and even if you're selected, you've got only until Tuesday before it ends. Microsoft is betting big on Titanfall, even going so far as to, quote, fix the Xbox One's controller to the developers' liking. Finally, you know that sinking feeling you get when something bad happens at work? Well, this morning a sinkhole opened up at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The sinkhole is reportedly about 40 feet wide and at least 25 feet deep, but thankfully no one was hurt. Damage cars include a 2009 ZR1 Blue Devil, which was on loan from General Motors, and an irreplaceable 1983 Corvette. At this time, the National Corvette Museum recommends midlife crisis dads just stick to piercing their ears until they can assess the full extent of damage to the Corvette community. That's it for today's top stories, but coming up tomorrow, I build a garage about 25 feet below Jay Leno's garage. And just wait. Come on, sinkhole. Do it.

I'm David with The Verge and this is Titanfall. When we talk about this new generation of gaming, this is the title that comes up in every conversation. It's arguably the first true next-gen game for Xbox One, the one that was in all the console launch commercials, even though it wouldn't come out for months. Its most next-gen feature is the way Titanfall blends multiplayer and single-player games. The demo we tried was mostly standard kill-or-be-killed multiplayer, but Titanfall is designed to add some cinematics and AI directions to make the game feel more like a campaign, even when you're playing with other people. The developers think your Xbox One is always going to be online and connected, and the game takes full advantage. At its core, Titanfall is a team-based first-person shooter set sometime in the future. Essentially, it's about pilots and titans, hyper-agile human soldiers in the giant mech suits they can climb in and out of. It's like David and Goliath, if David had a jetpack and was a parkour expert, and Goliath used a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. It isn't as one-sided as you might think, though. From the point of view of a titan, pilots are very small and out in the open. They're cannon fodder. But every pilot has a jetpack that lets him run on walls and free-run quickly through dense buildings. Pilots can attack from any angle, change direction mid-air, and each one has a rocket launcher or some other anti-titan weapon. The extra freedom and control is actually a little jarring at first, but it very quickly becomes second nature. The important thing, though, is that you'll never be stuck playing either a titan or a pilot for very long. Every few minutes, faster if you play well, players can call in a titan from the sky and start wreaking chaotic havoc with cannons and missiles. Like most modern shooters, you can customize the weapons and equipment for both pilot and titan. More options become available as you level up, and more weapon modifications unlock as you play. A lot of the customization feels like Call of Duty, and for good reason. Titanfall is the first game from Respawn Entertainment, a company founded by former heads of the studio that created Call of Duty and shepherded it through Modern Warfare 2. Really, most of the game isn't exactly breaking new ground, but where Titanfall excels is creating a sense of scale and balance. It never feels too unwieldy controlling a huge titan, or too erratic running around as a much smaller foot soldier, even though the whole world is climbable. The game is designed to keep you constantly engaged. Even when your team is getting crushed, there's a chance at redemption by ejecting from your titan or heading to the evac point. Titanfall is due out March 11th for Xbox One and PC. An Xbox 360 version from outside developer Bluepoint is due out two weeks later. Microsoft really needs this game to be the next Halo, the killer app that makes people go out and buy an Xbox One. We've only spent a few hours playing a multiplayer demo, but it really looks like this game might meet that goal. It looks incredible, it feels fresh, and with simple controls and forgiving aim, it's surprisingly easy to pick up and play. But still, there's a lot of Titanfall left for us to play, a lot of the world left to discover, and a lot of things to blow up from the cockpit of a giant machine.

Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. I am Dieter Boehm. I'm Dan Siefert and I am Chris Sigler. Dan and Chris were expecting snappy patter from me before I just dropped my name so that they could get ready with their clever repost. I usually like to take a long drink of whatever beverage I'm enjoying while you're going through your opening spiel and you really didn't give me enough time to enjoy a beverage this week. I'm a little upset about it. Well normally you have more time too, Chris, because it goes Dieter, Vlad, myself, you. Where is Vlad? What's Vlad's story? We don't know where Vlad is. Vlad is, he's busy. He's on the streets of London. He's busy. He's having a hard time. He's flatting so hard right now. There's a werewolf in London, maybe American, and Vlad has to fight it. Yeah. So Mr. Siegler, do you want to talk about the environs in which you're in and how they might change? I am in my bat cave. Yeah. And next week, actually there are some logistical issues here that maybe our viewers and listeners don't care about but I'm going to share them anyway, which is that we don't actually have regular studio time in New York booked for this program. Which is fine because we don't need studios. We don't, but next week I will be doing a studio time in New York. So I'm not going to be there. But next week I will be in New York possibly for a very long time. I might die there. Yeah. It's a risk. It's a genuine risk. Well no, I'm just saying of old age. Right. I might just be there. Well I mean London's got werewolves and New York has… Has Chris Siegler. Yeah, you can't leave. You just die there. Right. Also vampires. Like Hotel California. So yes, I will be in New York next week, which I am a little, shall we say, skittish about having been in Chicago with easy access to delicious pizza for the past 11 years of my life. So this is a… I mean, Chris, if you really get homesick, there's always UNOs. Dan, we already went through this. The UNO in New York and elsewhere in the United States is a licensee of the UNO name. If you want real UNO pizza, there are precisely two places to get… Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? There are two places to get UNO? Shouldn't there be just one? Ah. Shouldn't it be called, like, it should be called Duo. UNO? Duo Pizza. Dieter, I almost feel like you actually know that the second one is called Due, because it is. Really? Yeah. And you're just setting me up. But yes, there are two original UNOs. There's UNO and Due. They're located… No, it wouldn't be DOS. I mean, Chicago pizza might not be New York pizza, but it's not Mexican pizza. It's Spanish pizza, come on. I mean, UNO means one, right? Yes, it means one. Due means two in Italian. Oh, okay. See, when I see UNO, I think one in Spanish. So… Oh. Well, it's… UNO is one in a variety of languages. Forgive me for confusing that fantastic chain restaurant with fantastic Chicago pizza when I want to eat stuff that doesn't taste good like New York pizza. Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show, where we talk about Chicago pizza. Ad nauseum. If Vlad comes later, we'll talk about carrots. And avocados. Yeah, and avocados. We've actually had requests for more avocado banter. Really? More avocado banter. I hope this is enough avocado banter. The thing about avocados is that they're the ones that aren't stained with blood. There's a lot of bad avocados out there that come from poor working conditions. I do actually think there's an opportunity, a genuine opportunity for a Fresh Foods podcast. Not necessarily hosted by The Verge, but just in the podcast world in general. I think there's probably a good opportunity for that. But anyway, getting back to the original discussion here, yes, as of next week I will be in New York, which kind of changes potentially how we are going to record and present this show to you. And we don't have all those answers yet. There's an easy answer for that. You just need to go to a place where you can record and obviously the best solution is for you to get in the car that you own and drive there. You're trolling me. I no longer own a car, which I also feel very weird about. A lot of weirdness in my life this week. Don't worry Chris, car ownership sucks. It's kind of like home ownership. It's just a big false lie. You guys are killing me. Speaking of dying, Flappy Bird. Yes. Flappy Bird has been around and then it had its glorious moment since we last podcasted. And then it died. Unless you happen to have a phone or went out to eBay to buy the expensive phone that they're selling that has Flappy Bird. Or you use an Android phone and you just Google for the APK. I do not endorse what Dan has suggested. Or you have a Windows phone in which case you're using the clone that is identical to the original game. The kerf that's in the Windows phone store. Yeah. So Flappy Bird was discussed on the Roachcast. I really don't have a ton more to add other than it's remarkable and I kind of can't wait until the next thing to seem like Flappy Bird happens. And also if you had any doubt in your mind whatsoever that there is a very strong correlation to draw between apps and pop music hits, you need to let that go. Because one hit wonders are here. Flappy Bird is the... I don't want to go with bye bye bye. What's a good one hit wonder we can go with? Flappy Bird is never going to give you up of apps. I actually argue this. I think your point is flawed because the developer has like four apps in the top ten most popular games in iTunes. So who's a good four hit wonder that we can talk about? The other ones only became hits because they discovered their back catalogue, right? I don't think so. I think he's had success in the app store before. Not to this extent. No, obviously Flappy Bird is like, you know, Metallica wrote four great albums and then had the black album where that took off and everyone knew Metallica's name. But you know, that's the first example I could think of. As far as I can tell the phrase four hit wonder doesn't appear on the internet anywhere. Wow. You just coined it Chris. Welcome to four hit wonder podcast formerly known as the Verge Mobile Show. And we only have three people here today. How do we not have Vlad? Wait, wait, wait, here we go. Third Eye Blind is a four hit wonder. I coordinate with you. They do the semi-charmed kind of life song. Yeah. And the jumper song. Did you know semi-charmed kind of life is about doing math? I bet you didn't know that. So that's a cool fact, bro. Anyways, I don't want to talk about bad games. I want to talk about Three's because Three's is like the best game ever. And it's actually a really good game and I hate Dieter and Chris because they're really good at it and I'm not very good at it. I'm not good at it. I don't know what you're talking about. Dieter's score is like three times mine. Well that's like ten times mine. Oh my god, Vlad. Oh my god. Four hit wonder. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to talk about Three's. So here's my experience with Three's. I've gone through, I think whenever you have a new strategy game and I'm going to disclaim this by saying that I'm terrible at games in general and specifically like games involving logic and strategy like chess. Anything that is in the same vein as chess I fail at. Like Flappy Bird. No Flappy Bird is not. It's like an action slash platformer, right? Except really simple. I don't know how you play chess but that's exactly how I play chess. How Chris totally avoided Dieter's troll by not buying into it. I didn't. I can only be trolled so much in one show. Anyway, I've gone through phases with Three's where I keep changing strategies. Like first I was like well, the best strategy is to just make sure that you're matching color, you know, you keep tabs on the next tile and you make sure that you're matching colors as much as possible. That was my second strategy. My first strategy was just to push everything into one corner. My second strategy was to match colors as much as possible and now my strategy is just yellow. I basically just like do whatever and that actually seems to work best. That's how I've gotten all my high scores. So if you're not familiar, Three's is a game on the iPhone where you slide numbers around on a board and when they match they double. So you start with three, then six, et cetera, et cetera. Our own Andrew Webster wrote about it and we've all become quickly obsessed with it. The high score amongst the Verge staff has been passed around a little bit. Jay Krasnack has had it for a while. I believe I have it right now. But yeah, it's a good game and it's well worth the two or three bucks. So yeah, I think it's a buck ninety-nine or something. The thing with Three's is like there's a lot of games like this on the App Store. There's a lot of games with great gameplay. There's a lot of games that are addictive and fun to play. But like it's these little things in Three's that just make it like a real joy to play even if you're not having the best game you've ever played. The cards become little characters that say things as you play. Wait, they say things? I've got to turn the music back on. I've been listening to it. The music is awesome. Turn the audio on because the music is awesome. They say things like hello and like bored if you don't make a move for a while. And it's just like these fun little nuances of the game that just make it a fun experience. Yeah. It's good. It definitely reminds me, like there's this entire class of games that concentrate as much on design as they do on gameplay. Hundreds comes to mind. Letter Press. And what's interesting about both of those games is that they were flashes in the pan. They were super hot for like two or three months and then they disappeared. And I suspect Three's will be the same way because if I play more than three or four games in a row, I start to be like this is stupid and then I want to throw my phone. And eventually I'm going to get to the point where I feel that as soon as I open the game. But right now it's super fun. Did you ever play 100,000 or is it a million? I forget what it's called. I can't read how many zeros there are here. It's a really great game. I'm not familiar with that. It's a strategy game where you match symbols and as you match symbols, this dude running across the top kills monsters. It's great. Just trust me. Well whatever you do, don't play Dieter again. Don't play against Dieter in any game. Ever. He will ruin that game for you very quickly. Yeah. Don't add him to Game Center unless you want to be really depressed. Yeah. Although I don't know if I'm easy to add on Game Center because I've switched my Apple ID to a different email address so that it would be harder to have my identity stolen after Matt Honan had his identity stolen via a vector that included Apple. Not that it really saves me but I think just searching for my email address might not get you to me on Game Center. So not a lot of people are pals with me on Game Center. Also, the process of opening Game Center, waiting for it to actually load, hoping it doesn't crash is so painful. It doesn't really matter. Also, speaking of awesome things, this Nexus 5. With the red one. Red, orange. I still haven't seen it in person. Is it as awesome in person as it seems? It is FU red or orange. But in a good way, right? In a great way. It is just shockingly beautiful. I don't understand why they didn't have this from the get go and I'm very mad at myself for buying the black one because now I can't buy this one. Then that gives rise to the important question which is, is his back the same texture as the black one or the white one? Black and the sides also equally as important. Well really, because I had heard the opposite. Okay, well, I don't know. No, it's totally soft. It's not quite as soft touchy as the black one which is really an homage to the Palm Pre in terms of its soft touch feel. Actually technically And there's, ladies and gentlemen, is your weekly webOS reference. Well, if you want to really get into soft touch polycarbonate on phones, the phone that really started it all in my opinion is the Trio 750. It did the best job of proper soft touch. Dieter, just leave the podcast right now. Of course it did the best job in your opinion. Look, we established before the show started that I began podcasting in 2006 and it was the Trio Central Trio Cast. So yeah, if I'm podcasting, I'm talking about trios. That's just what my life is. But we can move on. But honestly, this thing is really awesome and you should buy 10 of them. You guys use Pebbles, right? Or at least some of you do. I don't currently because I am waiting on my shipment. I've got one in front of me and the battery is dead. So here's my question. And Vlad, you use one too, right? That's right. Oh, Vlad's there. Okay. So do you guys have this thing, and it's been doing this ever since version 1.0, where every once in a while the iPhone is like Pebble wants to communicate with Pebble Technology Corporation blah blah blah. And then you have to unlock your phone and then it automatically opens the Pebble app and then everything is normal again. Do you guys have that? I've had where the, so on the iPhone it's got two connections. It's got a standard Bluetooth connection and a Bluetooth LE connection which supports the notifications. And sometimes the Bluetooth LE connection drops and it will ask to re-enable that. Yeah, I think that's what's happening. It's super annoying because it forces you to open the Pebble app. There's no way around it. You can't even just hit pair and then move on with your life. You hit pair and then the app opens. It's insane. Anyway, we're going to have to talk about that one. Sounds like the absolute worst, Chris. It is a- For both of you guys. What Vlad? Sorry, for both of you that applies with respect to the iPhone you're talking about. Yes. Android, it's just straight up Bluetooth. At least the versions that I'm using. I've used Pebble way more with Android than I have with iPhone because you can be, at least with the supporting apps, not, I don't know about 2.0, but you can be way more discriminate about what doesn't get pushed out to the Pebble and you can change it when you feel like it. 2.0 is way better on iPhone. Way better. My problem is I don't want email showing up on my phone screen. I'm uncomfortable with that for whatever reason, but I'm totally comfortable having it show up on my watch. So there's a bunch of notifications that I would like to have on my watch that I can't on an iPhone because I don't want them on my phone screen. Actually, and I don't know if this is a bug or if it's intentional or what, and I've been meaning to Google around on this and figure out what's going on, but for some reason that's exactly how mine behaves. I don't have Gmail set to show on my lock screen but it still shows up on my watch. Well, it depends. I think if you do it, if you set it up inside the app it used to be then it would work because it was a direct thing. I don't know. It's been a while. If you do it through notification center then it follows those rules. Interesting. Speaking of notification centers, boom! Nice. We've stolen 8.1 leaks. Technically it's called that activity center. Do you remember back in the day when Trent produced the podcast and if there was a really good Segway he'd inject the sound of a Segway scooter? Do you remember that? Yes, I do remember that. No, it wasn't a Segway scooter, it was the Jetson car. Yeah, I was going to say, the Segways don't make noise. It's a Jetson's… No, no, no. There was at least one occasion where he actually used like a Segway scooter. I'm sure of it. Trent isn't listening. I don't know why Trent is listening. I'm going to email Trent and ask him about this. I think Dieter's right. I think it's the Jetson sound. The important thing is that I successfully derailed Dieter's pretty good transition. So Windows Phone 8.1 seems to be kind of awesome. Like support for soft buttons, proper notification center, which is called action center, which seems to actually perform or do the way you'd want it to. Slightly improved camera interface. They've changed the way that multitasking works so that apps don't fully quit out. They can still reside in the background but then you can quit them manually by swiping them instead of hitting a tiny stupid little X. Just a slew of stuff. There's improvements all over the place. I haven't seen a PIP update for a phone this big in a while. I guess 7.5 was of this caliber. This seems like a really nice update for Windows Phone and I'm excited to see phones running it. I was talking to Tom about this earlier today and he and I both agreed that this is a lot more than we expected Microsoft to roll out for 8.1 and it really feels like it should be called Windows 9. But I guess they're keeping it in line with Windows 8.1, which lots of signs of this point to Windows RT and this kind of merging together. So that kind of makes sense that they're calling it 8.1. I still don't know what Windows RT is by the way. I have no idea what it is, who uses it, what they use it on. It's not a clue. There are currently two devices that run it right now, the Surface 2 and that Nokia tablet. Nobody else makes RT devices anymore. So it's essentially Microsoft's own operating system for its own devices. But anyways, like Dieter said, it looks great for Windows Phone 8.1. It's bringing a lot of things that we've been asking for for a long time, which maybe should have been there a long time ago, but they're finally coming. I think the word is that we're going to see this around April, which isn't too far away. That isn't far away at all. You know what's going to cause complete havoc? And I'm just going to throw out a completely hypothetical situation here. Imagine if Microsoft says, oh well, you know, the Lumia 1020 is going to get 8.1 and one or two other phones. Yeah, the 920 isn't, all these other phones aren't going to get it. It's going to be Windows Phone 8 versus 7.8 all over again. That was a huge fiasco. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that Microsoft eventually rolled out 7.8 to some phones, but where are they waiting for it for like a really long time and then nobody cared when it finally arrived? Right, so I am going to say I trust Microsoft not to do that. That if your phone ran Windows Phone 8, that you're going to be able to run 8.1. Wasn't that the whole purpose of moving from 7 to 8? Yeah, they put themselves in modern infrastructure and the whole shooting match. I guess, but it's like… I'm sure Tom's yelling into his screen right now. That's my goal on every podcast, because I know that Tom watches us. So I just want to make sure that Tom gets upset at what we're talking about at least once per show. Hi Tom. I mean, does Windows Phone even have Instagram yet? Right, we're still waiting for that, right? And Vine? Well, no, they got Vine. Vine is really important. I'm just trolling Tom. Okay, so Cam Aaron wants to know, does it matter how good Windows Phone gets, can they dig out of the hole that they're in? So we kind of talked about this last week where I was like, we need to stop thinking of them as being in a hole. They're definitely in a hole in some markets, but in other markets they could actually do okay and they just need to focus on those. I would give Windows Phone another try if they could make nice with Google. Like I would give it more than like a… I'd give it the old college try. Tom just tweeted that he's upset. That's a very… You don't know that that's about us though. He's just generally upset. I would favor you. Wait, is there a footy match going on? Because he's always upset about footy matches. I love it when people call it footy match. What? Yeah, he does tweet about footy a lot, it's true. It's always around like four in the afternoon my time and then Tom starts complaining about some soccer game. So here's what you need to know about Tom. He's a huge Manchester United fan. If you're not sure who Tom is, it's Tom Warren, our resident Microsoft expert who is… He's an enormous Manchester United fan. You should tweet at him things about Man U. You should send him Man U like in products and souvenirs. Huge fan. Anyway. Yeah. I'm sorry guys. I'm sorry. It's late in the day. I overslept which is the reason I have a red nose and I'm late for the podcast. So I'm not really in a position to defend Europe at the moment. This entire assault on the good name of Tom Warren and our entire continent, I just don't know what to do about it. I'm just going to shrug and say on top of it. Just let it completely slide by. Just a detest point about Microsoft as a chance who makes good with Google. I mean that if is just way too big for me. As far as I'm concerned, from what I've seen since the beginning, the real problem that Google has with Microsoft is Google doesn't want a competition. Whether you say Google is afraid of Microsoft getting in or Google has some other disagreement that it's kind of taken out on Microsoft in this way. The fact is the reason there isn't a good YouTube app on Windows phone, there isn't a good Gmail app, etc. is because Google doesn't want to play ball. And I think it's wanted to do so ever since the beginning. Because to me I just see it as Google being defensive on the mobile front. What do you think? I mean it's defensive but at the same point it's like Google is so far ahead that it doesn't need to be defensive in this way. I think maybe this has to do with how much Microsoft has gone after Google in certain areas for search dominance and claim that Google has a monopoly and all these things and actually gotten somewhere with especially European authorities and things like that. So I don't know, maybe this is Google's way of taking out, I don't know. But yeah, without the Google support it does make it very difficult. At least for myself, I know a lot of us, a lot of people that rely on Google services which seems to be growing every day. Gmail subscriptions are growing not shrinking so that's a big thing that makes it difficult to move over to Windows phone. Absolutely, but I would also say it's a little bit different from the search situation where Bing's existence actually helps Google because it keeps Google out of antitrust situations, at least even more severe ones that already exist because at least there's some sort of viable, you know, somebody you can say, hey, Bing exists, those guys can take a bit of the antitrust heat off Google. That's not really the case with their mobile strategy but I agree with you. I think that Google is way far ahead and can afford to be a bit more relaxed about it. But then we can also say that about Apple and the iPhone and Steve Jobs used to spend earnings calls talking trash about Android and now Tim Cook has just taken up the baton and he's doing the same thing. Like every chance he gets, he talks trash about Android, you know, crappy tablet experience, whatever, you know, as far as really disease companies are. Somebody asked about Google selling off Motorola and he had an acerbic thing. He said… That Google wasn't committed enough. Yeah, I think it's really hard to do hardware and software services and link all those things together. That's what makes Apple so special. It's really hard so I'm not surprised that they're not going to do that. I mean, in all honesty that's just kind of like a slightly meaner way of what we've been saying. Google just didn't have the patience to ride that out. Yeah, well it's not… I mean that's not the only factor but I think that's one of the factors is that Google didn't want to wait for Motorola to sell off. It was a pretty well honed burn, I got to say. He gets credit for that from me. Same interview he also was pretty evasive about what the new categories were and he's like, you know, there's going to be new categories and no reasonable person would say that this isn't a new category which is a weird way to couch it but whatever. Categories being new products that Apple is expected to release. Not another iPhone, not another iPad, not another Mac. Maybe, I don't know. I would say not another Apple TV but maybe it is something in that zone. Tough to say. Anyway, we should actually get back on the Windows Phone horse because Nokia has got news coming up. We're expecting that it's going to unveil the Normandy. Ironically, not Windows Phone news. They've also got this mystery Windows Phone that we saw the YouTube video for which there's been speculation that it's the Verizon icon, I think. This has been talked about for a long time or rumored or something at least. Go ahead Dieter, I'm sorry. So I don't know. Normandy and Nokia Phone running Android. So I think Tom, not to bring the talk back on to Tom, but he summed this up really well the other day in a tweet. He's like, if you don't care about Nokia's Asha phones, you're not going to care about Nokia's Normandy phone even if it runs Android. So that's pretty much what it is. We've talked about this before about how it's a great way for Microsoft to bring its services to the lower markets where Asha is and where they currently don't run. Asha phones don't run Bing, they don't run Outlook, they don't run OneDrive now, a whole host of services that Android phones can run. So it's a good way for that and the other side is that Nokia's had these subversive factions that have managed to push products to market before. So I'm not hugely surprised that this thing is going to market. A lot of people have said it's egg on the face of Microsoft. Maybe it is, I don't know. It totally is. If they can push their services though, that's all that matters, right? If it's an Android phone, I mean it's not a win for Google because it's an Android phone that won't run Google Play. Google doesn't care. And if it's able for Microsoft to be able to push Bing and Outlook and all these other services to a whole new audience and a whole new market, then that's a win for Microsoft too. And bear in mind that from the consumer's perspective, they will never hear the word Android. You don't hear it from Amazon and you're not going to hear it from Amazon. And it looks like a Windows phone. Like the interface that we've seen, the leaks interface that we've seen, look like Windows phone interfaces. Which will clash jarringly with the Android apps, but whatever. Well I mean that's the thing though, right? Because they are not going to have Google Play, Nokia presumably will be curating app availability very closely. So that might end up being a non-issue to some extent. I mean they might install something like the Amazon App Store on there. Just make it completely a paradise of great apps. Yeah Amazon App Store and Yandex. Those are your options on the Yola phone. Does the Yola phone have Amazon actually? I know it has Yandex. I don't think it has it preloaded, but it's one of the recommendations that they make. Well regarding Yandex and not just Russian but also Chinese app stores, it's probably safe to say considering the market segment that Normandy is going after that there will be an opportunity for them to load a lot of Asian and Russian app stores on these phones, right? Yeah. So that one fly in the US, but you're not going to see the Normandy on any US carrier, I'm assuming. Well we don't see any Asha phones here. Right, exactly. So okay, we saw a couple of Samsung leaks. We saw there's some icons, well they were teasing these new icons that look very decent, but I think you made the point that they look flat whiz. Flat whiz? Wow. That's pretty good actually. I like that. But here's the thing, when is the last time, I mean we still make fun of Samsung for touch whiz, but seriously, when is the last time anyone at Samsung has said the word touch whiz? It's been a long time and they always jump on me whenever I mention touch whiz or tweet touch whiz. We don't call it touch whiz anymore. Yeah, it's like okay fine, whatever, I'll call it life companion software, whatever you want Samsung. Listen, they stopped talking about touch whiz and they started putting S in front of everything. Yeah and now instead of putting S in front of everything, they're putting 5 after everything. Yeah, everything to the power of 5. So life, speed, curiosity, everything to the power of 5. So there's been a couple, well I'm sorry Vlad, go ahead. Go ahead then, go ahead. Well I was just going to say there's been a couple of reports that Samsung's new software is going to be toned down, that they've had these agreements with Google and that was part of the reason that Google sold Motorola was that it made these agreements with Samsung that Samsung's going to back off of all of its S software or a lot of it at least and promote the native Google apps. And we've seen, we've heard those reports, Samsung itself released these icon sets today. But other than that, we have no idea what the S5 looks like. There haven't been any hardware leaks. We saw, there's been some very kind of sketchy leaks saying the specs of it, that it might have this processor and a 1080p screen or whatever but we still have no idea what the design looks like which is pretty remarkable. I think we mentioned this last week or whatever that it's pretty remarkable that we haven't seen any leaks of it with it supposedly being released. But it's not, it's not remarkable. Samsung has done a tremendous job of keeping its phones secret for the past like 12 to 18 months. It's remarkable, it's still remarkable in the whole scheme or the whole world of consumer electronics where literally everything leaks. I mean yes, Samsung's done this before where it's kept everything quiet up until the release. It's still remarkable that it's doing. Dan can I live vicariously through you right now and would you do me the favor of eating a cookie dough Oreo which I still can't find in Chicago? I will actually need to leave my seat to go get them. I want ones so bad but I can't find them. They're not good man, they taste like day old coffee. They're not good. I don't recommend. While we're on the topic I'll give my quick review of the new special edition Oreos. The marshmallow crispy ones which have a golden cookie are edible, they're not bad, I would not buy them again. The cookie dough ones which have a chocolate cookie are not very good and I definitely would not buy them again. That really sucks, I had high hopes for the cookie dough one. Yeah, me too, it sounds like a great idea. What would happen if you put a cookie dough Oreo in the oven and baked it first? Then you'd get a solid cookie in between two overdone cookies? All the way through now. I mean maybe cookie dough Oreos would be awesome broken up and crumbled into vanilla ice cream but on their own, not very good. What they should have done is just taken raw Oreo batter and put it in between two cooked Oreo wafers. I don't know if anyone wants to really know what raw Oreo batter looks like. That's true. I'm trying to decide if I woke up or if I'm still going for a nightmare. You're definitely not awake right now. I'm just going to drag this right back to icons, I don't give a damn. The Oreo is the iconic cookie so I think that's an appropriate segue. Yeah, no, sorry, quick mention on the icons. Somebody funnily enough in our Facebook comments mentioned this and he was spot on. They very much remind me as well of Symbian, the latest versions of Symbian by Nokia, things like Symbian Bell. They're very clean. All the gradients have been taken out. It's all dual color and it's all circular. Symbian Bell had this kind of squared circle, rounded square shape. These are all circular but they keep that same sort of flat design and just two colors. What I would say to them... It's very generous of you to say that they're pulling this stuff from Symbian when the obvious thing is that they're pulling this flat idea out of the iPhone. Yeah, but iOS 7 does a lot of gradients. There's no gradients here. Samsung's icons, specifically the thing that stood out to me is that they've eliminated the gradients, at least in the ones we've seen. Now there have been some leaks which show gradients which are much closer to iOS 7 but in general... I have the strong feeling that... Well, they've got gradients in the icons on iPhone. Anyway, I have a strong feeling that the design of the software on the next Galaxy phone from Samsung is just now getting pinned down from radically different visions. I think that they had that weird stuff on the tablet. There's rumors that Google is making them tamp stuff down. We've seen various conflicting leaks. We've seen these icons that don't seem to match up super well. I am betting that what we're going to get is going to be kind of a hot mess of a bunch of stuff that got finished last minute. It doesn't matter. You're going to get that with Samsung anyway. Imagine Samsung just releases the S5, it's got killer cutting edge hardware and then it's just running stock Android 4.4 and then it just drops and walks away. That would be pretty awesome. Instead of waiting six months for a Google edition. Just saying. That would be pretty awesome. So did you see this rumor over at the information that they're creating an API where it will track stuff that you type and then create a service called Context so that other apps can see that you're completely obsessed with Oreos and so when you open up Amazon it will know that you search for Oreos all the time and it will suggest Oreo stuff to you. Me as someone who loves to be targeted by ads, that even terrifies me. Yeah, okay so hang on. So you live your life in a browser on your desktop and Google knows what you're searching for. It's got a text box that you're typing stuff into all the time in your browser or on Google's homepage and that gets used to target stuff to you all the time. So is the difference that you don't trust Samsung to be a good steward of that information? I don't trust the apps that could potentially be requesting that information. Yeah but hang on, Google shares that targeted information with the sketchiest of sketchy websites I'm sure when you're doing stuff on your browser. The only difference between what Google does and what Samsung is doing is that this is on your phone and it's Samsung and they're like targeting more than just what you type into a browser. Well, I think we don't know, I think there's a lot of unknowns here. Like you said, they're targeting more than what you type into your browser. So is it reading all the text messages that I send? Is it reading all the private email communications that I send? Because is it capturing literally everything I type into the keyboard? And you know, a lot of people have taken issue with like third party keyboard apps that you can install on Android because the biggest permission that they have on them is that this can read everything you type and you know, what are they doing with that data. So that's kind of a big concern. It's not just third party keyboards, I was just going to say that is no different to what Google's keyboard available in the Play Store wants permission for. Yeah but we don't believe that Google is using that information for ad targeting, do we? Well it doesn't matter what the information is being used for. The point is, you install the Google keyboard. That's exactly what matters. Well yeah, but what I'm saying is it doesn't matter for you to be upset or worried about it for you to know whether it's for ads or for some other purpose. The risk is there. That's my point. So you install the Google keyboard and the first permission you give is this can record all the information that you type into it. Doesn't matter what application, what you're doing, you start typing, we can record all this data. So that's sufficient for you to have a security worry. To answer your question, I think speaking candidly, yes. We don't trust Samsung as much as we trust Google. I mean Google operates in the United States. Even people in Europe, we're more familiar with the US privacy regime and the ethics that Google is subjected to whether it adheres to them or not. And Samsung frankly is, okay, I'm not going to say it because I like to be alive and everything, but it's this big octopus like company with all of these subsections and Samsung display company which is a separate company but it's also subsidiary and there's all this stuff going on and it's just unfamiliar. So it's kind of a scary proposition. I think that the challenge for Samsung will be if it does indeed plan to do this is to show the value that it's going to provide to me the user with all this data that it's capturing. Google has whether it's actually providing value to me or it's convinced me that this is valuable. I find things in my Google now cards all the time for stuff that I search for that is kind of interesting. So if Samsung is able to prove that to me that letting it capture all of this information is going to be valuable to me and it can do all these cool things then great, that's going to be the hard sell. Google has already proven that, it's been doing it for years, it's improving the searches, it's improving things with flight recommendations and airline status and all this other stuff that it already does. So we'll see. I think the way to summarize this is first of all, these touch with icons or whatever Samsung was calling itself to it. Let's right now, here and now decide are we going to just keep calling it touch with and the same way we decided we're calling it Metro and I don't care what Microsoft capitulated. Are we just going to pin touch with on Samsung forever because it was terrible once or do we want to come up with like. The other option and I think the one that Samsung prefers is Samsung user experience. No, you don't need to be bland like denuded words that have no reference and passion and meaning. That's what Samsung calls it. I think we should call it life experience or life companion. Move on. Overwhelming support for that one. Samsung software. Samsung software. Center face. Center face is pretty good. So Vlad, finish your thought about the center face. I would focus on the same part of the center face. I think yeah, it's versatile. You can read it a whole bunch of ways. I think first of all, I get from comments. Okay, I'm going to try and finish the sentence here. Again coming from comments, somebody said whatever alternative you give me to the current and the old touch with icons is an improvement. So we don't need to be too picky about these and after all, we're still just talking about an icon set. It's just a teaser. There's two weeks until February 24th when Samsung very much seems likely to announce this Galaxy S5 like Dan is saying, we don't know much of anything about the hardware. We started to build an idea about the software. What I would say is even if Samsung like Dieter is saying is working to scale things back, its customizations, trying to be cleaner and more basic as the look suggests, it is really going to build into a hot mess because right now, one of the icons that is being shown is a style icon which again is simplified but its graphical representation is the same thing as the stock gallery icon in Android. So the very least that's going to happen there is that people are going to be confused because it's going to look like a gallery icon but it's called style which we don't know what the hell that's going to be. But if that's your photo gallery, then we've got a problem. John Ledger asks in the Hangouts Q&A, I don't think it's the real John Ledger again, but hi, do we realize that if it is called the Samsung User Experience, the best abbreviation for that is SUEX. That's beautiful. It would actually be SUEX. I am willing to reserve judgment on this thing until we see it. Comic has a very checkered past when it comes to this stuff, both in throwing way too many features in lots of weird little corners and just having ugly design. I would love to see them turn that around. These icons are actually a step in the right direction and give me a little bit of hope. I think we can consider that it will have been made progress if they just took out the option where you can choose Comic Sans as your font. That is progress, yes. Please, please, so long as we do that. Hey, and you know what else? The Sony, the Experience L1 compact from Sony has a white balance adjustment. That is the first phone I've seen with a white balance adjustment. I would like more companies to kick that out and just have those extra tweaks available. Because particularly with Samsung and those AMOLED displays, sometimes they over saturate. We discussed the whole blue tinting with displays, etc. That would actually be a nice bit of new functionality for me. Okay, we've got to talk about HTC. They just signed a huge patent agreement with Nokia. They stopped suing each other, which is great, but they also had a quarter where they broke even. Hooray! But they're going to lose money again soon. Boo. And then cheaper phones. That's going to solve everything for them, which no, no it's not. Just no. They're going to have to provide phones across. They can't be like a virtue. They've got the design line, whatever. I mean, I'm telling you. It depends on the market that they're going for. If they're going for the market in China, Sher Wang in her comments made a very good point that the phones in our stores cost $500 or more and most of the phones sold in China are $150 to $225. So if they're not selling phones in that space and they want to be in that market, then yeah, they're going to have to release cheaper phones. Maybe they don't have to spam the US with those cheaper phones. The idea that those cheaper phones are going to become a profit center for them and save the company, I mean, no. I think there's a lot of other things that need to happen as well. But hang on a second. I do feel like HTC is just kind of out of ideas at this point. It's really making me sad because it's a glorious company with a glorious recent history. Well no, that's not true. They've got one idea. They're feeling optimistic about wearables and it's not going to be just another wearable. Yes. They're talking it up. But that's my point. What I've seen over the past four or five years is every time a mobile company has gotten desperate, it's decided to retrench to emerging markets. So Nokia when they were still going with Symbian was like, we've still got all of this market share. We've got to work in the emerging markets. Stephen Hill just kept talking and talking about that until he got the company bought out and the whole device division shut down and owned by Microsoft now. BlackBerry has been doing the same thing. Oh, we're really big in Indonesia. It's like no, emerging markets and high volume of low profit margin devices, like Dita says, I'm not going to say. So that is really a common idea that HTC is trying to retrench. Wearables are a common idea that HTC is trying to jump on. And good luck to them. I would love to see HTC capture that market, but again it's nothing new. And finally the really disappointing thing for me is Peter Chow with quarterly results that we just announced yesterday in fact. We're saying we're going to communicate better with the consumer. It's like better marketing was your solution this time last year, and now you're just rehashing the exact same solution that you haven't done anything about over the past five months. I mean they're in a really tough spot. They can't fight Samsung on marketing dollars. They're not integrated stack developing a ton of their own software. They got blink video. So there is a steep, steep hill that HTC has to climb in order to be successful and I don't know how they climb it. I don't know what possible innovation, unless this wearable is the bee's knees. If they actually had a wearable that fit on the knees of bees, that could be interesting. Scott Croyle is a pretty talented industrial designer and I have a pretty strong feeling that whatever we see out of them in the wearables department is going to be unique. I don't think that they're out to replicate the Galaxy Gear and if they are then God help them. But you know one thing, really the only thing that in terms of their high-end smartphone game, about the only thing that I can identify at least in the US that hurt them last year was the extremely delayed availability of the one on Verizon. Otherwise there really wasn't anything that I felt like they totally stumbled on. Well I mean I don't know if it was just the funding issue or what, they didn't really have great marketing or a whole lot of marketing. Yeah but I don't think they could have done any, I mean just considering their marketing budget I'm not sure that they could have upped their game there much. Oh they could have gotten B-list instead of paying for Robert Downey Jr. That's true. You know they could have had Keratop. The thing that I noticed different in 2013 versus 2012 is even though HTC didn't really sell any One X's, there were quite a few AT&T commercials for the One X and I don't recall seeing the same for the One. Yeah, alright so when HTC inevitably fails, Shuman wants to know who is going to buy them. Actually I'm not going to say they inevitably fail, but if they were to fail and decide oh it's time to sell the company. Google? Lenovo. No man, Lenovo's already got their company right? They shopped around, they got rejected by Canada for buying Blackberry and like screw it we'll just go with Motorola instead. Yeah but Lenovo already had a smartphone business, so why not continue collecting smartphone companies. It's not like Voltron, you don't like buy four of them and it turns into a giant awesome smartphone company. Then you'll have the Moto One X. Yeah, I'm just saying, throwing out ideas. I mean think about it, can you imagine a One X with HTC's industrial design sensibilities? That would be a truly epic product. Here's my guess. A One X price? That already exists. No, like a Motorola One X. Are you ready? Yeah. Are you ready? Sorry, Moto X, not One. I always do that, I always call the Moto One X, I mean the Moto X. Who's going to buy HTC, are you ready? You guys standing by? Yeah. Think about it. Amazon. Yeah, that's right. Think about it. They're both in Seattle. I mean it would make sense. Yeah, it would make perfect sense. Yeah, I mean there are. But then Amazon puts its cards on the table and essentially announces to the world, we are building a smartphone. No, no, we just bought HTC because they already built the smartphone. Well I mean they could wait until, so the rumor in late 2013 was that HTC was partnering with Amazon for its smartphones, of which I think there are two or three that are in the pipeline, or at least Amazon is playing around with. So Amazon could wait until the first generation Kindle phones come out and then buy HTC. It's a thought. I mean it is super convenient. It is serendipitous that HTC has a large facility in the Seattle area and of course Amazon is headquartered there. So there would be some synergy there that would work out very well. Yeah. I mean if Amazon wanted to, it could buy T-Mobile and HTC and then it could have a smartphone company and a mobile network to run those smartphones on and never leave Seattle. Ever. Ever. Is T-Mobile being run out of Seattle as well? Yeah, T-Mobile's… At least until Sprint buys them. Oh, but that's not going to happen is it? Just briefly, I just want to say, and this builds on Dieter's point about, what was it you were saying, the Heplink video. I mean that to me is the point with HTC. You have a company and you have a budget of energy and time that you can spend on developing your proposition to people. So if you spend your time on BlinkFeed, if you spend your time on things like HTC Watch and things like HTC Sense and 5.0 and 5.5 and I don't know what it's going to be next version 6.0 and those things are not compelling to people. They are bringing new consumers in and getting people to buy, to make repeat purchases of HTC devices. This is where you end up. I mean Tim Cook is right, you can do the hardware but you can't just do that well. You have to do the software as well. And this is where HTC has consistently been failing. I mean we keep saying this, industrial design is HTC's strength and it keeps naming it. It keeps doing it well. Okay, so here is a great example, Zoe's. The one has got this little thing where you can take a picture and it's like a moving image and then you can upload it to their service but it won't stay there forever because why would you want that to happen? And then you share them and they are like flash and whatever the little movies are. Look if you don't have the chops to run a cloud service and distribute your brand new media format, then don't run a cloud service that takes a Zoe and converts it into a GIF or a GIF if that's how you prefer it to be pronounced. How cool would it be to have a phone that has the GIF camera that like it takes a picture and five minutes later you've got an animated GIF of the things that you can embed anywhere, right? That's Samsung. You could have done that and they didn't. No, but this is the point, with the latest version of Zoe I do think that you have a built in GIF creator, if not Zoe I think it's in the photo gallery app. That's fine. But you're absolutely right Dieter, it's the most convoluted GIF maker in the world. Your pitch to people isn't you have a GIF maker now in your gallery and you can get it on your HC phone and you can stick it on Instagram and everybody will love you for it because you look pretty cool. No they're like we do Zoe photos and people need to understand what Zoe is, they need to decode it and it's just so convoluted and messy that ultimately it puts people off and they don't even bother using it. And the other thing, their sharing service, you're absolutely right, it's so over branded as well as not being more functional than all the other ones. It's so branded, it's so HTC Zoe, I'm sharing a Zoe with the world. They assume it's kind of like set from an iPhone. In order for anybody to want to have all this signature that identifies your device, they need to feel proud of the device in the first place. And HTC just isn't in that position anymore, it's sad but that's the case. You need to give people a reason to want to push your brand and they're not doing that right now. I mean if I told somebody that I was sending them a Zoe they'd be like no thanks, I'm not ready to have kids yet. Or oh no thanks, I've already watched the West Wing. Or I'm not a big fan of New Girl. There you go. I actually haven't watched New Girl at all. Oh it's a good show. I'm actually a fan of it. I was mad at her because like Ben Gibbard really? I mean come on. But that's not right. She left him. Yeah she left him. Yeah she was like I kind of want to be a movie star so see you. I don't know what you people are talking about. So the star of New Girl, Zoe Deschanel was dating… They were married actually. Oh isn't her name Zoe? It's pronounced that way. Death Cab for Cutie. And Death Cab for Cutie had like three great songs and we were like oh man these guys are going to rock and then they got super emo and then it's like oh they're just dashboard conventional all over again and then I gave up on them. But like that, he managed to be cool enough long enough to land her and so I was always just bitter about that. She did better and she is now so there you go. I have literally nothing to contribute to this conversation. I mean the challenge HEC faces to get back into business when you have even just the name is… Yeah exactly. Like they, HEC married Ben Gibbard right and that's what I'm saying. Who should they have married? I don't know, Robert Downey Jr. but that came too late. But like in his coke phase or in his clean phase? Definitely in the coke phase. Either way. You know I have to say… It's like buying buy low, sell high, they get in the coke phase even early and then… Just to extend this whole thing, this whole stupid terrible metaphor about Robert Downey Jr. as a promoter of HEC, strikes me as kind of like Jennifer Aniston in her desperation phase where she is trying to prove that she can have a hot boyfriend and she is like just find me somebody to associate my name with. I don't think that's fair. Robert Downey Jr. is one of the most well-known movie stars in Hollywood right now. The Iron Man franchise remade his career and you know the fact that he is so well associated with Iron Man and like high technology and things like that kind of makes sense that he is a spokesman for HEC which pushes high tech funds. I'm just saying that HEC is desperate and it's just showing… Look the highest paid movie star of 2013 was Dwayne The Rock Johnson. The Rock? What? Are you kidding me? No, it's true. It's true and so he should have hooked up with The Rock. Really? Yeah. Man. I mean he is definitely the guy who works at it the most. You can tell. Yeah. I believe he made like $66 million last year. Yeah, his packs are larger than Vin Diesel. Every Fast and Furious movie that The Rock is in like his arms get bigger and his chest gets bigger and he just like becomes more towering and menacing and then he like smiles and he is like, oh I'm a nice guy but I could crush your face. It's really terrifying. All right, we need to keep this going. Scarlett Johansson's publicist is… Johansson? Johansson. Are you Swedish now, Johan? Yeah. Maybe she is, okay so deal with it. That's fair. That does sound like a Swedish name. I mean it's certainly Nordic. I've never heard anyone say Johansson before. Oh I have. For her name. Well, her publicist is to me, you know, the biggest failure of this year so far. Why? You have the most marketable actress in Hollywood and you associate her with freaking Soda Stream. Well. Okay, you associate her with the Israel-Palestine conflict which is the most intractable conflict that nobody should be commenting on if they don't want to have the head yode off by one side or the other and you stick your actress into that. I mean she could have market in anything. The commercial also sucks. Like she's like, I don't know what they are trying to prove but she's like, I'm going to make this go viral and then she like just stands there for a minute and then that's the end of the commercial. It's terrible. Hey man, we're talking about it so it must have gone viral. That was the plan all along. Do we want to talk about how Sprint thought that they could roll into the FCC and be like, hey guys, how's it going? The FCC is like, nope, not merging. Nope, you're not buying T-Mobile. It's like I could have told this, look, I mean all Sprint had to do was bring me in as a consultant like a month and a half ago, pay me $100,000 and I could have been like, nope, this isn't going to work. Nope. Walked out of the border, like walked out of the… Yeah. What do you guys want to do? Nope. Nope. Okay. But they could have saved so much time and effort and money if they had just brought me in in December to tell them this. Did anyone think this was remotely plausible? Sprint Chairman Masayoshi-san and CEO Dan Hesse, according to the Wall Street Journal, they were shocked by the opposition within the FCC. Well then they should both lose their jobs because anyone with half a brain could have told them that this wasn't going to happen. Yeah. And why is that, Chris? Because the market dynamic is completely different now than it was in 2011 when the FCC shut down AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile and it has become much more competitive now. So if they shut down that acquisition in 2011, what would possibly lead them to believe that in a more competitive market in 2014 would see regulators approve a sprint purchase of T-Mobile? It just doesn't make any sense. Well their idea is that they would be a better competitor to the other big two. Right now it's the big two duking it out on top and then sprint and T-Mobile kind of on a lower tier and that if they were to combine then they would get up to that upper tier and then there would be a true three-way competition instead of a two-way competition with sprint and T-Mobile. Well I will… That's your argument. I'll be the first to admit that Dan Hessey is a sad panda, I get it. But John Ledger has created this arsenal of quotes that would work against him in any merger scenario, right? Yeah. Like he has done nothing but try to convince people that they are the most hyper competitive like, you know, FU18-Teen Verizon carrier on the market. There is nothing depressing about their message. There is nothing depressing about their prospects. They are growing, they are adding subs. Like it just… he is working against the whole deal. Not to mention the fact that even if sprint and T-Mobile did merge they would still be something like 25-30 million customers smaller than AT&T and Verizon. So they wouldn't like be top tier competitive. They would occupy this like weird third place that can't quite reach. Yeah, it's a terrible idea. It's already so to Chris's point, there is no point in merging. So that's that. That is that. And that also is the entire Verge Mobile show. We want to thank you so much for listening and watching. And we want you to comment on the post on the website, theverge.com where the show appears. You could also tweet at us. I am backlon, Vlad is Vlad Sabov, Dan is DCC, Chris is Zpower. We are all at Verge. You could also head into the forums and talk to us there. We will be back next week, probably, maybe, definitely yes. Good night everybody. See you.

It's Tuesday, February 11th, 2014. I'm Jake Kastronakis, and the Lego movie was good, but the K'Nex movie is gonna be way better. This is 90 seconds on the verge. Robots may be taking our jobs faster than we first thought. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google's Andy Rubin and Foxconn CEO Terry Go recently met to, quote, speed up deployment of Google's robot technology at the Taiwanese company's factories. The report suggests that the first area of application will be an automating manufacturer, a move to combat rising wage costs. But Google also wants to extend beyond the factory floor to compete with companies like Amazon and its fleet of shipment drones. Now we are this much closer to living with Rosie from the Jetsons. Virgin Atlantic is working on new ways to make its upper class passengers feel even more special. The airline has begun a six week test that uses Google Glass and Sony's SmartWatch 2 to serve up information about upper class passengers and their destinations to its employees at London Heathrow Airport. Virgin employees can update passengers with their latest flight info, as well as weather and local events at their destination. In the future, Virgin says the technology could also tell its staff their passengers dietary and refreshment preferences. And finally, the greatest partnership in the history of advertising has arrived. Netflix and the crude card game Cards Against Humanity have teamed up to bring an expansion deck to the popular party game. House of Cards Against Humanity includes 25 wonderfully inappropriate Mad Libs style quotes from House of Cards and ribs against Netflix itself. Now we can only hope for some orange at the new Blackjack. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I start production on the RoboCop sequel, RoboBlart Mall Cop.

It's Monday, February 10th, 2014. I'm Sam Sheffer, and I finally convinced everyone at the office to partake in formal Mondays. This is 90 seconds on the verge. Flappy Bird shall flap no more. The game's developer followed through on his promise this weekend and has taken down the mobile game from the iTunes app store and Google Play. Citing no specific reason but ruling out legal problems or acquisitions, he tweeted on Saturday that he couldn't take it anymore and would be taking down the game the next day. Missed out on your chance to flap? You could purchase one of the dozens of phones with the game installed. They're selling on eBay for thousands of dollars. Nokia's Android phone may actually be released. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company will unveil its phone, codenamed Normandy, at a press event at Mobile World Congress later this month. The device is expected to be named Nokia X once it starts shipping and will run a forked version of Android without access to the Google Play Store. What remains to be seen is exactly how this will fit in after the Microsoft acquisition. Nokia is expected to integrate Microsoft services in some way. And finally, James Franco has made both good and bad films, but his next one is definitely going to be bad. And that's what might make it so good. Franco's company, Rabbit Bandini Productions, has optioned the rights to the book The Disaster Artist, which recounts the making of the 2003 cult film The Room. The actor plans to direct and co-produce an adaptation of the book, along with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Franco himself will star in the film alongside his brother Dave. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I start the disrobing process that leads to a very casual Friday. I'll see you then.

I'm Alexis Ohanian. I've started startups, invested in them, and met amazing people using the internet to change the world. Our generation has an opportunity unlike any other. We can create small empires without anyone's permission. Welcome to our crib! It wasn't even kind of being stressed in my day job. It was just realizing that I wasn't making things anymore. Starting ArtCycle was about building stuff again. It was scary because like the site would go down and I wouldn't know what to do and everyone would be like, okay Tom, well you know what you're doing. And I was like, ah Stack Overflow, I don't know. Literally at the beginning it was me with the PowerPoint deck. We didn't even have the website live. So you were pitching it before the site was even built? Yeah. Or live? Yeah. That's great. It sounds cheesy but it really is a great feeling. It's a good, like honest thing. I made this thing. Give it to you. Spend a little bit of money and you're winning too. It's cool. I'm considering this as my application video for Topshop. This is exciting and a little terrifying. I can't tell you this is actually really hot. So for somebody who's watching this show and is thinking, I want this job. I want to do this. What do you tell them? What do you tell her to end up like you? Well, I think one of the most important traits is that you don't listen to the word no. If you hear a no, go somewhere else.

It's Friday, February 7th, 2014. I'm Adrienne Jeffries, and I apologize if I'm a little bit off today. I just got these screws put in my neck, and I think one of them is loose. This is 90 Seconds on the Verge. The Winter Olympics kicked off today in Sochi with the spectacular opening ceremony. But just like the events leading up to the games, things did not go quite as planned. Instead of the five iconic Olympic rings, viewers saw four rings and what looked like an asterisk when the top right ring failed to expand. While that may be a glaring mistake in the ceremony, the full show was apparently quite impressive. You can watch for yourself when the ceremony airs tonight on NBC. GoPro is going public. The extreme sports camera maker announced it's filed a confidential IPO. The company has been expanding its brand, adding its own editing software and original content to its name. But now it seems GoPro wants to be a media company. The confidential IPO process allows the company to keep financial details private until a few weeks before their shares begin public trading. GoPro was valued at around $2.5 billion in December of 2012, so the IPO would be expected to value the company at several times that figure. And finally, the upcoming fourth film in the Jurassic Park series will be filmed in a surprisingly prehistoric way. Despite more and more films opting to film digitally, Jurassic World will be shot on film. This move means the sequel will visually match the three earlier Jurassic Park films and not go all George Lucas on us. Jurassic World, which stars Parks and Recreation's Chris Pratt, is set to be released on June 12th, 2015. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I get this neck issue figured out. Oh no, here it goes again. Ah!

Beef that sweat, the Sam Sheffer story today on the Vergecast. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. Where we'll be talking about beef in your sweat with Sam Sheffer. We're off to a great start. Hi everybody, it's the Vergecast. Josh is not here today. He's, he's, it's, you know. Josh is an enigma. Look, what's he gonna do? Enigma wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in a box. Anyway, I'm Nilay Patel. Roll it in a pizza. I'm David Pierce. I'm Ross Miller. Yeah, and this is the Vergecast where we talk about, pretty much talk about where Josh is, where, what he could be doing, whether he's thinking about me, and whether he asked about me yesterday. I mean, Valentine's Day is coming up, so I assume he's out planning your special day. Right. I hope so. Yeah. He's gonna take me to the park. Hollywood Topolski's out, you know. He's doing, he's making deals. Anyway, this is Vergecast where we talk about the week in technology news, culture news, news, news of the weird, news of the world. I'm on a BuzzFeed post. Whether Ross is thinking about me right now. But it's called, how does, you're the perfect steak for your Valentine's. We can talk about that if we want to. Really? Turns out I have a lot of information on the subject. Really? That seems really easy. Step one is choose your cut. Yeah. So I've been in a hanger steak. We had a hanger steak. We did. It was delicious. Yeah, it was good. That's where I've been. Yeah. Yeah. That's a mistake. You know, I've been sous-viding things in a crock pot. Dude, the crock pot is the most amazing thing I've ever had. I bought a thing called the Geek Food DSV. I'm not even kidding. It has an amazing name. It's basically the world's most complicated on and off switch. So it's a power, it's really nothing more than a power strip with a thermometer. Okay. And you plug the crock pot into it and it measures the temperature of the water in the crock pot and then it turns it off and gets that temperature and then turns it back on again when it falls below it. That's amazing. So it holds it at a temperature. The crock pot itself doesn't do this? You have to buy a separate device? Crock pots are not complicated devices. No. They literally, it's funny because when you do recipes, you know, it's like run your crock pot at high for five hours and like that means nothing. It's like... A crock pot is just like a lid. Yeah, it's a lid and it's like literally, it's like should that get hotter or colder? There's no temperature setting. Anyway, but so I bought this thing. So I sous-vide the steaks in it, which is amazing. And everybody should get one because that's the best way to make steak. Fair enough. Look at this. Look at this piece. Yeah. Beef sweat. Thank you, man. Beef sweat. See you later. Swaggy chefs. So this. So you love this thing? This is a red Nexus 5. This is the red Nexus 5. That's what David Pearce is holding right now. This just showed up yesterday. I would say that this is some of the biggest news this week, but that really is an insult to the rest of the news this week. That says a lot less about this and more about the kind of week. So I will say this. I am on record over and over and over again saying that the white Nexus 5 is a piece of junk, which I will maintain. And it's because it's the sides. It's the sides. It's like these gross, glossy edges that just don't look good. Yeah. I think the black Nexus 5 is fine. It's a soft touch. Sure. Whatever. It's kind of generic. That one, which they are calling red. It's not red. You know, Josh and I have an endless argument over what is red and what is orange. And we actually. One of you color it. It's like a fairly cut and dry. Well, no. Because there's all kinds of orange stuff in our office, right? I'm like, that's right. It's orange. And like, we just do. Wait, wait, wait. Like the couch is upstairs? It's definitely orange. No, the couch is orange. But the weird desk, that CB2 desk we roll around the TV sitting on right now. Oh, yeah, yeah. Josh will swear up and down that that's red. Josh is wrong. Right. But so we. After it's funny that over the course of the past few years, he for a while thought that he was colorblind. But now he's doing a pretty good job convincing me that I am colorblind. You and the rest of the world. So wait, what color is this? Orange. 100% that's orange. Yes, of course. I'm telling you, Josh will tell you that's red. And Google, for whatever insane reason thinks this is red. Yeah. That's just Google's not paying attention. They like, they like moved on. That's fair. Like whatever we sold, we're all we're never making phones again. I'm way back and forth on this thing. I want it. Give it to me. You know, it's kind of red. This is I like, I'm buying this phone. This is my next right here. Like, I'm not even kidding. Like, it's awesome. You just the thing I like about is you like, you can't look directly at it for too long. It's like, too bright. It's the best. It throws me off. No, it's cool. It's like, who? You know, Nokia tried to do it, but they never went all the way like this with like searing orange. HTC tried to do it for a minute. You know, HTC. And then they're HTC. You've played with this, right? I mean, it's just a Nexus 5. I like the black buttons too. I think that's a nice touch. The black buttons are the little thing. I mean, it's just Nexus 5. It still has a screen that like, I think looks kind of washed out. What about the camera? It has a Nexus 5 camera. You know what you can't ever take a picture of this with? A Nexus 5. Like, you try to take a picture of this with another Nexus 5 and the camera explodes. It's like, too many colors, too vibrant, too much details. I will say just looking at it on camera right now, it looks really good. It looks awesome. This is the best. Look, here's my iPhone, right? This is whatever. It's boring. It's functional. It has a bunch of apps, a nice camera, whatever. This is red. And victory. Well, right? I mean, this is the best. I want this. The screen, I will say, maybe it's because it's red. The screen looks better on this one. Maybe they're getting better. Yeah. It's crazy to me that it took Google, like A, that it took Google this long to have colors because Google is like the company of colors. Yeah. So they're tagliners, actually. The company of colors. And number two, that they picked this one. Like, I kind of love them for it because they're like, we're going to make colors. We're just going all the way for it. But it's just reddish orange. Massive color. I think it's $349. $349. I'm buying one of these immediately. There you go. Wow. All right. You want me to buy you one right now? We can do this live. Let's buy. It's doing nothing happens. This is the worst I've ever heard buying. No. This is the... Okay. I want to talk about Flappy Bird. We were talking about Flappy Bird. All right, well, that means I get to pick it up and play Flappy Bird. The thing is, I have played... $349. Look at that. There you go. Wait, so is Flappy Bird new this week or was the news that we found out that the developer is making all of the money that has ever existed in the world? Yeah, I think it's been around for a month. It's now like the top of the charts. More than a month, maybe. Okay. So it's been out a while. It's been out a while. I have too many Google apps. Him and like two other of his apps are also like in the top app store sales. Yeah, whoever this guy is, like, he's good at this game. How do you make money? It's a free game, right? It's a free game. All I want to say is that I hate Flappy Bird. Wait, wait, wait. One, two... It's just... Two, guys, it's my high score. Three, four... Holy fuck, I got this. Yeah, I just bought a phone. I just doubled my high score. By the way, Google, I want to tell you this. Because of your terrible account management, I almost bought a phone with a totally wild old Google account. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I just like, why don't you know? You should know better than this. Like some other state that you... Do you remember the days when the Vergecast was all one cohesive conversation? No. Not much. That literally... That never happened. But I definitely just bought a red Nexus 5 because it's the best. And I'm never going to... I mean, I guess I'll move my SIM card from my one into this. One. Right. You have a T-Mobile SIM card, right? Yeah. It's the best. It totally works. The service is amazing. Four. I have absolutely no... I need that can't tell if serious GIF right now. There are moments in New York City when having T-Mobile... So everything about buying T-Mobile service is the best, right? So I bought it at Walmart. I bought the card. It's like a secret plan that you can buy at Walmart or you can find if you skirt around the website online. Okay. Where I pay $30 a month for unlimited data in like 100 minutes of voice. Can you... That's the whole plan. Wait, that's all? Huh? Can you tether? Yeah, you can do whatever you want. It's a mandatory phone. Wow. That's... Live your life. That's amazing. You know what I mean? That's like the plan they have for the iPad and stuff, right? But except no voice. Well, there's 100 minutes of voice. So you can definitely buy this one at Walmart in a package and it says Walmart exclusive. And I said I went to Walmart to buy this thing and then everyone tweeted me that you can find it somewhere online. You just have to wink at the right guy in the T-Mobile store and then everything's fine. Yeah. You have to open... You get a lot of things... You have to Snapchat the right T-Mobile person. I'm looking for the right Walmart special. The answer is just John. Anyway, so I bought it. I love the idea that I have this card and I can put it on all the phones and all... Whatever. It's great. And then the service in New York City is totally hitting this. Yeah. Really? It's like on one minute I'm getting 40 down and then I take two steps to the left and my phone lights on fire and explodes. Yeah. I mean, it is occasionally outrageously fast. It's faster than my home internet sometimes. And then every once in a while... And then it's the same thing. I walk into my bathroom and it's like no service ever again. Paul Miller, when he first got back on the internet, Paul was like, I just have T-Mobile, I've just been watching Netflix on my phone over and over again, connected to a projector. And he's like, there's no data caps. He's like, what have you been up to, buddy? He's like, I'm watching Netflix on my phone connected to a projector. I was like, well, you came all the way back to the internet. You live... That's like two years ahead of time on the internet. T-Mobile needs to buy a little Pico projector company and start making those and just sell them. I mean, Samsung did that. Screw your TV. Samsung did that phone though. They did the projector phone. Hell yeah. What was it, the beam? The Galaxy beam? That phone was ridiculous. That was bad. But I think if... I would... That's a really good idea. Maybe I should just do that. Yeah. I literally don't see a single downside to this idea. What? Having a projector, just sticking your phone in and playing... Just going for it. Yeah, playing movies. Yeah, I mean, the downside is that you have to purchase a projector. Would you like to shop for a projector now? No. Oh, God. So everybody tweeted David what projector he should buy. No. And don't do it. What audio system? Soundbar, full 5.1. Cleave. That's true. That's very important. That's just rolling down 12 pounds. So this rabbit is going far down anyway. What soundbar should I buy? It's all over. Okay. Let's talk about what actually happened this week. Okay. I think there's actually... There are two pieces of, I think, huge news that are both connected. Okay. So one, and we talked about this on the Verge Live a little bit earlier this week, Microsoft appointed Satya Nadella as CEO. Yep. Replacing Balmer. We ran a touching tribute. Say his name again? I don't know. I've been saying it different every time. Yeah. So the way I've heard them say it is like Satya. Satya. It's Satya Nadella. It's Satya Nadella. Okay. Yeah. No, it's not that. That's how my mother would pronounce it. Because I have a thing. My parents pronounce my name far differently than everybody else. Really? How do your parents pronounce your name? Neelay. Really? Yeah. That's my name. Wait, Neelay? You can't do it. I'm sorry. This is like a... There's a cultural barrier that prevents you from ever pronouncing my name. I could just study the culture for years and never do it. And that is how many people pronounce the letter A. Okay. That's it. As far as I can tell. So my name is Neelay, and it's hard to say. I didn't even hear you just now. So I grew up in Wisconsin and it just turned into Neelay. Okay. And then you just went for it? Just went for it. Like, hi, I'm Neelay. My sister made a... She made a conscious decision when she went to college to undo Wisconsin pronunciation of her name. Really? So she grew up in Wisconsin. Everybody called her Terrell, like Terrell Owens, which is hilarious. That's amazing. It's not real. T-O. Also not a man's name. I'm gonna call your sister T-O from now on. She went to college. She's like, my name is Thorol. That's her name. And... Right. And she trained Illinois to pronounce her name correctly. And then she comes back to Wisconsin. And she's like, hi, Terrell. And she's like, who? She's like, what is that? So yeah. So, you know, I didn't... Does she hang out with Terrell Owens a lot? No, she doesn't. You know, I think one time she met Jamie Foxx. Is that a thing? Sure. Yeah. Nice. He probably knows Terrell Owens. Anyway, so Satya, I think is right. I think like... I'll buy it. OG, that's the pronunciation. But they've been saying Satya. Yeah. They're all over the place a little bit. They are all over the place. I think they're gonna... But Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft. He is... I will say this. I've gotten a lot of tweets from very excited people in India. And my parents are very pleased. Like nationalistically, like people are very excited about this. Yeah. But I think that's like a weird thing. Because his number one qualification is not that he's from India. It's that he's been at Microsoft for 22 years. And he's done an excellent job running various parts of the business. Have you heard his name before? Yeah. Okay. I hadn't. I was sort of surprised by that. I think... Here's what I think is really interesting. Tom's like a small piece, like saying like he might possibly... He's like a low on the list. No. So that... Here's why I think that's interesting. So right when they said Bomber's leaving, we did a story and we did some reporting. We talked to a bunch of people and his name came up a lot. Really? A lot, a lot. It was like Tony Bates, Alan Mulally, Stephen Elop, and you remember this guy, Satya Nadella? And it just kept on coming up like, who? Like he's been there, he's been running big enterprise divisions. He ran Bing. Like not necessarily a natural choice. But he was in that conversation at a high level from the get go. And I want to say that there were other big candidates involved, but because he was in that conversation at a high level from the get go, the rumor is that Bill Gates, he was Bill Gates candidate. Oh, interesting. Well, because Gates is now coming back to oversee this personally in a lot of ways. He's like he's an advisor. Right. So Bill Gates is stepping down as chairman of the board of Microsoft and then taking a bigger role on products as a technical advisor. And so that's like there's a lot to unpack there with what's going on with Microsoft. And one of the things that we had always heard about with the flashy external candidates is that they didn't want to be under Gates and Bollinger on the board. And Gates is the chairman, effectively running the show, but big strategic decisions was a problem for these external candidates. Alan Mulally, chief among them. Right. Yeah, if I'm Alan Mulally, I'm like, screw you, I ran Ford. Shut up. Yeah. But the thing about Mulally is he said from the beginning, very happy at Ford. Yeah. And he probably is very happy at Ford. He probably is very happy at Ford. I feel like he has a lot of reasons to be very happy at Ford. I'm happy at Ford and I re-upped for a year and everyone was like, so what are you doing after that year? Yeah. You're leaving, right? He's definitely leaving in a year. No. He's leaving. You're out of there. So yeah, I think that there is an aspect to this where this was always kind of Gates' candidate and Gates got out of the way because he got his guy. And if you're Bill Gates candidate at Microsoft, I feel like how could you lose? I think there's a lot of ways. Who's going to be like, hey, Bill Gates, you're dumb. Yeah. Remember how you're Bill Gates? I disagree with your decisions though. Like, no, that doesn't work for people. They are often like, oh, we're shedding the image of old Microsoft. We need to figure out what to do in the future. Yeah, but Bill Gates then just smothers you with his money and you're dead and he wins. Right. I feel like that's how this goes. Just the stockpile of malaria that he keeps. Right. Yeah. The stockpile of malaria. Yeah. He isn't conquered. He just captures it. He's like, these are the ones the lasers didn't kill. Yeah. And he releases mosquitoes. Yeah. Hands you a laser pointer. He's like, let's see if you're- He's like, a TED talk, he like, release mosquitoes into the- Yeah, yeah. He just does that at board meetings and he's like, I don't know, maybe you'll die, maybe you won't. I have this thing right here. Yeah, he hands you a laser pointer. So, Satya Nadella, right? And they're like, yes. And then he gives everybody the antidote and everything's fine. Yeah. What's scary is how- It's a solid board meeting. I can totally see that. I'm just assuming that that's correct. Look, he's an evil genius. Look, so there's that. There's that whole story. It's a huge story, right? Right. There's a big shift in their language from we're devices and services to we're cloud and mobile, which sounds like nonsense, but it was repeatedly said out loud and sort of out in the world as we did more reporting on it. It was repeatedly said that this marks an actual change. Right. Well, yeah. They're going to go devices and services with Ballmer's line and cloud and mobile is Nadella's line and those are different in some way. But aren't those like- Yeah. I mean, those are pretty easy synonyms for each other. It's like devices and mobile are kind of becoming the same thing. Yeah, but I asked a- Sorry, go on. When I was talking to the person I was talking to, I said, is that like a conflict difference or is that just shades of gray? And I was told, you should really read into it what you want. Okay. And I think that's really meaningful. Fair. I think that it is a difference. I think that devices and services means we're going to make devices and put our services on them. And that was their strategy, right? I think that's why Office isn't on the iPad. I think cloud and mobile, cloud first, mobile first, that's Nadella's line, means we're going to make, we're going to literally move Microsoft software into the cloud and then put it down onto mobile devices. Right. And I think that opens them up to the iPad. I think that opens them up to Android. I think that opens them up to an entire suite of other devices and platforms that they have been trying to leverage into getting people onto Windows. Well, that was the thing that- So here's what's interesting though about that timing then, which is they just bought a hardware company. They just bought a consumer devices company. Yeah. And well, they haven't yet. This happened right before the Nokia purchase finished. Right. So what does that mean then? Well, that's mobile, right? That's mobile. I think they're, I can't imagine they're going to get rid of Windows phone or try and get rid of it. But I think the smart thing, this was, John Gruber wrote a great piece about this this week. And I thought the thing that was most interesting that he said was he quoted the numbers where it was like the raw number of devices that run Windows products is still enormously high. Yeah. But the number, it used to be, like I can just find the number here, but it used to be like there were 90 million devices and Windows ran on 95% of them. And now it's like 240 million devices and Windows stuff runs on 30% of them. And like raw numbers, they're the same and they're big ass numbers. But like there's this huge world that they're not touching now. And this is like, and the place he landed in this piece, which I thought was really smart is instead of saying, you know, we want to be, he just wrote Satya Nadella needs to find Microsoft's new, a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software. Here's my stab at it. Microsoft services sending data to and from every network device in the world. The next ubiquity isn't running on every device. It's talking to every device. And I think that's exactly right. And that's what Google has accomplished, right? Yeah. And I think Microsoft, there's been a lot of conversation about how companies are trying to do the Apple model where they sell you a device, they sell you the software, they sell you a suite of services that run on that. And Microsoft or Apple has 70% margins or whatever insane 40% margins. That's not Google's model, right? Google's model is they make a bunch of software and they have, I think very aggressively use those services in their software to push Windows into third place in terms of market share. And services, right? And I think that has been worked out really well for Google. I think Microsoft needs to come back and say, you know what? Google Docs isn't as good a cloud services office. It just isn't, right? And if you want to run a real business, you need Excel and we're going to put Excel on the cloud for real. And we're going to put it everywhere. And we're going to put it everywhere. Yeah. And that will enable them to start a conversation with a class of customers that they have traditionally always had, but have started poking around because they have iPads now. Yeah. And that's like a big deal. And I think saying you have to make the investment all the way to buy a surface to get Excel is a huge ask now in this market. Well, yeah. I mean, I think what this is sort of an admission of to some extent is like doing what Apple has done is impossible because Apple already did it. Yeah. Right? Like they've built this locked in thing and their market share is big enough, especially in particular places like phones and tablets where nobody else is going to get enough market share to like pull it off. And Apple is fine with not being 90% margin. And the one vendor who has done it in terms of hardware has Samsung has no software chops that I've ever seen. Right. Especially not in the kinds of software that Microsoft sells. Well, and they're not even really trying. Like they're not trying to lock you in the same way that Apple is. Well, they're doing- Like Apple straight up doesn't work if you don't use its products. Like it's- That's true. I just plugged this phone into this computer. Like this is a new computer and I never plug a phone into a computer anymore. I literally plugged it in and charge it and like all kinds of Apple stuff started up. Oh, God. Yeah, yeah. Would you like to use iPhone? It's like, no. Like literally the first time I've ever opened iPhoto on this particular machine is when I plugged this phone. But then they try to put a word document onto your iPhone and everything just catches on fire. Like it just won't work. But then, but so by basically saying like, we're not going to try and do that anymore and we're going to go back to this model of, and it's way more true to like what Microsoft actually is to say, we just want to be on every device. Like we want all of the things that people use to be running our software is what Microsoft originally did. And they just happened to, like Microsoft originally said a new, like it was a computer on every desk and every home. That's why they have a Mac. We already did that. Now it's about getting Microsoft software onto it. And like they got away from that. And the way back into that is to do cloud stuff and to open it back up to a lot of people. I think, and then that, but that's short term. I think the other piece is like, you know, the real answer is computers everywhere, right? Because everything is everywhere. That's where they're right. But software like is running, like putting a computer everywhere doesn't mean anything. It's just awesome software behind it. Right? Right. Like I have that, there's in my office upstairs, I have a really crappy camera that runs Skype. Like really crappy. It's impossible to overestimate how crappy the camera is. But it does, but its functionality trumps how crappy it is, right? It literally is a camera, a webcam with a Tegra 2 processor running Android and running an insanely bad custom Skype UI on it. Yeah. Right? And it just makes Skype calls. It's like somebody took web OS cards and was like, how can I make this in four minutes? And then just shipped it. But it does its job, which is I don't want a computer next to it. I don't need all the complexity of a computer. I literally just need a thing on top of my TV that can make Skype calls. And I have it. Right? But most people have it. But the software is miserable. When most people have it, it's an Xbox. But an Xbox costs $400. This thing costs $120. You paid $120 for that? It's 120 bucks. Seriously? That does the job. That seems really expensive to me. Don't you have that TV at home that just has the webcam that pops up? You just got to get another one of those. So that's another great example, though. So I have a Panasonic plasma television. It's brand new. It's one of the best pictures you can buy. And the software that runs on it is fucking miserable. Just awful. Just the worst. If you work at Panasonic right now and you're a software engineer, you should quit because you're bad at your job. You should go get a different kind of job. You should go be a grumpier. They won't get somewhere else. They should keep their job forever. I'm just saying, have some dignity. Are you the guy who designed the make a video call UI on the Panasonic VT? What do I have? VT-90? VT-80? Sure. All I remember is you bought it and you Instagrammed it, and you said America because you bought it on Cyber Monday and you were very proud of yourself. Whatever. If you designed that UI and that TV, you should never do any more software design in your life. You should feel ashamed. I'm sorry. That's just the way it is. But that's the opportunity for a company like Microsoft, is to start making the software for that. And they tried to do it before. But it's to start saying, there are all these other places for us to go. There are all these other kinds of devices that are going to talk to the internet. And we can be the company that brings it all together. Yeah. Well, and I hope that what they realize and what Satya Nadella does is say, the answer to that is not always Windows. But they have to make Microsoft bigger than Windows because it's not going to work everywhere. So this is the second piece of news. There's a lot to unpack with Nadella. There's a lot to unpack about why Microsoft decided to introduce him by launching a web page with a series of fake interviews. How long do you think it takes them before we get to actually start evaluating what he's doing? What does it take? Like a year? 90 days. 90? Really? Half that? 100 days. You evaluate the president after 100 days. That's like the first 100 days. All right. I mean, yeah. I buy it. So, what? Three and a half months. That's like a cool physical course. And he doesn't even have any wars to fight. Yeah. He's going to be fine. He's got two major wars to fight. He's probably also right now just sitting there playing Flappy Bird. Would it be amazing? Is it on Windows Phone? This person in the office, he sits down at Ballmer's old desk. It's like totally clean and barren. He's like, what do I do now? And slowly pulls an iPad out of his pocket and starts playing Flappy Bird. He's on Secret. I bet he's as bad at it as I am. He's a threat. We never heard sorry about it. I'm not good at Flappy Bird. So, here's the second piece, sort of the flip side of this news, which is Sony today decided they're not going to make Viya PCs anymore. They sold off the Viya business, which is incredible. Yeah. That's an incredible admission of this isn't a viable business for Sony anymore. And Sony has all kinds of... Damn it, John. For those at home playing at home, our director just gave us the worst part. Not to be repeated. I just feel bad. John, please leave. Please stop correcting yourself. You're John Lager Marciano and you're responsible for the Viya joke. I think you should leave right now. Have some dignity. Have some dignity. By the way, iTunes Match has been running on this computer nonstop since the day I bought it. What are you doing? That's a normal thing. It just launched itself to tell me it's still running. I hate iTunes. We don't even need to go there. But so... So wait, so... So, what's... All kidding aside, I hate you iTunes. That's an ugly road for me to go down. So, David, I have a question I asked you earlier. I don't know if you know this still, but does Sony make money on Viya at all? So, I did some research when you asked me. Okay. And the answer is no. Okay. Like they still sell a lot of them. Right. Which is something. But it's not a money making business for Sony. Right. Right. Just like TVs. Right. Sony's been in two businesses for a long time that should be their biggest growth businesses, but have been anchors on their company for a while. Right. And it's computers and it's TVs. And it's funny because the reason they got on computers because they... In the late 90s, everyone was like, convergence. TVs and PCs will be the same thing. Right. And Sony's just been chasing after that and not getting there for 20 years. That's the whole story here. Yeah. Well, but it's really interesting to me. Like Sony's been talking about this one Sony thing for forever, right? And I guess their plan was to make all different products with all the stuff they're really good at making. Right. And they're just kind of bailing at all the things that they aren't doing well. I mean, the things too. Yeah. But it's a platform decision. Well, they've only... Which other ones have they ditched? Ebooks today. They ditched ebooks today? Yeah. Was that just today? That was just today, yeah. That's weird. So they had a lead in Europe, right? They never cracked the American market, but Kindle isn't in Europe or across the world. Sony did really well in Europe. And every time I've met with them, they go to great lengths to remind me that it's super successful everywhere but the US. Yeah. And I just... I don't know. I guess I get it from... It's just US and Canada. Right. Where they're losing here. Right. Why would you keep throwing money into the void of Amazon? Sure. You can't beat them in the US. But I think Sony killing the PC business to me is not in admission of we can't win in this business. I think it's an admission of as a platform, Windows isn't important to the future of Sony. And that to me is... That is the killer. That is... That should be really scary for Microsoft. That's super scary for Microsoft. Because they are one Sony and basically what you make is... Now what you make is computers of different shapes and sizes. Yeah. Whether it's like their weird bad smartwatch or whether it's a TV or whether it's a PS4. They're all computers. Sure. And they're saying... It's like that and Justin Bieber albums are like the two things that Sony makes. That's true. And he's a computer. He is. He does it on Windows apparently. But what they're saying is they don't need the expertise of how to bring up the Windows platform and ship PCs because they're gonna use other kinds of platforms everywhere. And the big bet that they made, and I actually always ask them this, because they've made a big bet on Sony Mobile. Their phones are good. Mobile and cameras are the two things that they... And they're great at it. They're really swinging. And it's like they make tablets. They make Sony Android tablets. They make that weird phablet. The Xperia... Well, there's the... What is it? The... There's the one that they're always drop... They're like pouring water on. Yeah. It's like its main thing that they can do with it. Dear Lord, why can I remember? Wait, the phone? The Z1? It's like the Z1 Mega or something. But then there's the tablet. Oh, right. It's the Xperia tablet. And that's what it's called. And every time I see it, they've just got like a fountain just posing down the screen. I'm like, cool. That's the best part of every Sony show now is like, we have devices. We're just gonna put underwater. You just walk right by. I mean, I liked it because I got to lead a review with a story about my showering habits. So that was good. I mean... Thank you for that. What you don't know about David is that he will take any opportunity to discuss himself in the shower. That's true. I think actually people know that about me. People have probably figured that out about me now. Top Shelf got real weird at the end. I'm so sorry, John. The lost episode. I'm so sorry. That will never be released. Stuff in the shower. That's actually... Stuff in the shower. It's not a bad... Top Shelf shower. When you listen to like a Bluetooth speaker or you play on a tablet. Yeah. Actually, the only problem is that you would have to be in a shower the whole time. I don't see why that's a problem. This is a really bad modern Seinfeld. Yeah. But this is happening to the PC. I mean, Dell had to take itself private because its consumer businesses and PC just like weren't working out. But what's the other one? IBM left years ago. HP. HP is doing whatever it's doing. Yeah. Lenovo is still big. Yeah, Lenovo is growing. I mean, what it sounds like is happening to me and the thing, the big analyst discussion around all this stuff is that Sony... It's not that the PC market isn't big and that there's not opportunity there, but what it's becoming again is like price commoditized. And these Chinese companies like Lenovo are able to make and sell at such huge scale and so cheap that nobody else can compete. And it's like the real money in laptops is in like $350 laptops. And that's like if you can make those with any kind of margins, you can make money. And if you can't, you can't make money in laptops. It's like that seems to be the prevailing wisdom here. And Sony, they're... Well, they were always targeting the super high end. Right. This is the thing. Do we have that photo essay we did of Sony machines? I mean, they're so... This made me so gore-sounded. Sony made some of the most beautiful PCs ever. Oh my God. It's funny that as I've been seeing a lot of stuff about how Apple was willing to let Sony build Mac OS X machines because Steve Jobs loves Sony. Yeah. And it's true. Sony had some of the wildest hardware design of all time. Well, and they tried so many things like the Vi-OP, which is such a ridiculous thing and didn't work. It is still my all time favorite. What happened to the orange keyboard deck? Yeah. It was the second generation one. The first one was real weird. I remember very distinctly, very distinctly the first time I saw Vi-OP, which was at CES. First time we ever got our hands on one. Right. And it came with a Vista. Wow. Vista on it. And we got literally, we got the bits to the Windows 7 beta on an SD card. We got it the same day as the Vi-OP and Paul was like, I am not running Vista. Like immediately put the Windows 7 beta off an SD card. He's like, this is ridiculous. We're not using this. But no, Sony made beautiful PCs. Yeah. They sold them at a huge premium. They're always overpriced. Right. And they sold them at a massive premium and that market is gone. Right. Every PC, seriously, Apple has 90% market share of PCs over $1,000. Wow. That's the number. You can't win that game against Apple. And once you get under that, you're totally in the commodity zone, which is what Google is targeting with Chromebooks, right? Right. So there's like this weird dead middle of the PC market where you've got Google on the bottom saying we're going to come at you with $270,000 Chromebooks, which are all you might need. And you have maybe a tablet or whatever and a PC at work that runs Excel. Yeah. That's what you actually might need over there. And at the top, you have everybody buying a MacBook. Yeah. And somewhere in the middle, there's a business for Lenovo and maybe not Sony and maybe not Dell. Maybe though. Maybe not HP. Like Lenovo sells a lot of $400 laptops. Yeah. What nobody seems to be able to make or sell is like the $700 laptop or the $800 laptop. Like there just doesn't seem to be a market for that. And what's really interesting is like hearing, like watching a lot of companies go into Chromebooks, the two reasons are really obvious. Like Google, it sounds like from companies I've talked to, Google has gone to all of these companies and said, here's how much you're charging for this laptop. The end. Right. There's a ceiling. And that's like that comes from Google where they're saying, if you're going to make a Chromebook, you have to charge this much. And like only Google is allowed to. Really? That's what I've heard. I don't know this for sure. Interesting. But more than one company has told me this. Right. That they're saying like this is what your Chromebooks cost. With the exception of Google's own. The Chromebook Pixel. Yeah. Where they're just like, you know. Well, there's Pixel and then there's the weird Google, the thing that they released today, the weird teleconferencing. Right. Well, that's a totally separate kind of Chromebook. That's an enterprise Chromebook. They're calling it a Chromebox. I know. But they're liars. It runs Chrome. It does. It's basically designed to sit there and run Hangouts, right? Yeah. Yes. And a whole package costs $1,000. Yeah. It's actually enterprise. It's a weird collection of other people's hardware. Yeah. So it's like a, what's it, an Asus or an Acer PC? I think it's Asus. But I can't remember. Let me look. Well, that one says HP on it. Oh. Maybe it is. If you scroll down, there's definitely, there's an Asus logo. I saw some. Yeah, there is an Asus logo. Well, so Asus just released a $179 Chromebox. Yeah. And it's the, yeah. Right. So there's these like commodity weird small form factor PCs that have like i7 chips in them. Which is bonkers. Because it's running Hangouts. Yeah. Google, if you need an i7 chip to run Hangouts. You did it wrong. Yeah, you screwed up. And didn't do a good job. You should feel shame. You should go find the Panasonic guy and John. And you guys should all go to an island and feel shame together. Right. John, I'm sorry. But you have to go to an island now. But John did make one good observation here, which is the controller. No, no. So that's what I'm saying. It's a weird, it's a weird con of this. So just to recap the news. Google today announced, they had an event and said, this is an interesting announcement for business. That's how they invited us. Sean Hollister went, and it's a $1,000 video conferencing kit for businesses that basically is built on the back of Hangouts. So it's this small form factor Chromebox. It is a remote. That remote is exactly the Boxee Box remote. Yes. I think it has a different number of buttons. It has one extra button on the front. Chris and I had a weird argument about this. It's the same remote. They just like retooled it and added a button. It's a Parrot makes that speaker phone. It's a Bluetooth speaker phone and a Logitech camera. Oh, it's a Jabra speaker phone. Oh, Jabra speaker phone. Yeah, and a Logitech. So it's just this weird collection of other people's hardware that anybody could put together. But it all comes in one box. You plug it together, and you need video conference over Hangouts for $250 a year in support costs. And it's called Chromebox for Meetings, which is my favorite Wild Troll on the nose name ever. I don't really. It's just like, what is that? It's a Chromebox for Meetings. I think there's a class of startups and small businesses that are getting one step bigger. And our business is among them, and they need a new breed of conferencing applications that maybe 10 years ago, Microsoft just owned that entire market, and Blackberry owned a huge chunk of that market. And Google realized that it got a piece of it with Hangouts, and they're trying to bet on it and edge their way back into Microsoft's territory. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a place for this. It's really easy in companies that live on Gmail, which is more and more of these little startups that are growing. This just makes a ton of sense. It's really easy. There's the fastest way for us to do conference calls because we're all on Gmail all the time is just Hangouts. Right. But I don't know why I want. I have weird Hangouts problems. I could just use my computer. The Hangouts UI, I want there to be a control panel somewhere where it just tells me what the hell is going on with Hangouts. And how to put pirate hats and mustaches on yourself. That is always there. I use it all the time, and there's just a weirdness to it. Hangouts is you push the button and then a Hangout has to come up. You push the button and then a Hangout happens, and I'm never quite sure who can see what or why or what I'm sharing. It's happening in this browser, but there's no interface. There's no settings. I don't know. It's just weird to me. It's like now a Hangout is happening. Also, I have like 50 Google accounts, and managing that is impossible. Oh, it's a disaster. Yeah. And so Hangouts makes no sense to me. It could be worse. It could be 50 Hotmail accounts. Right. All I really want is for Google to make a native Mac Hangouts app. Instead of the weird Chrome extension that takes over the whole screen for no reason. Why is this happening? Yeah, I don't know. We'll never understand. Just do the right thing, Google. Yeah. Just stop blowing it. Well, it's like they have a Hangouts app on the phone. It's great. True. It works well. Hold on. Let me finish this bio point. Google goes to these companies and says, you can make a Chromebook or a Chromebox, and it's going to cost this much. And then what they can also do is they don't charge for the license. And it's like, you know how you spike your margins is don't pay for a Windows license. Right. And it's like, that's done. And they can charge $250 for it, and people like it, and it has good battery life. And that's going to be a hard- I think the next generation of Chromebooks is the one that will be killer. I agree. I mean, I still- This generation is very enticing. Nobody's made a great one yet. Yeah. And I've like- I think HP, Edge Close, but then they kept on lighting on fire. Yeah. So that's- This Toshiba one they announced, the CES, seems pretty nice. Is that one just out, or Lenovo just came out with one? Lenovo just- One of them just started shipping. Yeah, they're all, yeah. Can it run YouTube? It's all- We should, you know, reviews editor should do a review. Oh, who is that? I don't know. I'll find that person. Who runs most reviews? Is it Ross? Is it- I think it's Ross. I do. Ross, get on that. I doubt it. Super annoying dude that everybody hates. He sounds like a real asshole. I never liked him. All right. So that's the bio. I mean, look, it's sad. I think Sony needs to refocus. I think they're a TV business. Well, so- The only side- You say refocus when it's TVs and tablets and smartphones and music and movies and PlayStation. But those are all the same thing. Yes. Right? What Sony is ultimately is an entertainment company. That ad that they started running a couple weeks ago and they ran at Super Bowl, where like, we just want you to experience feelings, which is basically every ad now. You should feel feelings. Every ad at the Super Bowl is like, you feel feelings so deep, State Farm. And it's like, what the- What just happened? I got State Farm like 12 times. But Sony fundamentally is an entertainment company. Yes. And this whole diversion into PCs was always weird for them because PCs are like commodity enterprise products. I don't know that I agree with that. I mean, the other side of Sony is they're a huge manufacturer that has tons of partners all across the world. And it makes sense that they would take all this stuff that they make already and just stick it together, put a logo on it and ship it. Like they make this stuff for other companies. But Sony doesn't make motherboards and Intel chips and graphics cards. I mean, I guess it makes more sense for them to make things like cameras because all that stuff they do make. And maybe that's what we're seeing here. I don't know that they're just an entertainment company. But that's like... But think about it. When you say cameras, they make the whole stack. Here's Justin Bieber dancing. Here's a Sony image sensor and a lens looking at Justin Bieber dancing. I was like, I should have figured out where Justin Bieber fit into this. Yeah, but he's here. Sony owns this. This represents Bieber. This represents a camera. Here's Sony broadcast technology doing stuff. Then here's a PS4 receiving it plugged into a Sony TV that's showing it to you. So when you watch Taylor Swift... That's why they're not... Here you are sitting on your couch holding a Sony phone, doing a second screen thing. That's the Sony story. That's why even though Sony isn't making money off TVs either, that's why I don't think Sony is ever gonna get rid of TV. They will never get rid of that. Because it's that same... They have that whole stack. And PCs, I guess, were just sort of this thing over here that they also did that didn't have anything to do with the rest of the business. I think it's why Vizio tried to make a PC. You know, they still make two of them. But they wanted to play that game of... Everything's a screen that shows you entertainment. Right. Right? And here are all these screen sizes. We should make them all. And I think Sony made them all and they realized that the PC business for them was a screen size that demanded the most investment, was the most competitive and cutthroat, and had the lowest margins. And I don't think he... In that place, I don't think he wanted to compete against Samsung and Acer. Well, I think tablets are the other one that that describes. And Sony is not even trying that hard to compete in tablets either. Yeah, but that's the platform that... This is what I'm saying about Windows, right? Sony, they made half a Windows convertible. I was gonna say half a tablet, but it's... They made Windows tablets and that hasn't worked. That platform does not take it off on tablets. Like there's a few very happy corporate executives who have Surface Pros. That's it. And then there's everybody else. And I think Android tablets, they're the ones that still have the chance. And so I think Sony has to stay right there. If you're gonna make Android phones, you might as well make Android tablets. And their phones are good and people like them. And in Europe in particular, they're selling well. Right. So I think Sony... This is like the Sony story is when I say refocus, it's decide what platforms as computers are important to you and what your story is of how you get this guy. Justin Bieber. How you get the Biebs to people is effectively... You taught him how to dance, didn't you? I did. Hey, do a thing with Rihanna, it'll be cool. What? It's the Justin Bieber story. So what happens to VAIO now? They're selling to some Japanese company. Are they gonna... Are there gonna be VAIOs? They're gonna make them for Japan, I think, is the thing. That just seems weird. Like this business is... They're clearly getting rid of it. Yeah, but if you're not Sony, if you're running VAIO as its own business, you can do all kinds of stuff too. I mean, you can make decisions that Sony would never make. You can make the business smaller, you can start something around the world. You can... I don't know, you can do stuff. Yeah, you can probably make money, but that's kind of sad. Like Sony made good computers for a long time. I mean, they can still make good hardware. It's just... Yeah, they have a keyboard and a hinge. There's a lot of secrets happening to me right now. A lot of secrets. You wanna talk about secrets? Let's talk about secrets. I mean, I will say that this is one of the worst. Oh, God. Friend number 35 joined. I wonder who it is. So here's this app secret. Do you guys know about this? We're not gonna write about it yet, because I don't know what the story is, unless you're a gigantic tech insider nerd. There's an app called Secret. You suck at Flappy Bird and everybody knows it and they're talking about it right now. We're gonna talk about Flappy Bird in a second. That was you, wasn't it? It was not me. Okay. Well, my secrets are awful because I have no secrets. Like literally this app and like two cups of bourbon are gonna be a disaster for me, because everyone will know who I am. I'm an open book. The only... What do you wanna know? The only two... So I haven't used secrets, but there are two about me and they're both just you taking pictures of me and then saying weird things. I don't think you're doing this right. I'm not. So there's an app called Secret. You download it. It does some weird sketchy privacy stuff where it takes your entire contact list, all the email addresses, all the phone numbers you have, creates a network that you cannot access. Can I just say, by the way, how are we okay with that? We're not. Like we yell at every company that does it and then we're like, oh, you wanna use it for secrets? Okay, that's totally fine. Have all my information. I did it though. I know. Everybody's doing it. Anyway, and then... The thing that seems to be is like the whole tech industry is using secrets. So we're... And the people who care about it... Here's what we have on Secret. We have their nice little video about how... Share a thought. Share a thought is there. And it's like, sometimes I'm sad or like, today I'm happy or like, I kissed my mother and it was the best feeling that I've ever had. Like not like that. You sick bastard. I'm about to tell jokes on the internet. A super weird... That's not super weird. Like I hugged my mom and it felt cool. Like that's great, you know? Nope. It's still not getting better. This is no... I mean, I guess like put that into Secret, nobody knows you and you'll be fine. All right, let's do it right now. I hugged my mother and it felt cool. I cannot wait to like this so privately. That's just no... But like, I mean, I guess it's worse when you put it in a secret because that sounds like a secret. There, done. I posted a secret. Wait, wait, refresh. All right, so it's app and you type in thoughts, you do this stuff. And all that's happening right now is that the first wave of adopters are in this app. So it's all people in the valley and tech journalists. And it is the cattiest place on earth. And it's super entertaining right now. I will say this app has sort of a terrible UI. It's not wonderful. And it is so annoying with push notifications. I just got one out. It told me my 40th friend had signed up. Thank you. That's not a fact I need to know. Certainly not a fact that should interrupt. I don't care if I know that information. It's not useful. There's no reason I need to know. It doesn't matter. Just shut up. It's actually way better if I don't know that only 40 of my friends are on it because I could guess which 40 and then narrow it way down to who's saying these terrible things about how they hate their mother and it felt really cool. I hugged my mom and it felt cool. That's a secret. A secret is teaching me that everyone else hates the same people and things as me. Which seems to be like Sam Biddle. That's how I know who uses this is everybody either loves or hates Sam Biddle. Maybe you should check your privilege instead of an app. So look, this is the thing that's gonna... I hate dudes who never do their legs chicken legs. Oh, I just got that. Clearly we have the same friends. I'm just assuming that was directed at Neil. I get an inexplicable craving for CES pizza. Yeah. I hate that person. This is a wave. There's gonna be like weird, bad, mainstream, like CNN, like the app all of Silicon Valley is secreting about. Right. That's gonna be a headline. Whispers is gonna be the big thing. But there's Secret and there's Whisper. Aren't they the same thing essentially? I don't know. I don't know. Wait, I thought it was the same thing. Look, I don't have any... If I did know, I wouldn't tell you. As best I can tell. Well, so I guess Whisper is... By the way, telling people you're posting a secret I think is probably not the smartest move. Yeah, that's fair. So I think Whisper's thing is it's... Whisper's thing is it's public but it's anonymous. Whisper is like Post Secret. You remember Post Secret? Yeah. Where it was like you would send in this postcard and nobody knew who it was from, but it was like everybody could see it. And Whisper is kind of the same way. Whereas I guess Secret is more like designed to be around your friends, which is something. But like, man, these whispers are super weird. This color is called cash. I'm using it. No, but this is... Grandma gave me Taco Bell hot sauce with my fish sticks. I was like WTF until I tried it. Incredible. Bitch knows her shit. Whisper.com. Okay, so here's the thing. People are starting to post like weird rumors on Secret and like the Wall Street Journal covered one today. Did it really? Yeah, it was about the Evernote one. They debunked that one. Oh, okay. Which is the saddest moment. The saddest debunk ever. Let's back up. So there was a secret that came out that was like Evernote is about to get acquired. And enough people thought it was real that the Wall Street Journal had to acknowledge the Secret. Well, the guy said he was like, I work at Evernote and we're about to be acquired was like the text of the thing. And yeah, and everybody like, and I guess enough people freaked out. The eight people on Secret freaked out. But Wall Street Journal's like had to acknowledge this. And that was it. It's just, there's... Valleybag wrote a story about it today. There's this return of, you know, the internet is the Wild West with like Snapchat and Secret and Whisper and all these apps that make you anonymous and untraceable. Although I did just give my entire contact list to these people. And we have been complaining about the NSA and metadata and how you can like definitely figure out who's who very fast. I mean, Secret knows who I am. Someone's going to break... Someone's going to hack Secret. It also, it keeps track of which ones you posted, what comments you did. Like it's going to dox everybody at some point. Yeah, I mean, and like, it's just, it's out there. And this is like probably way easier to pin to you than something like Snapchat. Because Snapchat at least theoretically disappears. So you have to like dig harder to find the data. Secret is all out there. It's just a matter of like, here's this and here's this and like, let's shove them together. And then thank God no one posts anything of value on this thing. Yeah, I think it's interesting. I think that this like rush to go play with an app called Secret is fun. But I was more conceptually, the value of secrets is eventually telling them to someone and like the danger of maybe somebody finding out. And this has none of that. Right. I mean, but I think there's, there's certainly something to the idea of like, there's something to the idea of like having to get something off your chest, but not having to not telling anybody who's dangerous. So you're going to tell your friends list an app called Secret. Yeah, that's perfect. So you have, you have passive aggressive issues with your friends. So you're going to post it anonymously on Secret hoping that they may or may not see it. Okay. Sounds great. I'll see the promise profitable. Also, like if you spend enough time, the control room hates the verge cast. You could definitely figure out like three quarters of these. Yeah. Just got doxxed. It was Billy Disney, everybody. I wonder who that was. Yeah. You see, you don't know. It's anonymous. I mean, I have a number of ideas. I mean, it's, it's a small, there's so many, so many people back there. Oh, this could be a reader just trolling us. Right. All right. Now I'm playing Flappy Bird. Just moving on to other apps that I'm now obsessed with, which is, no, you know what I'm obsessed with is threes. Have you played this game? I have not played this. It's crazy. It's like, I tried looking for in the app store. There's a lot of, I will say our commenters were very confused about why we covered threes. Really? Yeah. They're like, why, why is this on here? You must be getting, this must be an ad. Well, anytime we like anything, it's an ad. Right. That's just true. Everybody should know. Even when we hate it, we're fanboys for the other thing. Right. When we hate it, it's an ad for somebody else. Oh, I found it. Threes. Whether we say it or not. Well, when I hate things, I do my best work. That's true, actually. That's a fact. Oh, God, this game sucks. All right. I'm buying this. This is, I've played like four rounds of Flappy Bird. I got zero, zero, zero, and one, and then felt so good about getting one that I quit, and I have no desire to ever play again. I just got my high score during the show. Four. Nice. I got a four. Well done. I know. I'm very proud of you. I can't do it again. It's very exciting. No, this, I genuinely don't understand why a game like this is so popular. Flappy Bird or threes? Flappy Bird. Threes is like, I think threes is popular for the same reason that letterpress is popular. There are people who like these sort of slightly intelligent requiring games. Right. But like, this is basically just a worse, annoyingly difficult version of Jetpack Joyride. You think so? Like, what if Jetpack Joyride were way... It's funny because we did a story on this, and he's making $50,000 a day on this game. I know. He's making crazy amounts of money. Oh, I got two. Oh, shit. Oh, man. Excuse me. All right. I'm doing this. I'm doing this. It's very exciting. I've got my threes, but now I've got to play Flappy Bird. Here's why this game is popular, because most people go through the day and they accomplish nothing. They wake up and they don't do anything hard. At least I don't. Right. There's no challenge in their lives. Just float through life hoping to feel the thrill of victory. And then they don't ever again. This game makes you work for it for two seconds, and then you feel it. You're like, I got one. It's just unfair. You're like, I got one, everybody. I'm out of here. So I'm leaving this dead-end job. I got one. Like, spike the phone. Screw this. Sure. I'll buy it. I'm done using Excel today. I'm going to break my phone playing this game. What else do you have? No, I think my theory, so this is like, my roommate played, was unemployed for a while and played Dark Souls for like 300 hours. That is the hardest game. See, this is the thing. I think this is the thing with people. He, I asked him why he liked this game and he was like, I have no idea how to play it. It's so hard. All I do is die. And I was like, that, you didn't answer my question yet. This is DayZ, right? Yeah. So I was just going to say, it's the same kind of thing. We're like, I think there's this weird, we all have this weird, like, masochistic streak where we like to die 10,000 times and then the one time we don't die, even when we're not successful, like it's not a victory. It's like, it's a don't die. Yeah. We feel victory. This is not a new trend. I achieve victory over death every single day of my life. Wake up and not dead. This is great. Yeah. But this is interesting game for everyone. Like, Super Meat Boy was another one. Like, you die 3,000 times each level. I did play that game a lot. And they show you every death, the replay, once you accomplish it. Goals and Goblins back in the day. Like, people just love super hard games. That's just never going to go away. I will never understand that. I just don't get it. What games do you play? I play mostly... You play games you win right away? Yeah. Yeah. You play draw... It takes more than five minutes to win. Draw a line in the game. But you cut the rope all day. Just all day. Oh, gosh. It's the opposite of draw a line. All right. But like, so, Daisy, anyone else actually played this game? No, I watched the live stream yesterday. That was remarkable. I mean, I will say that I'm... I have a theory. Okay. The theory is that there are two people inside of TC Sonic. Okay. One of them runs our news day to day. That's cool. All right. The other one of them is a murderer who uses Twitter. Question. Why are these different? I'm just confident that they're different. I don't think they are. I really think that's the same aggressive murderous drive to hit news. I'm very worried about it. That's true. But I watched the stream. I mean, they found Sean. Sean was being attacked. Did you catch the last 15 minutes? I did not catch the last 15 minutes. See, here's what happened. It was described to me. This is everything you can do in the game, and I'm sorry. This is really, really bad. I'm sorry. This is real. So they spent an hour and 15 minutes looking for Sean Hollister, Addy and TC. They found him. They had a friend who was a plant. He was supposed to kill Sean at first sight, but that didn't work out because they lost him. But they found him. They had Sean go on our roof and said there were people coming. Please be careful and keep a lookout. TC gets behind Sean, handcuffs him, force feeds him poison, puts a burlap sack over his head, at which point Sean falls off a ledge. Wow. But somehow... Survives. Survives and it gets worse. He survives, handcuffs come off. So TC and Addy are running down because they can't just jump off with him. And then Sean is nowhere to be found. And all of a sudden someone starts shooting at them, but missed. So TC got behind him and hacked him up with an axe. At which point Addy goes, well, we're almost done anyway, and shoots TC with a shotgun. TC is fairly alive, shoots Addy in the head, and they both bleed to death. This is the end of our stream yesterday. God, that's dark. It's dark. I mean, I always knew there was something between those two. That doesn't... No, no. That real... Stitious co-murder. That's how every great love story ends, I don't know. That was my wedding vows. One day we'll both shoot each other. It's like a Romeo and Juliet suggestion. Daisy is the most sadistic game though. One day we'll both hunt down Sean Hollister and shoot each other. Aww. We're holding hands. You're the best. Follocking in a field as it is. With a knife behind each... TC's kind of scary. Yes. Yes, yes, okay, we didn't explain it easy, but essentially it's a $40 game that is broken, that is not finished. You pay to just suffer through this game where you wake up with no food, you're hungry, you have no items, you have no clothes, and you somehow have to survive. If you die, you lose everything, you just do it again. There is no point. This is the most sadistic or masochistic game you can imagine. I mean, it seems... But the thing is that it's also a really bad game, right? And people have paid a lot of money for this. It sounds like it. It's alpha. It's not even finished. It's half an idea. And people are paying $30 just to be part of this broken idea as they build it in real time. And it's made a lot of money doing it. Yeah. It's kind of a great idea. Yeah, it's wonderful. Is it just because you can do anything? Kind of. I mean, it's like... What's the promise that you can do anything as soon as they finish building it? In a weird way, is the appeal the same as like Minecraft, where it's like the game doesn't exist yet and you just sort of make it as you go and figure it out? Minecraft was a more complete idea. And like the part of Minecraft where it was broken and this broken was free. And then once it got to a certain level, like, okay, now it's beta or whatever, well, you can pay. This was like, we have an idea. We're kind of building it. This is real time Kickstarter. Like, give us all your money. Yes. And this game's going to be awful, but maybe it'll be good. And you'll love it even while it's awesome. And everyone loves the faults. And like it gets fixed every now and then. Kind of does it. Things break more. Still, it's a success. No game like this has existed. They do now. Minecraft Rust is kind of like between Daisy and Minecraft. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. They both have zombie. You both die. There's zombie hordes in both. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's what makes the game successful. Real open world. Yeah. The sense of adventure and freedom. And also murderers. I will say I've played Dead Rising a lot for exactly those reasons. I'm really bad at video games. I'm really bad at playing video games. I buy them all. Really? Just nonstop buy them all. And then they sit. They're just stacked up on a shelf. Most of them still in plastic. I have a lot of games and I find myself just playing a mix of FIFA and Grand Theft Auto. I'm replaying Grand Theft Auto for the 47th time right now. Wait, which one? Out of control 5. Yeah. I still have it. I can't stop playing that. It's outrageous. I own that one. I sit in my house. It's great. Own a lot of stuff. If you like my move, I beat it enough times now that the actual game isn't that fun. So I just go and I try to get five stars and then kill as many cops as possible until I die. Which is the whole point of Grand Theft Auto. It's the go to move. Yeah. There needs to be a mode in Grand Theft Auto where you're playing it, but while you're playing it, you're doing things that are productive. You're mining bitcoins. Yeah. Things that married people have to do. Because that's like, man, if I was playing Grand Theft Auto, but also shopping in the room and board catalog, that would really solve a lot of problems for me. So you take a rock, I want that. That's like, and then it just ships. That's what there is to it. It just adds it to your overstock.com account. Yeah, exactly. It's like, man, we really need new chairs for our dining table. Let me go into Grand Theft Auto. That would be the best. You can rob a crate and barrel and they're like, oh, you must want all this. Straight up. Like, the other day I was making storage units for our closet, doing husbandry stuff. It'd be great if I was doing that in Grand Theft Auto. And they just automatically make you a Pinterest board of all the things that you decide you want. Here's my thought. Let me just put it out there. Grand Theft Auto container store. I would play that game. Just make it happen. I would absolutely play that game. You just go and you're wandering around, and you're like, man, these shells look really great. And then a hooker shows up and you kill her. Let's just add a little interest to it. Clearly, killing hookers. Do you want to play DayZ as well? I'm sorry. I'm sorry, everyone. Most especially my wife and the creators of Grand Theft Auto, who I hope never, ever get to review. I was going to say they should be. They'd be friends. I don't think that'd be cool. Is there anything else? What else is there? Can we talk about Facebook Paper? Kinda. I guess. Yeah. We should talk about paper. We should talk about Sochi, because whatever is happening in Sochi is crazy. But let's talk about paper. Sure. Go ahead. You go. You talk about it. I'm just going to sit here. I mean, I'm curious what you guys think. I've been using it a lot. I download. Tell the people what it is. I don't use Facebook very much. So Facebook Paper is a new app. It just came out this week. And it's ostensibly a news reading app. So it's really beautiful. It's the best design I've ever seen from Facebook. And it's all for news. So the first stream you have is your Facebook feed. And then you can pick headlines. And they have a bunch of goofy names for all the different sections. But you basically build your own little newspaper. And they have a bunch of cool animations and a bunch of different ways of thinking about how you move in and out of an app that I really like. But it's a news app. Fundamentally, it's a news reading app. And one of the things that you can read is your Facebook. Not entirely real time either. It doesn't have the breaking news. It's like, oh, well, I don't know a lot about Home and Garden, but I can read this. It's grabbing from Facebook feeds. So it's relying on, I think they picked 40 publishers. Is that right? I forget. But they have 40 publishers, and they're like, here are their Facebook feeds, essentially. And that's slow by nature, A. It's getting there. It's incomplete. But it's also, I guess their idea is that they want people to break news on Facebook, I guess. But that doesn't happen. I feel like they should have some Facebook app. Right. I mean, so I used, I mean, I will say some of these animations are great. Yeah, I mean, it's a gorgeous app. It does this thing, like here's a virgin story. And when you can flip it open, it's like a brochure. Yeah, it's really nice. That's cool. I will say, I used Cover Feed. On my Android phones, I always have Facebook Home, which is insane. I think I'm the only person who likes it. But I only have it not for the launcher, but for the home screen. Because I love just looking at my phone. It's a good looking lock screen. Standing there and just blasting through photos. Did you unfriend like 80 people after installing it? Because that was my first impulse. Oh, I said 80 people. I muted them from the list. But so yeah, it's just that way. You don't have to deal with the confrontation of the unfriend. Yeah, I understand. It's rough. They'll come after you. It's weird when you discover old high school girlfriends. Which I'm just assuming is all of your Facebook friends. Why would you unfriend that? Don't you want to know what they're up to? I know what they're up to. They're raising adorable children. That's cool. That's great. Sure. It's great for your children. I mean, I'm happy that we spend our time together. Right. That's cool. Please don't be on my lock screen anymore. This is the thing. I think paper is a gorgeous app. I just can't use Facebook because I don't know what to do with it. I don't care about the feeds. Yeah, I don't really use Facebook anymore. I use Facebook for planning events. Yes. Accepting event invites. That's it. People who have birthday parties always seem to plan them on Facebook. Yeah, because that's where the people are. Right. That's where you use Facebook Messenger a lot. I think of my birthday party every year for me. My birthday party is an opportunity to talk to my high school girlfriends and invite them to my birthday party. Bring your children, I said. So it's just you and 100 ex-girlfriends in a room together. That's the best. I like it. Yeah. Hey, how's it going? Speaking of reasons to apologize to your wife. Another year older. Yeah. Hey, didn't work out. Want to see my secrets? I'm going to sit here and use this app. You guys can watch. No, I think a lot of people use Facebook. And I think paper, I think Facebook, the Facebook app on a phone is so, it's weird because this app is complicated in a wildly different way. Yeah. It's complicated in like a UI way, but much more simplified in the sense that you're just like blasting through Facebook one screen at a time. Right. And I think that's really cool. I think that's really interesting. Yeah. The regular Facebook app is so, it's simpler in like idea. You open it up and like Facebook is there and you scroll. Well, and it's so ingrained at this point. Like people know how to use Facebook that way. People have been using Facebook that way for a long time now. And this is like a totally different way of thinking about Facebook. But the thing that I'm, the thing that I have to keep reminding myself of, and I keep asking people and people seem to really like this app, is that I think it like for people like us, it makes no sense. Like I spend all of my time reading the news and by the time I get to paper, it's like, oh, I've seen every story in here. At least for techies. But most people, it's like, it's just a great, like there's no way, there's no better looking way I've ever seen to like get a bunch of news in three minutes, like waiting in line somewhere. Right. And that's what most people want. That's what Facebook mostly is for, I think, is these sort of just check-ins. And it used to be with people and now it's with news. And I think that's like, Facebook sees itself that way, I think. Where it's like your friend group is now your access to all this other stuff. So I have this theory about Facebook. Okay. And maybe it's right and maybe it's wrong, but here's my theory about Facebook. When Facebook started off as about people, when it was a bunch of like 20 something people partying all the time, and that was really exciting. Right. So Facebook could just be about people and that would power growth forever. Sure. Right. Because it's a bunch of young people. I mean, it worked. Right. They got a billion people that way. Right. Spring break on Facebook was a phenomenon that I experienced for like four years. It was the best. With your high school girlfriend. With all of them. All 100 of them at once. Right. It was really weird. We did a lot of keg stands and then posted about them on Facebook. Right. Now Facebook's audience is much, much older and the things they are doing are no longer as inherently exciting or naked. And that's real. And I think now Facebook has to find other things to show people because the story, like old people complaining is not exciting. Like Grand Theft Auto Container Store is like a real phenomenon in my life. And I don't want to talk about it on Facebook. So you go from like naked keg stands to like, ow my feet hurt and I'm at the container store. Yeah, exactly. That's not nearly as interesting. Yeah. I'm friends with a bunch of like people, like my parents' friends on Facebook. They want to be friends with me and like, they're like, these kids today. I'm like, why am I looking at Facebook? And I think Facebook has to shift what it's showing people from just what was inherently exciting and like titillating to other stuff. Well, so is this, I mean, this is sort of the other side of that same problem that Facebook is. Everybody says about Facebook, which is that young people don't use Facebook. They're not using it. They're gone. So that content, that constant flow of like wild bad ideas, which is exciting and like keeps things exciting is gone. So you're saying instead of Facebook, like trying to get teens back, they're just owning that teens don't use Facebook anymore. I hate teens. I hate saying that for, not teens, teens, you're cool. I like you. The, you know, I'll put that on secret. I love teens. They're cool. But the... I completely lost my train of thought here. But what they're saying is like, that they're just not, they just don't care anymore. I'm inventing secret doxes. Another thing? Like secret RLRTs. I think people might have already done that by now. This is cool. Dude, this is just, this is great. Yeah. Teens. Yeah, it's like how do you... No, but I think if Facebook is smart or this, I don't know if it's smart or not, but this seems like an admission to me from Facebook being like, hey, turns out... By the way, my phone just auto corrected teens to trends with a Z. That's perfect. I'm doing something wrong. We have a coworker who somehow his girlfriend changed, ha ha ha, to auto correct to, I like to poop. So every now and then I'll get a text, I like to poop. It's like, that's nice. This is the worst. We should probably end this first cast. Yes. I mean, look, I think paper is really interesting. I think Facebook trying to re-decide what it is, make new decisions about how it exists become... And they're turning into the new AOL, right? They're turning into the new... God, that's a scary thought. Default destination for a million people on the internet. I've always said, I think Facebook for a lot of people is the internet. Yeah, right. Facebook and Google, you can make a decision, like which one of these things is the internet for people. I think Google and the whole Google Plus thing was the fear that Facebook would become the internet for people. I think that's where our parents are gonna live in the internet. Well, but isn't the... I think for a whole new generation of people, it is things like Snapchat and Whisperer and all these other social networks that come and go in a heartbeat because you don't want to preserve this stuff. Right. The lesson of Facebook has been learned. But also, is there a desire for that single unified avatar? You control your identity somewhere. That's what I think Facebook did that nobody gets that Facebook did. I think what Facebook did is build this friend group. Facebook's been around for 10 years. They just celebrated their 10th anniversary with a bunch of weird stuff. But the thing they've done in those 10 years more than build Facebook.com is they've... All of my friends are on Facebook. All of them. Every single one. And except for Sam Thonis, who is not on Facebook because he's the worst. No, there's a bunch of people here who are on Facebook. I hate all of them. None of them are my friends. But no, but what they've done is now... Facebook now has this crazy leverage with that group to build that into anything. And if they're like... They did Messenger and they were like, hey, we built an IM app. And you know what it already includes? Is all of your friends. That's a huge victory. And their real names and their pictures so you don't... Right. And they can do that in... And I think that's a huge part of Instagram is building that back into Facebook where they're now connected that way is huge. Because I don't use Facebook for blogging, but I will use it for authenticators because... Yeah, absolutely....great, fun, easier than putting a password in. Really? Yeah. No. I don't want to connect to Google. I have real shit on Google. Facebook, I have nothing. What's your real... I mean, it's like they're not going to get my Gmail, right? No. But like if I... The last thing I want any app to do is post for me on my behalf on Facebook and they all want to do it. No, you see... No, see, I don't... You said privacy to only you. That's like a... And then they don't do it. Yeah, I don't think they... I have yet to have an app do that in a long time. Same. Everyone... Actually, that's not true. I had one, I can't remember what it was. I had one do it and I just instantly was like, this is a terrible app and never use it again. So good job that app. Interesting. But I think... I agree. And I use... What was it? Rdio. And signing into Rdio with Facebook, it like instantly found all of my friends and was recommending them based on people that are on Facebook. And that's... Nobody else has that and compete with Facebook along that line. So as long as Facebook has that and nobody else does, they have this huge ingrained advantage anywhere they want to go. Right. And they can go a million different places and they seem committed to doing that. And like with design, like what they had in paper, if they apply that to other things, I think it's super interesting. Here's the problem. Paper is only in iOS. They left 50% of the markets, not theirs. Right. And they have to figure that. I mean, like, you know, they'll get there. But at least they've proven like there's the chops are there and they're willing to think about it in different ways. Right. And the people who built it are like all ex Apple employees, right? Yeah. So that's, I mean, a bunch... So a lot of interesting ideas, but I think Facebook has to prove to a next generation of people... Why they should use Facebook. Why they should use Facebook. Yeah. And why having that network behind them is interesting and useful. Right. And I think they're doing a fine job of it, but I think that piece of Facebook where they were going to become the default communication network for everybody is gone. Yeah. Oh, I agree. Because I just don't use Facebook to communicate with people. I mean, people do want to use Facebook with me. I'm like, you're going to say something weird. That's like literally what I think. It's like someone's going to ask me for something or say something weird or ask me for something weird. Fair enough. I use Facebook Messenger all the time. I love it. What? It's so good. The app on iOS is fantastic. It's everywhere. And it's like Hangouts on iOS is just a disastrous piece of a disaster. It's awful. Right. And I hate it. Why is Messenger... And Facebook Messenger is great. Really? Yeah. It's real weird. It's great. It's super fast. It has the stickers. Those are fun. No, no. It's great. No, stickers are awful. But it's basically it's like a fun, easy app that all my friends already use. It's like if all my friends use WhatsApp, I'd rather use that, but they don't. And they all use Facebook. So you're saying you're friends with olds. Mm-hmm. Friends with olds. It's all your ex-girlfriends and your parents' friends. That's... Those are my Facebook friends. Yeah. I just scraped your Facebook one day and friended all of them. You can have them. Have fun. Your ex-girlfriends. So should we talk about Sochi? Wow. I mean, there's some weird stuff. Briefly. There's a media story here. That's really what this is for me right now. So as far... So Winter Olympics are happening in Sochi, Russia. Starting like tomorrow or something. Something like that. Is it soon? Yeah. I think it's soon. And all the usual Olympic stories are there. NBC is going to tape delay it, which is weird. But they're committed to doing it. But then there's this weird second class of strange stories about Russia. So the first one, which I thought was interesting, is that Sochi is actually a beach town. Yeah. For most of the year. Somebody pointed out to me that it's the same distance from the equator as Toronto. But I don't think of Toronto as a beach town. Sochi is definitely a beach town. Yeah, wait. Was that supposed to prove that it's a beach town? I have no idea. No, they were like, but it's... Toronto's cold. And I was like, yeah, but it's like 45 degrees. Toronto's not near an ocean. Yeah, whatever. Whatever. There's like a lake over there or something. Darn it. Lake Canada. You know? It's good. Lake Canada. Yeah, the Canadian lake system. I've been there. It's great. It's nice. Very clean. I don't know. It's just super polite lakes. Canada. They're all starting a band together. Yeah, so anyway, so there are mountains about an hour away. That's where they're actually holding most of the Winter Olympic stuff. But all sorts of other crazy stuff is happening. Like somebody saying, say, Sean White pulled out of the slope style snowboard event because the snow isn't ready. The tracks aren't ready. And then journalists are getting the social right now. Well, he hurt himself practicing because they hadn't finished setting it up and it wasn't ready. So he busted his knee or something. Getting ready. So there's that. And then there's all these journalists are descending there. And they're tweeting pictures of disaster infrastructure. The double toilet, man. The double toilet. The double toilet is the greatest cultural thing. There's rubble in hotel lobbies. That is insane. And so the interesting piece here is that NBC will presumably not report on this because their interest is in presenting the Olympics as this happy. Right, they're supposed to be a spectacle. But wait, at the same time though, NBC is the one that did this hacking story. We'll get to that in a second. But I don't think they're censoring themselves for that reason. So we'll see. But it just seems like every Olympics is a nightmare of corruption and stuff. Oh, absolutely. Yes. And then this one is in particular it's being exposed because of social media. That's what's happening. That and also the exorbitant stuff. It's like $51 billion is the estimated quote for all this. And the fact it's not ready. Well, but it's also the conditions seem uniquely awful for the wrong people. It's always corruption. There's always issues. But those are always behind the scenes. But when you walk in and see a sign that says don't drink the water or don't put the water on your face, it'll kill you. Yes. It's like that's a lot more straight in your face literally than it normally is. And so I think it's like was it South Africa the last one? Where's the last Olympics? I confuse the Olympics and the World Cup. Wait, the last Olympics. Where's the last Summer Olympics? Everywhere. It was two years ago. It was London. Yeah. So there's like I'm sure there was all kinds of stuff going on in London. But like ultimately you're in London, which is like a nice city with nice amenities. And so nobody really notices unless they look for it. We covered the hell out of that one because we have all kinds of people in London. Right. And so I just think in this case, like it's- I think Aaron was running some sort of Airbnb scam the whole time. It's entirely possible. Yeah. He's like, well, look, I can make like millions in this thing. So whatever. Yeah. I mean, they keep like I remember seeing today that like links for everything from like South by Southwest in Austin to like Sochi. And it's like if you live in a place where lots of people go occasionally, you just oops, you're rich. Right. Like here's my house for 50,000 dollars a night. Yeah. Well, and that's somebody some like- And that's why I've been buying houses in weird places. Just hoping. Waiting. Topeka, Kansas. And now you're pitching the Olympic Committee to try and- Please. Like, do you want to come to Des Moines for the Olympics? Yeah. We're seeing Wisconsin. Yeah. It's going to be great, guys. My parents have a nice pad. That'll be great. No. So I think we're actually like I think we're we're going to pay attention to the Olympics for any number of reasons. We always do. But this story in particular, where there's the main narrative of the Olympics. Yeah. And then there's a sub narrative of people using back channels to tell you what's really happening and then on top of it, there's like crazy Russian surveillance. So the director of the Sochi Olympics, they straight up was like, the hotel rooms are fine. People are just trashing them. Our surveillance cameras have been watching the showers and they're just pointing the shower heads at the wall. And the follow up question was like, excuse me, the surveillance cameras in the bathrooms? He was like, I'll get back to you. And I walked away. Now he's denying that such a thing was ever said to the Wall Street Journal. Wow. That'll go well. Yeah. So there's just there's just a deep level of weirdness there. And I think the danger is treating it like like Russia is some weird. I mean, it's obviously different country, but some weird other place. Sure. That's always the danger. But the reality is there is the official story and there's like the real story. Yeah. And I think this one in particular, we're going to see a very different real story emerge from what the main narrative of the Olympics. I mean, I think one of the stories that never really gets told, but it's true no matter where you have the Olympics, but especially when it's in a place like this that just doesn't seem to have been ready at all for a winter Olympics is the just the sheer level of like infrastructure and overhaul you have to do to make an Olympics happen. Like the New York Times ran this piece the other day. I was showing you this where they were they sort of superimposed some of the events on New York City. Oh, yeah. So what if the bobsled run were in Times Square and it was like 40 blocks long and the downhill ski slope was twice the size of Central Park. It was wild. But I think what nobody really talks about is what was the number you said like $51 billion. $51 billion. Like to get the Olympics is an unbelievable undertaking and there are people are tweeting pictures of buildings that aren't finished. They kicked people out of their houses and then half finished a building that was supposed to be used for the Olympics. Yeah. And I think it's actually going to be really important to tell that story. And I think you're right that it's really easy to sort of treat it as like this other third world place. But I think it's real and it's told in bits and pieces in every Olympics. And these pictures that are out are crazy. You know, S-Cnation has been collecting a lot of them. The pictures that are out are nuts. Yeah. Just nuts. Yeah. And there's a story that like there's a wild dog problem. So the government's just killing dogs ahead of the Olympics. The dog murder squad. It's third party. It's not government. They just hired a company that does this. The dog murder squad. Which also begs the question, why do you already exist? Yeah. Well, if you live in a town. Again, opportunity just waiting. Yeah. Just you're like, you know what? It's a small business. Let's get those Olympics guys. I'm going to clean up and then rent out my house. Yeah. And that was the rich cast. Yeah. I don't know what else to do. Come back to Flappy Bird. Screw this. I mean, I'm going to go upstairs and play Flappy Bird. What are you going to do? Why would I miss anything? I don't think so. Can we? Here's where I want to end. It's true. And this is important. I think we should end on this. I thought you were about to button your jacket. I was like, it's about to get serious here. I'm just going to leave here. I would like to end on iced tea talking about the government. So I'm going to say goodbye. You have to set this up a little bit. No. No? I refuse. OK. So that was the Vergecast for whatever week this was. It's the week of February. The week of February 3. February the 3. The Vergecast. It happened to you at this time. And you should tell a professional. That was our Vergecast. Seed help. Thank you. Thank you for being with us. You can leave a comment on the post. You can yell at us on Twitter. I'm Reckless. I'm Pierce David. I'm Pierce David. I'm Oner Roscoe. Just a bad collection of Twitter handles. Yeah, we're so sorry. There's probably a phone number you can call. You can just talk to your parents. Or your local counselor. Just whatever you want to do. Or you can rent Nealai's house on Airbnb. Yeah. Find him out in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin. Please, you can hold the Olympics at my parents' house. They'll teach you how to pronounce my name and any other collection of Indian names that you want. And that was it. And now, Ice-T, we'll talk about Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not. No. There are going to be some other ones. I read an audio book. On Audible? Yeah. Yeah, on our sponsor. On Audible. Yeah, that's hot. Audible.com. That's hot. And I went to their offices and they said, Ice, we want you to read this book. OK, they didn't tell me that this was a motherfucking Dungeons and Dragons book, OK? Dungeons and Dragons is some of the most crazy, deep, deep, deep nerd shit ever invented. So every word you're saying is pretty much made up. Motherfuckers talk like Yoda. You know, outside I go into the sun thereof and out. What the fuck? How do you read this shit? To actually verbally say these words is weird. Son, son, it took me 3 and 1 half hours to read 25 pages. 3 and 1 half hours. I'm only reading the short story. It's like 45 pages. I have to do it in two days. I walked in there like, oh, yeah, 40 pages, man. We got this, man. I got three hours. Huh. Huh. Two days. I needed breaks. I needed water. The guy was in the other room coaching me. Don't worry, Ice. You can make it. You're doing really good. You're doing really good. He was saying, yo, people have broken down tried to read that stuff. When this thing comes out, I'll tell y'all when it comes out. And it'll be a treat just to watch me with my South Central educated ass trying to read some Dungeons and Dragons shit. It's talking about good talking about. I mean, oh, my God. Talking about what we talking about Pegasus and Pegasi and that's horses with wings banking to the left. This mother fucker got a sword that talks to him and shit. It's a story based on the Dungeons and Dragons type thing. The series. Yeah, the series. Yeah, mother fuckers live in places that don't exist. And it comes with a map. My God. I told my manager, I said, don't ever have me trying to. Book you for no shit like that no more. This shit is crazy. You know, let me read some porno or something, a sex book. It's easier. Yeah, I know about that.

It's Thursday, February 6, 2014. I'm Addie Robertson, and last night surgeons successfully installed my bionic tooth implant, which tells me if I'm about to choke. You are about to choke. Please stop. This is my second time to work. Addie? Addie? Sony is giving up on PCs. The company has officially announced plans to sell off its Vio computer division to a Japanese investment fund. Not to worry, Sony still has smartphones, tablets, TV, movies, and PlayStation. Plenty to do. Amazon is already an online store, streaming service, video production house, and hardware maker. And now it's making games, or more games. The company has purchased video game developer Double Helix Games, the studio behind the Xbox One launch title Killer Instinct. The acquisition is the latest in a set of conspicuous moves as the company reportedly prepares to release its own set top box. Have no fear, Killer Instinct fans. Microsoft has confirmed that it will continue to work on the game with a new development partner, who will be announced soon. And finally, Dungeons & Dragons has been a fantasy staple since 1974, but it was always missing one thing, until now. Rapper turned actor Ice-T has recorded an audio book set in the world of D&D. It's unclear which book he was reading, or when the audio book will be available. I can quote Ice-T's account of the reading, but I think it's better if you hear it yourself. Motherfuckers talk like Yoda. You know, outside I go into the sun thereof, and out, what the fuck? How do you read this shit? And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, Ice Cube announces his plans to narrate the audio books for Warhammer 40K.

Hello, and welcome to The Verge Live. Today is a huge day, I think, in the tech world, and in the world. Microsoft has named a new CEO after a search that took just about six months. Steve Ballmer stepped down six months ago. They accelerated the timeline, and they gave themselves a little bit more time. Today, they announced Satya Nadella, who has been at Microsoft for something like 22 years, currently running the cloud services division, will be the new CEO. I'm joined here by Dieter Bohn. Hello. Our senior reporter, Tom Warren, is somewhere in London in an undisclosed location. There's just a lot to unpack here. Tom, I think most people are curious what you think. How are you reacting to the news of Satya Nadella? Well, I guess it's not surprising, because of the rumors from last week, and the continuous rumors that he's one of the top contenders. I guess the surprise is more, not necessarily that he's been named, but that Gates has stepped down as the chairman, and all that side to it. I think that's more surprising. Satya is an interesting candidate, because he's obviously got an enterprise background, a focus on service and stuff. I think the questions around Microsoft going forward this year is going to be, are they going to keep going for the consumer stuff, or is this going to be full-blown going for the cloud and the enterprise, and all those sort of things. It's definitely not a surprising move for Nadella, but certainly surprising to see Gates step down as chairman, and become more involved, apparently. Right. There's an interesting message there. He stepped down as chairman, but then he said he was going to dedicate something like a third of his time. He's going to substantially increase the time that he's going to dedicate to Microsoft. Apparently, being chairman of Microsoft, he was just like, whatever. He ran the foundation. I'd recommend the chairman was like one day a week, step in, make sure the company's doing fine, be the chairman of the board of directors. I think what he's saying, he can't be in that role. There's been a lot of conversation about whether any CEO can come into Microsoft, with Gates and Ballmer still on the board of directors, Gates particularly in that chairman position, and actually affect real change. I think that's basically what's been the holdup. They have to strike this balance of the new CEO coming in and having power and authority to shake things up like he wants to, without Ballmer and Gates looking down over him. They need to maintain a sense of continuity and not have people panic that it's not the same people that are around. I think they need to, it's Microsoft, and they need to reinvigorate their sense of innovation, pride and all this other stuff. You see Gates saying he's going to, I think he said he's going to spend three days a week, a third of his time, or up to three days a week, a third of his time, working on new products specifically for Microsoft. That's what I was going to say. He's working on stuff. He's making things. I think that's really important. That sense of continuity, actually, Steve Ballmer, obviously outgoing CEO, was the face of Microsoft for a decade. Here's a quote. Satya is a proven leader. He's got strong technical skills and great business insights, remarkable ability to see what's going on in the market, to sense opportunities, really understand how we've come together at Microsoft to execute the instance opportunities in a collaborative way. Our senior leadership team has never been stronger. Together, this group will drive us forward. We actually also have a video of Ballmer welcoming Satya Nadella, which Microsoft did a weird thing today. They literally announced the news by tweeting a link to their website and saying, we've got a new CEO. Full of YouTube videos. It's a beautiful website if you haven't looked at it. It's a really nice website. HTML5, they're good at it. IE's great. It's just weird that they've chosen fake interviews and weird walk-in talks and photo shoots as the way to... It's strange. Let's run the Ballmer video here. Of all, I love the spirit and culture of this place, the perseverance, which has been the cornerstone of our culture from the very beginning. I know Satya will lead this company into the future and that future is going to be bright with innovation, with growth, and with impact in the market and on the world. I love this company and today couldn't be a better day. The only thing he was missing there is saying developers. I love this company as a reference to previous Ballmer moments. He's met a Ballmer. He's floating. Ballmer himself is in the cloud. He's like Robert De Niro. He just played himself. He's just playing himself now. Wasn't he screaming there at the internal meeting as well? I'm sure he was screaming, I love this company. He's out. I was talking to some people at Microsoft today and said, a couple of weeks, we don't control him. You can go interview him if you want. Ballmer and Jay. Then they asked me to please not do that. Obviously, I think Gates stepping into a more product focus for old Ballmer, obviously completely stepping out, maintaining a seat on the board. The key question is what is going to happen now to Microsoft with a new CEO, with a new person? Tom, you actually wrote a profile of all the candidates a while ago. Do you want to give us a quick rundown of who Nadella is and where he came from? Essentially, he's been at Microsoft for 22 years. He's worked across the Bing business and their advertising stuff in search. He's worked a little bit on Office. Most of the core of his work has been on the cloud stuff recently and in the server business that he did. Effectively, he took the server business up the revenues, just changed their focus from being a client server platform into being focused on the cloud. That's key for the enterprise and businesses and stuff. The thing that I guess he lacks is obviously, he's never been the CEO of a publicly traded company. He also doesn't really have much attention or focus on devices and even to a certain extent, mobile and consumer stuff. Although today, he's obviously mentioned cloud first and mobile first, but he's obviously got Nokia coming in. I think that's going to be an interesting dynamic to this initially, at least, anyway, with the Nokia acquisition. His history is really the server and enterprise guy. My question is, given that that's his history of server and enterprise and given everything that I've seen him say today, all the interviews that he's given, the fake interviews, everything that's the way he talks and the language he uses sounds super enterprise and not very consumer at all. It's hard to follow. The reason we waited to do this show today was because there was a big public call with Microsoft's investors and big customers who wanted to listen to it to see if there's any more information. Dieter and I were sitting there listening to it and we're like, this is super business focused. This is very stay the course. There are big opportunities in our server business and big opportunities in our enterprise software business. What we didn't hear and what we've been waiting to hear from Microsoft for the longest time is how are you going to re-energize these consumer businesses outside of Xbox where things haven't gone well. There's a moment, and take this for what it is, where Satya was like, the Surface 2 really embodies everything that we're doing at Microsoft. Yes, there is one piece of that that is true. Then there's another piece of that where the Surface 2 embodies everything that Microsoft has gotten wrong in the mobile market for the longest time. They have a mobile operating system that's not 100% connected to Windows 8 outside of the tile interface and that is not connected to their phone offering. That's the disconnect and that's why that product is floundering in the market where the Surface Pro maybe people are actually buying. That's the big question. Tom, you and I have been talking a lot about this. There's a shift in language that Nadella has been using all day today where it's cloud instead of, you know, Balmer was devices and services, devices and services. Three screens in a cloud. Three screens in a cloud. They literally shifted the entire company from we're the world's sort of software vendor to we're a devices and services business. They're buying it so they can make devices. Nadella all day today. He didn't say devices and services. He said it only as a subsidiary of cloud first, mobile first. Before that, I just want to point out that if you've got cloud first and mobile first, I mean, can you have two firsts? I just stick that there. What does that mean? What does that shift in language mean? Yeah, I mean, I think it's clear. He's obviously trying to differentiate from Balmer's strategy for a start. You would if you're a new CEO, you want to put your mark on things. But also, I get the sense that perhaps he's more aware of the challenges and the realities that Microsoft faces rather than sort of like this devices and services focus previously. Because I mean, the devices stuff, like what devices do we have from Microsoft right now? We have the Surface and Surface Pro 2 and some other like mice and keyboard and all this sort of things. But if they're really going for devices in the way that you'd assume they were, that they produce themselves, then they're not really showing that right now. And maybe that will change, but maybe it won't. I mean, I think certain divisions like Windows and Surface and other components have kind of been waiting for the CEO announcement. So I think it's going to be interesting to see the way that he said, we're cloud first, we're mobile first. And that's like his primary, that was his primary talk today. That's pretty much what he focused on. And people did raise the devices and services stuff, but it was really a secondary thing. So we actually, we have a little clip of Nadella talking today about sort of his vision for the connected world. Let's take a look at that. You talked about this focus on innovation. Where do you see the opportunities lie for Microsoft? You know, going forward, it's a mobile first, cloud first world. In other words, everything is becoming digital and software driven. And so I think of the opportunities being unbounded. And we need to be able to pick the unique contribution that we want to bring. And that's where our heritage of being, having been the productivity company to now being the do more company where we get every individual and every organization to get more out of every moment of their life is what we want to get focused on. So I have a prediction. Tom, I think you might share this. Tom and I have literally been talking about this all day. I think this signals a shift for Microsoft, a bigger shift. And I talked to some people today and I was told to read into this change however I wanted. And this is how I'm choosing to read into this. I think they're going to start to open up their software platforms across, or their software across platforms. I think this is, they're going to start to engage iOS and Android as places where they need Microsoft software and services to go in a much more focused and directed way than just using Office to sell Windows, which has been the cornerstone of the, like the Balmer empire. So if they do that, the big challenge is can they do it and make money at it? Yeah. I mean, that's the big, that's the big challenge. Yeah. Because it's pretty difficult to sort of expect people to pay for something like Skype or Outlook or SkyDrive or OneDrive or whatever. It's pretty difficult to convert a user into like, you know, into revenue. So, but I think that they've obviously started doing that. Like they've obviously got all these services across Android and iOS, but not really to the full extent that they could. Like they could obviously make that software a lot better on the rival platforms. So I think it'd be interesting to see if this year that they do that, they take the steps, they put Office and iPad, they, you know, all the sort of things that you'd expect them to do as a software company. And I think it's like the important thing here is that they're mobile first. And that's a, to me that's really interesting way of saying like, you know, we're focused on mobile and all that sort of stuff. But really and truly, if we're being honest, Android is like the Windows equivalent, right? On mobile it's dominating all the OEMs and backing and stuff. So I think it will also be interesting to see if Microsoft has any sort of shift towards perhaps using Android apps on their own platforms or doing some sort of Amazon style fork with Android or anything related to Android. That would be crazy. That would be insane. I mean, that would be the, see, I think that putting their apps on the Android platform is, that's the opportunity that has been vacated by Blackberry, right? Because Blackberry, the killer app for Blackberry is messaging. It was built on the back of Outlook, right? Completely, you know, Blackberry and Exchange were just sat on your Outlook box in your office, right? And so Blackberry is out of that market. Samsung is trying to take that market with knocks. Apple is doing whatever it's doing to like integrate with Exchange and all this stuff. I said Outlook box and I meant Exchange. But Microsoft isn't in that space at all really anymore, right? So that's a place where they can say, well, we can start to provision Android devices and Windows phone devices and iOS devices in a much more holistic way because that's what we do. Like we're already providing the email services for all these companies. And then to say, well, we can also extend that to Office and OneNote and all this other stuff that we make. And I don't see them doing that. They're not focused on doing that right now. And I think Balmer's strategy was to say, well, we're going to buy Nokia and we're going to sell you a complete integrated package, Apple style, you know, soup to nuts. Here's your business. And I think they have kind of realized that that opportunity is no longer there for them. Right. That's the big thing. And so if they can't win with that basic strategy, just buy Nokia, sell everything just like Apple, the big challenge, the very first thing is what are they going to do about that traditional mobile market of just smartphones? Because they, I trust him to get cloud services right. Microsoft's already doing a pretty good job. I trust him to find the right strategy for dealing with software and what platforms to put it on and doing it in the right way. But the big question is just straight up selling phones. Do they need to do that to be successful and how are they going to do that? Right. And so, you know what? The people at Microsoft have always told me when I say, where is Office on the iPad? It's a fair question, right? Here's the dominant tablet platform. It is eating away at laptop sales. Like where is Office for this device? And they always say, well look, Office makes us money. No one has ever made real money selling software on mobile. They make real money selling services to back free software on mobile and you can make a little bit of money selling like $2 games on mobile, but you can't make Microsoft money selling software on mobile. And it sounds like this is mobile first. Microsoft's saying it's a strategy of software companies on mobile first. It means that they are going to rise the challenge of making real money selling software on mobile. And that to me involves engaging the other platforms. Because they are not going to make real Microsoft level money on mobile unless they engage iOS and Android while they try to build up Windows phone and hopefully solve this ridiculous puzzle of Windows RT, Windows 8, the Xbox all having shades of the same operating system. Right. Yeah, well and the other thing about mobile, sorry go ahead Tom. I was just going to say, I was just going to add, I think it remains to be seen, but there is a real opportunity there right on the iPad for Office. Like no competitors really created something that's like perfect that people are going to right now and buying. So there's an opportunity for them to generate some sort of revenue from selling Office and iPad. And the initial versions they put out for like the iPhone and stuff are pretty limited and you have to subscribe to their services and stuff. So it would be interesting to see if they take a slightly different approach there. Yeah I think for me the big takeaway, something else that Del said was like he wants to expand the definition of mobile to the industrial internet, the internet of everything and sort of basically anything not PC. And so I think when we hear Microsoft say we're mobile first, cloud first, I think that our definition of mobile has to be bigger than just phones. And even if they don't manage to find immediate success with just selling Nokia phones, they need to find something that catches on pretty soon. And that seems to be what they're going for. Well let's talk about Nokia for a minute. I mean this was the, you know, Ballmer basically like lit the building on fire and then was like okay find me a CEO, right? Like he undertook a massive reorganization, won Microsoft, he bought Nokia and then he left, right? He actually did those things in reverse order. He bought Nokia, undertook the massive reorganization. There was endless amount of talking and speculation that Stephen Elop, by the way poor Stephen Elop, I mean his plan just failed. His like secret plan to ruin two major companies. He got half of the way there. But you know Stephen Elop was at Microsoft, went to Nokia, famously adopted Windows Phone over Android. You can talk about that. There will be books written about that decision for decades to come. And then Microsoft purchased Nokia. He's coming back into the fold. For 30 seconds he was the CEO front runner. And then it was Alan Mulally and then that fell apart and here we are with Satya Nadella. And I just want to know what happens to Nokia now. Is there, the one thing we haven't really talked about today, I've seen anyone talk about from Microsoft externally really is they're about to enter the hardware game in the most serious way that Microsoft has ever entered the hardware market outside of the Xbox. But phones are a much bigger market than game consoles. There are many more competitors. Microsoft isn't the leader. It took them forever to become the leader of the Xbox. And now with the PS4 and Xbox One that's all up in the air again. What are they going to do with Nokia? What is the strategy? And I just haven't heard it at all. Well I've got a hunch but I'm really curious to hear what Tom thinks. Yeah I'm totally, I don't know. It's just totally not clear. And they've obviously not been able to talk about the intricacies of the deal yet and stuff. But I think when you look at it, if you look at what they did with Skype, they kind of took it and they haven't really done much to it. Like Skype is just, it's not languishing but they really need to start taking that service and doing something with it. And I think they'll run with a sort of similar approach to Nokia. I'm guessing they will anyway. They'll drop them in and they'll kind of leave them alone for a little bit and just figure out what they're going to do because they're not going to have a full strategy and being able to shake these people up. There's also the added complexity that most of the people are based in Finland as well. So they're not going to want to move those people. I think that acquisition is going to be interesting to watch because especially a lot of the growth areas for Windows Phone are in Europe and obviously Latin America as well. Yeah that's actually, I was just going to bring that up. If I were them, pick your areas where you're already starting to see some growth and target those really heavily and gain a foothold there. Don't try and take on Apple and especially Android everywhere because they're going like gangbusters, both of them. And if you can build on some growth that you already have in a couple of different markets, you can establish something and grow from there. I think as a consumer strategy that's the best they can do and then they just need to make the enterprise sell that they offer the best end to end solution for an enterprise. They can do that certainly much better than Blackberry was able to with Blackberry 10. So I mean I don't think, it's not going to just completely blow up right away like the Kin did, but it is going to be a slow progress before we start to see like genuine worldwide consumer success. It may never be in the cards for them, but I think they can capture certain markets and they can make a relatively compelling argument to enterprise. I mean Tom, you've been reporting that Nokia is going to do Android stuff for quite some time now. Yeah, I mean we've heard that they're doing the Normandy stuff. They've obviously been planning that for the low end. Sounds as though that's probably going to happen at Mobile World Congress and that the Microsoft acquisition isn't going to close before then. So that will definitely be interesting if that particular model is going to be on the Microsoft side of the acquisition. It's not something that Nokia are going to spin off, but I don't know that they can do that. That's definitely going to be interesting to see where Microsoft takes that. But even on the Windows phone side, I think they face a significant challenge across this year with not having a Nokia brand across Europe. Because I think that's really been helping to push because it's still like a respected brand in Europe to a certain extent. And it's not in the US. They've never really got anywhere there. But it could be without that Nokia name on it. That could be an interesting dynamic as well. So that's mobile. That's where we are with mobile. Then there are the other huge components of Microsoft. So it's funny, another thing you didn't talk about at all today as far as I can tell besides a passing mention was the Xbox. Here's another huge piece of Microsoft strategy and they're just kind of like leaving it alone. I didn't hear a lot of conversation about the future of Windows besides the Surface 2 is great. What I mostly heard was we're going to really focus on these big business customers. And that kind of focus away from the consumer and onto the enterprise is interesting. But Tom, do you have any sense of, I mean, the last piece of news that we reported about Windows was that they're turning, in Windows, the next update to Windows 8.1, they're going to turn off the boot to the tile interface. Which by the way, I'm just calling Metro. And that's going to happen. And it's called Metro. They should have paid the grocery store and gotten the rights to the Metro name. I'm just calling it Metro. Ditto SkyDrive. And SkyDrive. I don't even know what they're doing with SkyDrive. But are you getting any sense of what they're going to do with these other big chunks of business besides the enterprise stuff? Because it can't be staying the course. Right? The course is not working. Yeah, I mean on the Windows stuff, like on the boot to desktop, they're going to effectively, like they were testing that and it might have been like some weird testing scenario. But from what I've heard, they're going to just allow OEMs to boot to the desktop on PCs that aren't touch screens. So they've not been allowed to do that before. So yeah, I mean I think like coming up shortly for the Windows side of things and for Office, like certainly on Windows, they're trying to make it more PC friendly, right? Back to like the majority of the way that it's used at the moment. Because they've obviously seen that feedback. And I think a lot of it is also to do with businesses are moving away from Windows XP by April. They want an alternative to Windows 7 as well. So they need to make it more friendly to sort of entice businesses to move towards that rather than Windows 7. Because they don't want another scenario where Windows 7 is the next Windows XP in like 10 years time. And in Office, it's like they've really missed an opportunity to make Office touch. Like on the surface, it's runs in a desktop mode. They completely missed that. And it was kind of a mess really. And now they're creating their touch versions of Office. But we've only really heard that they're going to do them for Windows. So again, it feeds back into the whole idea of Office on iPad. And then obviously the server and cloud stuff, that's like slowly emerging as their big business now. So Xbox is really tiny in comparison. And for like years up until, I can't remember the exact date, but it's probably around 2010, 2011. It was losing money, right? And it still costs a lot of money to launch a console and all the marketing and stuff. So I don't know what will happen with Xbox this year or the year after. But I get a sense that that and the surface is like a showcase for their services and stuff. So I can't see that they'd get rid of that, like not initially at least. I think what's clear from looking at their revenue and profit over the last couple of years perhaps is that they've got this big backing from the server and Office and enterprise software. And they're making loads of money there. And if they go and lose a billion on surface, it doesn't matter so much. It's a small, it sounds like a lot, but really in reality it's not. So I think they can still keep feeding the consumer side and trying things and trying to get these services onto devices and stuff whilst having that enterprise backing. I think some of the stuff that Nadella is talking about today, like cloud first and mobile first, is probably a little bit to do with protecting that dominance they have in the enterprise before it really gets attacked by like, I mean, I guess Google is probably the imminent threat rather than anyone else. And yeah, I mean, I think that's their strategy is they want to be a little bit, they want to take revenue from wherever they can, right? So they'll do the Apple strategy of doing surface. They'll get a bit of revenue from there. They'll do Google style online services and make money there. Well, you know, it's interesting. And this is like, you know, we saw the Nadella walk and talk with another random Microsoft staffer who I don't know. But you know, if they, you know, whatever. It's their day. You don't want other journalists in the mix. I get it. You want to do your own rollout. You want to do fake interviews. But what I would have asked, and I think what anybody, any actual journalist would have asked on this day is, okay, you took over. You're at war, right? You're at war with Google. You've reached a detente with Apple, but you're fundamentally going to be at war with Apple when Nokia is part of your company and you start selling cell phones. How are you going to make peace? Are you going to, do you want to make peace? And I think whether or not Microsoft can fight Google to a truce or find leverage against Google outside of making scribbled t-shirts is actually like a major question sort of in the industry. And I don't, as far as I can tell, there's no answer to that question yet. And I think finding the leverage for Microsoft against Google against Apple, even to some extent now against Samsung, Samsung also makes cell phones, is going to be hugely important. So actually the other thing is like he needs, he just oversees, he's overseeing a company that just went to the one Microsoft strategy and like there was infighting with Microsoft and they've got big decisions. Like they've got Windows 8, RT, Windows Phone, Xbox has got a random version of Windows. They've got to make the decisions about whether or not to take their software to these other platforms. He's got to make a lot of big decisions and really have the power to do it. And is Bill Gates moving into this new role going to help or hurt that ability? Right, so we should talk about Gates. Tom, well actually, before we start, Gates also shot his own YouTube video. This rollout to me is amazing. Just because it's kind of cool but it's also kind of, watch the video. Here's Bill Gates welcoming Satya. Satya's got the right background to lead the company during this era. There's a challenge in mobile computing. There's an opportunity in the cloud. And the various business groups he's worked in, he's driven innovation, gotten architectures put together that really meet the needs of our customers. The opportunity for Microsoft is greater than ever before. Whether it's taking Office and bringing it to interactive documents, letting you find your information in rich ways, securing your information in rich ways, or even building a new platform, a cloud platform that connects to all sorts of different devices. I'm thrilled that Satya's asked me to step up, substantially increasing the time that I spend at the company. I'll have over a third of my time available to meet with product groups. And it'll be fun to define this next round of products working together. So there's a lot of opportunity in front of us and it's exciting that we've got a strong leader to take us there. That to me, just that last line, maybe I'm being negative. I'm being hopeful. I'm switching, I'm flipping the switch. Oh, I just hope. I'm super hopeful. Yeah, I mean, they've got a guy. A bomber, I think, was a lame duck for a long period of time there where no one believed outside of Microsoft that he could do the things that he wanted to do. And there were a series of decisions, particularly at mobile, that created that belief. And I think they're saying the right things right now. But the other piece, and I think this is just going to be a thing for Microsoft to figure out, is what role does Bill Gates have there? If Bill Gates, this would be like Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he was an advisor to Gil Emilio. And then like 25 minutes later, he was the CEO of Apple. And that's there. That's the historical precedent for this situation. Well, the other historic, I mean, so the question is, is he going to come in and do that and kind of become the shadow leader? Or is he going to be like, I don't know, like a constitutional monarchy? He's not actually going to help make products. He's Queen Elizabeth. He's going to be Queen Elizabeth. He's going to be in on the money. Tom, you're English. Tell me how that feels. Yeah, I'm trying to get my head around the Gates stuff. Because I kind of expected him to step down as chairman this year. And maybe someone from the outside take over as chairman. But I guess what I wasn't expecting is for him to then be like the wingman for Nadella. So I guess it's just interesting to see how it's going to play out. I mean, Nadella said in his video, in his Microsoft interview, he said, I think the quote was exactly, he's going to ruthlessly remove any obstacles that allow us to innovate. So he's going to be pretty ruthless about sort of focusing where Microsoft's going to go. And I just wonder how Gates is going to be involved in that. Because I can't imagine Gates ever wanting to adopt Android or put all its services on viable platforms that are better than on its own platforms. Well, you know, famously, famously Bill Gates killed the courier because it couldn't run Atomik, right? I mean, because it wasn't Windows. And famously, the first, or the Xbox 360 was a Skunk Works project that didn't run, right? It was aside from the Windows stuff because Microsoft had a tendency to kill anything that wasn't Windows at that time. Kin, also. Just saying. The Kin was just a mistake from beginning to end. Like, shouldn't have done that. It's right. That thing would have been fine if it wasn't priced at the ridiculous price it came at. It would have never been fine. It was a terrible product and marketed just in the worst. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's all over now. The nightmare is over. Bomber is gone. That was a joke. I'm actually very sad that Bomber is leaving. He was wonderful to cover. He was tremendous to cover and his obvious passion for Microsoft was cool. My happiest moments live blogging at The Verge were taking pictures of Steve Bomber. Yeah. I just love it. As a journalist, you could not ask for a better CEO. I think as a shareholder, they obviously made a different decision. But what I want to note, like honestly, the real question is can they do this thing? Can they make this change to be a software company that serves all of the platforms and there are now multiple platforms in the world with Bill Gates still kind of there. He was the one who drove a large part of the Windows first strategy at Microsoft. He's a business genius. Along with Gates and Bomber, they built Microsoft into this behemoth on the back of using the leverage of Windows. Tom, I'll let you have the last word on this. My opinion is yes, they can do that, but I don't know that they can do that and still feel like Microsoft instead of feeling like Oracle or Sun or IBM or something. If they become the cloud enterprise. Tom, what do you think? Today with the Gates stuff, it's like the Gates effect. He's there. I think a lot of it is to do with making the data not seem so green. He's not so fresh into it and he's got a helping steady hand there and stuff. Really, I can't see exactly how involved Gates is going to be. He said time and time again that he's focused on his charity and the foundation work. He's saying that he's going to be involved a third of the time, but I don't really know exactly what that means and how involved he's going to be in the products. Notoriously, he used to be the worst person to put a product in front of because his product reviews were like he'd pick it apart basically. If he's going to be like that, then I guess it changes the dynamic in a sense that if you're a product manager and you've got a product and you've been building up and you're ready to go and you're waiting for the final sign off and review and stuff, who do you go to? Do you go to Gates or do you go to Nadella? Where's the dynamic there and who says yes and no? How does that stop there being some weird arguments between Nadella and Gates, which I'm sure when he was in the boardroom there used to be some heated arguments probably over strategies and stuff. I don't know. I can't see how he's going to make a massive difference as well because he walked away from his full-time work in 2008. You're coming up six years without him being intimately involved in product decisions and the meetings that they have every week with the various product teams and stuff. He would have been in a day or so a week doing the board stuff, but in terms of products, I don't know. I can't see how he knows intimately what Microsoft's product strategy is right now as well. Well, maybe, but I think if you're Gates, that's a huge opportunity to actually begin to shape that strategy without the baggage of knowing how you got there. I think if Gates' role is to basically be the editor and to say this is good enough, this isn't good enough, we can put this out, that needs to get baked a little bit more. And to be a product guy that can stand outside of Microsoft politics. I don't care whose fiefdom this came from. This is good. This is bad. Yeah. I hope if Gates' role in Satsu's job is to run the business, I think that is recreated across the industry and I think that would make sense. I guess what Microsoft really needs, the time they've needed in recent years at least, is like a gatekeeper. Similar to what Marissa Mayer used to do at Google, which is just sit there and block stuff that just wasn't working, send it back. And what Jobs used to do at Apple, nitpicking, if Gates can do that well and to the correct strategy and stuff then that's definitely what Microsoft needs because there's some products that they should just take a little bit more time and care on before unleashing them out and stuff. Just like some basic mistakes that it's just unthinkable really. If they could have a gatekeeper there that would do that, I don't know if Gates is the right one for that but just because there's a lot of emotion and history there. But yeah, it's definitely interesting to see how him and Nadella work together. To me that's exciting. Hopefully that re-energizes Microsoft to make better things and hopefully we see them resurgent in a way that they've got the businesses that are working. I think the Xbox is really interesting. But on mobile, the places where they're talking about mobile first, they need to make a big push and hopefully they do that again. So I just want to end. We've assembled, this is very sad for me to see Steve Ballmer leave Microsoft and I was alluding to it earlier but covering Ballmer has been amazing and a privilege in many ways. So we're just going to end with a little highlight reel of Steve. Thanks for sticking with us. We're going to have all kinds of news on this the rest of the week on theverge.com and if you want more of us talking about this, the Verge cast is on Thursday as usual so tune into that. So let's say hello to Sacha Nadella and to Bill Gates' new role but more importantly goodbye to Steve Ballmer. Microsoft's like a fourth child to me. Children do leave the house. In this case I guess I'm leaving the house. Hey Bill, what's up? What's up? Hey, what's up? We've been given an enormous opportunity and Bill gave us that opportunity. I want to thank Bill for that. I want you to too. The pace of innovation isn't going to slow. It's going to get faster and faster. There might be a few competitors that are unfortunately eliminated. I love this company. Yes! I am a PC and I love this company. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. Yes! Listen to what else you get at no extra charge. The MS-DOS executive, an appointment calendar, a card file, a notepad, a clock, a control panel and can you believe it? Reverse it. Send them to CD, post them to MSN, mail them to friends all with one click. One Microsoft, one strategy, one team, focused, disciplined, professional and expert in all that we do. Let me use a line from an old movie. Relationships are like sharks. They move forward or they die. I actually think tech companies are the same.

It's Wednesday, February 5th, 2042. I'm not, because that's the year, it's 2042. It's 2014. It's 2014? F***, I fell in the wormhole again. I've gotta stop drinking. I'm future Ross Miller and this is 90 seconds on the verge. CVS, the nation's second largest pharmacy chain, just announced it will stop selling all cigarettes and tobacco products by October 1st. While the company will be forfeiting two billion dollars in sales a year, CVS is angling to become more of a healthcare provider. CVS joins stores like Target, which hasn't actually sold cigarettes since 1996. There are plenty of great sights to see in Barcelona, but on February 24th, one of the biggest ones might be the Galaxy S5. According to the New York Times, the unveiling will come during Samsung's Unpacked event at Mobile World Congress. Despite rumors of an iris scanner or a quad HD display, the next Galaxy device will reportedly not have either. Opting instead for more modest changes, the Times also reports that Samsung's event will be decidedly much lower key than last year's, which was a Broadway extravaganza for the Galaxy S4. Finally, Microsoft rewards hardworking Xbox Live players with virtual achievements, and that's great. Whatever, don't get me wrong, but EVE Online's about to take it to a much, much bigger level. The game's developer will honor the players who have helped shape EVE Online by building a real life sculpture in Iceland. The monument will be almost 16 and a half feet tall, and will rest on a platform that features the names of all quote, active ping EVE Online players as of March 1st, 2014. The sculpture will be unveiled at the end of April, just before EVE Online's annual celebration Fan Fest. That's it for the Daystop Stories, but coming up tomorrow, plus 28 years, I find my way home, and we host this again.

Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show on this, the 5th of February 2014. I am Dieter Bohn. I am Vlad Savo. I'm Dan Seifert. And I am Chris Ziegler. So you are. So we're a day late, and we're deeply apologetic for that. But the reason we're a day late is because of Microsoft. We ended up doing a Verge Live bit about that yesterday during the regular Verge Mobile Show time slot. And so it shuffled things around. We ended up doing our DayZ live stream today as well. You got to watch Killing Zombies, which was awesome. And now you get to watch us a day later than usual. And I don't have any witty banter. I don't feel like trolling Chris any more than I already have today because really it's just not funny anymore because it's just so easy. So let's just talk about Microsoft, eh? Again? Do you guys talk about it yesterday? A little bit, but I mean from a mobile perspective, what do you guys think of the new CEO? I think he's a very sharp dresser. I think that's important. That was like my instant reaction when the announcement dropped yesterday and Microsoft put out its announcement out there and it had pictures of him. He looks much more like a modern tech company leader than Gates or Ballmer ever did. Some people may not think that's a big deal or think that it's stupid, but it's the image of the company and when it starts at the top and trickles down, it's kind of an important thing. Image is a really important thing, especially in the consumer space. So I think it's a good thing. I also heard a really profound reaction to the appointment into Satya Nadella. I think between him and the Windows chief, Microsoft might have the fittest executive team among all of technology. Wow. Like seriously, these guys, they work out. You can tell. You know who I'm talking about? The lady whose name escapes me right now who replaced Stephen Sinovsky. Yeah. And I mean physically fit. I don't mean anything that's making Dan and Dieter giggle. No, I wasn't thinking that at all. You realize that Tom is screaming at his computer right now because he knows and he's like, I can't believe you guys don't know. He's going to tweet at us at any second now. We should just refer to her as the woman who replaced Stephen Sinovsky for the rest of the show just to troll Tom. That's terrible. So to Dan's point, it's interesting because it was what, probably two, two and a half years ago that that, I can't even remember where it originated from, but there was this huge level of consternation about Mark Zuckerberg wearing a hoodie to board meetings. And now like one of the main pictures of Satya Nadella that's circulating is of him in a hoodie, which I think speaks volumes about the direction that the entire corporate world is going. And I for one celebrate the move. I've seen at least one article in the past 24 hours that's like, is the suit and tie dead? Which it would appear that maybe we are heading in that direction. I mean for, maybe for companies in the tech sector. I don't expect the CEO of Bank of America to start donning hoodies. Goldman Sachs is not going to be adopting the hoodie. I think you're probably right about that. Also I have to say that every time I hear Satya Nadella, I get hungry for Nutella. No. Like this is seriously, this is not even a joke. This is something that has happened to me two or three times in the past 24 hours where like I say his name in my head and then I'm like, oh that sounds good. And then I grab Nutella out of the pantry. Like this has actually happened and I'm not proud of it. But so you know, unfortunately I think I probably put in all of our listeners heads now and they are going to be doing the same thing which is good for the Nutella Corporation I guess. So did I ever tell you that back in the 90s before the web, they had a 800 number on their packaging and it was call and ask us anything. And so a friend of mine and I, probably drunk late at night, got in a big argument over whether it was pronounced Nutella or Nutella. And so we called like four times to try and get a rep that would settle the argument for us. We ended up chatting with a very nice lady for like 20 minutes and she didn't know the answer but I mean you know. Wouldn't there have to be an umlaut on the U in order for it to be Nutella? No, we literally, she's like can I put you on hold and ask my supervisor? We're like yes, yes you can. It went up the chain. It was great. That's amazing. Like in modern terms, there would have to be a Nutella Mayday button and then it would connect you to like a live video representative. So we are doing, we have the Q&A. Tom, you do not get a compensation for us being on a day late. So sorry man. And then Christopher really wants to point out that Dan Seifert is wearing a hat. I am wearing a hat and is that a camo hat? No, this hat is like 10 years old man and it's really the only hat I have that comfortably fits my enormous head. And I'm wearing it because I have a terrible hair situation going on. There we go. Okay, so sorry, we should wrap Microsoft. I'm sure it will be discussed. We're wrapping Microsoft after we completely talked around the issue and didn't do any discussion. No, I was going to wrap into the issue of how like in my opinion, the most important thing that Satya Nadella needs to do is figure out how to manage Nokia and make sure that he sets expectations for how many phones he is going to sell and does the rest, executes on the rest of his plan which is apparently mobile first, cloud first. So mobile is first tier than cloud. I think it's 1A and 1B. Yeah. I think that is the case. Well actually I got assigned the beautiful task of reaching out to PC partners, Microsoft PC partners and got some feedback from them and funnily enough it wasn't all boilerplate. Some of them, particularly the smaller outfits, the guys who make gaming PCs were really quite upfront about saying Microsoft has had failures in the past and it's been behind the curve. And what they've been talking about have been one is everyone is like excited, happy, thrilled, those are all the descriptions that they say. So everybody is on board but what they're saying is they want to have a consistent ecosystem in terms of gaming. So the guys who made the gaming PCs obviously they say if people can access their games and apps all across and there is some coherence, presumably I mean they don't speak to Xbox One but presumably they do want to have some crossover there. So that's interesting but they also all emphasize his expertise with the cloud and they all speak again about his expertise and his experience and his track record which has so far been encouraging and successful. But on the mobile side this was a really interesting thing. The guys who were Microsoft's Windows Phone partners all declined to comment. So that's LG, nothing to say, Samsung, nothing to say, HTC, zero. So they all declined to comment and I mean the way those relationships have been going they've been chilly to say the least. Actually, speaking of relationships, I mean I don't expect, I mean there's a rumored Windows Phone from Samsung but I don't expect any phone maker to put a whole lot of effort behind Windows Phone for a long time. No, that's the thing, I was writing there's going to be a challenge for Nadella to keep them, oh my god now I'm thinking of Nutella as well. I didn't want to say it but when you just said it right there I just was like, I told you. Yeah but I was saying it's going to be a challenge for him to keep those guys on board but actually I don't even know that some of them are on board. Do we even know that HTC is still a Windows Phone partner or LG? I think LG is. I'm sure they both are, who cares? When is the last time LG made a Windows Phone? It's been a while. I think LG has said that they are not pursuing Windows phones but that was like a year or something ago. Yeah. And as far as the Samsung goes, it's like the Samsung is just a rebadge of the Galaxy S4 or whatever. Yeah. So it's not like, nobody expects Samsung to put any effort into it. So the other question, so the Google Microsoft relation has been really frosty, there's the screw gold, there's the fact that Google services don't work on Windows Phone or work very poorly and all that crap with Exchange and everything. Do you think that that's going to get better? Do you think that it's a priority for the new CEO? Asks Jack March. I would think that it should be a priority but it seems to me that at least with as far as the services working on Windows Phone, a lot of that is on Google's end. Yeah. And you know, I mean Microsoft can try and work with Google as much as they can and plead and beg and ask and things like that but Google has, I think is the one that holds the cards there. I am very curious to see what will happen with screw gold, if they're going to abandon that or if they're going to keep that. I think I've heard somebody say in the past that the decision to keep going with the screw gold campaign goes all the way up to Balmer. So without Balmer there, it's not going to happen. He's not just not there, like he's gone, gone. He's gone to board. Well, whatever. I mean he's gone. And then Bill Gates is going to help with product. He's increasing his time there. He's no longer chairman. That's interesting. Yeah. Tom pointed this out in his report, in his excellent report which you can see on the site right now, that Bill Gates was known as being kind of a hard ass as products go. He personally killed Courier which remains a sore spot for Microsoft fans and non-Microsoft fans alike. So it will be really, really interesting to see exactly what kind of influence he has. I think it's one of the biggest wild cards. I mean obviously Nadella is a wild card too but how Gates leaves his mark on the company the second time around I think is actually for me the bigger question. With regards to the Courier, doesn't Tom's report say that he killed it because it didn't have an email app? Yeah. Which by all accounts is probably the right decision to kill it. No, no. Does it have an email app? No. The decision you make then is build an email client, not kill the entire product. Right. No, but guys, I think the Courier is one of those things that because you never know how good or bad it might have been. It was perfect for that. Keep kind of idolizing it. It was perfect. It was infallible. We have to stop talking about the Courier because then we're going to start talking about WebOS and Scion. I was about to say it was Microsoft's WebOS. So this isn't actually even like okay, it is yeah, it's easily the biggest news of the past week and a half or whatever but there's other huge news which is that Google went we give up and they sold Motorola to Lenovo. I mean it has to go through but. You know what this is nuts? Here's what this feels like to me. It feels like Google went into a pawn shop with Motorola and they were like what can we get for this and the pawn shop owner is like I'll give you $3 billion and Google is like yeah that's fine. No, it's actually more like Lenovo walked into a mall and it desperately wanted to buy a phone company and it was looking around at shops and it couldn't find anything and it looked at Blackberry and was like yeah, I don't know, maybe, I guess I'm not going to get anything and then on the way out the door, Motorola ran up and grabbed it and said hey, I'm for sale. Pretty much. The fact that Lenovo was going to buy Blackberry and then decided not so much but they were from Motorola. It was blocked by the Canadian government. Right. That's what I'm saying. It was like it's card got declined in the store. That's the hilarious thing. Like they don't accept discover there. They only had discover so they had to go somewhere else where they could use their discover card. But seriously, when you think about it, Blackberry was being valued at something like $4 billion or whatever it is. I don't know, at this point it's kind of like $20 Canadian dollars probably. When that speculation was happening, Lenovo might have spent some $4 billion buying Blackberry which is a worse brand. It's not in any way, shape or form on the upswing, not in terms of reputation, not in terms of sales, not in terms of hardware design or specs, all software. I mean anything good about Blackberry isn't happening at the moment and they got like you guys are saying a bargain basement price of Motorola which… $2.91 billion if you're not remembering. Blackberry is not losing nearly as much money as Motorola was losing though, right? Well, there's that. There's the fact that the Moto X as far as we can tell has been a failure in the marketplace despite the fact that it's been lauded by everyone including us. But then there's also the very, very important fact that Google peeled off some of the most important parts of Motorola and kept those parts for itself. They're keeping their quote-unquote skunkworks operation that includes Project ARA, they're keeping at least some of the patents, right? Yeah. So what does that leave? It leaves like just a random Android OEM that doesn't have any wildly successful product. No, no, no. Hold on. From Lenovo's perspective, I mean everything that you said so far is absolutely valid and correct but from Lenovo's perspective, it's exactly as Dieter was saying. Lenovo just needed a brand familiar to American customers. They're paying the money for the badge basically. Yeah, yeah. So if you're just going to spend for brand awareness and for reputation, Blackberry would have been an if you move but it would have been an upgrade on Lenovo, it would have been a really expensive one. And to me, just kind of heading nowhere. Whereas Motorola is really going up in people's estimations. Absolutely, it's losing money, it's not making sales, but everybody has a Moto X, it's showing it to their friends, they're showing the crazy screen, the beautiful industrial design and the way it fits in the hand and all of that stuff which we're going to come on to discuss later again. I mean, these are good things. It's good things but Motorola lost more money in Q4 than it had in any of the prior quarters since Google bought it. Lenovo has the cash, Lenovo has the facilities, it has all the capabilities, it doesn't have the name. It's like people just aren't buying it. There's great word of mouth, it's scored very highly among reviewers, among virtually all of the press people I know love it. I really like it but people are not going into stores and buying the Moto X, they're not going online to Moto Maker and buying it from there. So that's the problem that Lenovo has to solve. Think about the Moto Y, alright? Why? But I don't get it. Like I honestly cannot for the life of me understand why the Moto X has been a commercial failure. Are people just comparing it to the GS4 and saying, I trust the Samsung name? Is that what's happening? I think there's a number of missteps. I think one being exclusive to AT&T for a long time was a problem. Being exclusive to the US for a long time was a problem. And then the whole Moto Maker thing, I think that goes to show that most people aren't comfortable ordering a phone online sight unseen. There are people that are enthusiasts that are welcome to do that but the vast majority of consumers, especially in the United States, go into a carrier store and buy the phone that they can get in the store that day that is shown to them as the best representative. But they could. You can get a Moto X in the store. You can get a white or a black one, right. Same as you. But if you want any of the stuff that Motorola advertises like the colored backs or a wood back now or whatever you have to order it. And you know, the things, it comes down to the in-store perception. A lot of that, you know we said this HTC has a really hard problem with this as well. You know, people are pushing it on the ground floor. So what has Lenovo got here? They've got the brand name, they've got the badge. And they, you know, Lenovo is doing fine in some markets with its phones. It's obviously not trying here in the US and their CEO kept on referring to mature markets. So are they going to go the ThinkPad route? Are they just going to be like, you know what we did with ThinkPad? We're just going to repeat that exact same process with Motorola. They need to do more than that if they want to be successful because as we just discussed for like the 10th time, the Moto X is not doing that well. So like Lenovo, they're going to need to step up and do more if they really genuinely want to compete with Samsung. Yeah, and I think you mentioned this last week Dieter that Lenovo needs to be tenacious. They need to have the patience, they need to be willing to spend the money, and they need to be willing to go head to head with Samsung in the developed western markets if it really wants Motorola to succeed. Google didn't have the patience, that was very obvious. It had the money and it spent a lot of money on Motorola, but it didn't have the patience to see it through and it didn't really, that whole firewall that set up that Google said Motorola is its own company and we're keeping it separated, really feels like that was a thing that killed Motorola. I don't think it had anything to do with patience. I think Google's game plan from day one was to use it as a patent shield and at this point they're just like, well we're just going to get rid of the components that we don't need, which is what they're doing. The notion of Google being in the smartphone business directly still feels… I think if Motorola was a profitable business, Google wouldn't have sold it. Well I don't know, I kind of agree with Chris. I don't really see how being a smartphone manufacturer really fits into Google's long term strategy, its overall strategy. It just didn't need it. And one of the things that is kind of a side story to this is that just as Google was announcing the sale of Motorola, it was announcing a much closer Android partnership with Samsung. So it may well be the case that Google had Motorola and then Samsung came to Google and said, we're not comfortable with this, we're going to put our chips into Tizen or whatever bluff Samsung had. But you know, forking Android or trying to be difficult for Google is not something that the company really wants. I love the rumor. So the rumor here is that Google played with the tab pros and they're like, this sucks. And then they went to Samsung and they're like, look guys, this is getting out of hand, can we talk about it? And that started the conversation. That's the rumor, right? Yeah. What is it going to take for you to not do this crap to Android? And you know, if you don't do something, we're going to leverage some more power, we're going to leverage maps, and maybe this Motorola thing ties into it. But like the joke that I tweeted, you know, back when Google bought that developer team from HP, we joked that Palm bought us for $0 billion. And it's like, Samsung kind of bought Android for $0 billion? Like Samsung, unless Lenovo really, really puts the screws down and really spends a ton of money, who in terms of big developed markets is able to compete with Samsung in the Android space right now? Nobody. Unfortunately, nobody. Yeah. I mean, if you take off the right now from that question, there's potential answers, but otherwise, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I would say with respect to Lenovo is absolutely what you guys are saying, persistence, money, etc., tenacity, all of those things are necessary. But as far as I'm concerned, if you look at the entire mobile landscape and how Lenovo could enhance its brand standing in the West, this was the best case scenario for the company. You know, taking Motorola, particularly now where it's considered kind of America's company with its Texas assembly plant, and I mean, it just has a reputation that is on the upswing. That's what I'm saying. And you just have to compare that to the idea of Lenovo doing the exact same thing but trying to sell you idea phones or left phones. It just doesn't really compare. You know, selling Motorola devices, even if it's just a badge, is so much more – it gives Lenovo so much more of a chance than, you know, using its own brand name. Now, here is one unanswered question, at least as far as I know it's unanswered. To what extent did Google directly influence the design and development of the Moto X, and to what extent is that brain trust moving to Lenovo? In other words, will future Motorola's look and feel like Lenovo's, or will they look and feel like Moto X's? Yeah, and this actually – we've got a question from Ryan, like are quick updates from Motorola going to be a concern? So it's not just the look and feel and the industrial design. It's the fact that even though there was this supposed wall, like Motorola got their shit together when it came to software. They created really interesting software improvements. They did really good hardware. Like they made huge strides forward, and the question is can Lenovo continue that and do the right things and actually sell phones? I think that as far as the software updates are concerned, I think a lot of that was the Motorola engineers that were doing that. If Lenovo keeps those Motorola engineers and those teams working on that, I don't think you really – there would be any change there. It's not like the Android 4.4 update was coming out at the same time as it was for Nexus devices, so they didn't have like the – It came out before some Nexus devices on Motorola stuff, like – Well, like when the Nexus 5 and the Nexus 7's got it like immediately, right? Well, I mean the Nexus 5 launched with it, but they immediately got it. It's not like the Moto X got it the next day. It was weeks and a couple months later. So the engineering teams were working on that, and I think the fact that Motorola doesn't do a lot of changes to the base operating system. It just adds these small tweaks on top, enables it to push out these software updates faster and makes it easier than other OEMs. But like Chris said, that would be really interesting. We haven't heard or I don't think there's anything definitive that said how much influence Google had on the industrial design of the Moto X. It was obvious that it seemed like a lot of people at Google were fans of it, but it was their job to be a fan of it. And I think the other big unanswered question, and Lenovo kind of hinted at this, but is what's going to happen to Motorola's US manufacturing? Lenovo has a manufacturing plant in North Carolina, but that's for laptops and ThinkPads and things like that. And the manufacturing in Texas is outsourced. Motorola has a contract with Flexotronics, and during the conference call to discuss the purchase, Lenovo's CEO mentioned that most of the manufacturing is outsourced. We're going to be looking into that as things that could be possibly changing. So I would be surprised if they keep up with the US manufacturing. I highly doubt it's all that profitable. Well, I mean, to me that sounds like that puts Moto Maker in major jeopardy, right? It's an entirely different issue trying to send a customized device from Asia than sending it from Texas, at least for the US market. Then again, I mean, I guess Apple does it, right? They customize a MacBook online and they ship it directly from China. Yeah, but I mean, Motorola turns those Moto Makers around in like two days. And there are so many different combinations that you can get. It's way more than just components that go into the same shell that everyone gets, right? So there's a lot of customization. And when Motorola launched the Moto Maker program, they said the reason that we're able to do this is because it's located in the United States. And it has a close proximity and we're able to turn around these shipment times really quickly. So it seems that being in the US is a big hinge or Moto Maker existing hinges on being in the US. Right. How many – Are you guys going to buy a Lenovo phone? Are you going to do it? Well, I mean, Dan just spent all of his money on 18 Moto Xs, so – I bought every iteration you can buy, every combination you can buy, I bought. And he still lost $350 billion. Let's put it this way. When I point blank asked Dan how many Moto Xs he had, he refused to answer. Wow. I just want to clear the air in case like my wife's listening or anybody's listening that cares, I own one Moto X and I've only ever paid for one Moto X. He has his – he just exchanged them over and over and over and over again. I did exchange one of them, yeah. Yeah. Because Motorola let me. Wow. Yeah, I'm still – yeah, I don't know. I'm – I don't know what I'm going to buy. I can't answer that question. But I am kind of bummed that we're down to just one major phone manufacturer in the US. And like in North America, like you can't even really count BlackBerry that much anymore. We certainly can't count Apple. They're not making any phones in the US. Well, okay, major phone company, like phone company that's like we. Yeah, I mean nobody was assembling phones in the US before MotoMakers. I guess Nokia is a US company after this. Oh, yeah. Clever. Nokia is a US company the same way that Motorola will be a Chinese company. Yeah. Right. Well, so they actually put out – I don't know if it was a press release or how it came out, but the word on the street is that Motorola is still committed to moving its headquarters to downtown Chicago. They're in the suburbs right now. And they have a plan in place to move about 2,000 people to the city. So we'll see how long they're there. Did they buy your condo? Yes, they're moving 2,000 people into my condo. It can be a little tight, but there's only two bathrooms. But no, that's interesting news that they're continuing with that plan. Yeah, I mean we kind of just have to wait and see. I mean it has to get approved, right? So I kind of imagine it's going to be. Don't you? Yeah, if they approve ThinkPad. Yeah. And actually Lenovo just bought another division of IBM the other day. All right, so how far away are we from Mobile World Congress, guys? Two and a half weeks. Two and a half weeks. And there's already I know at least one day that looks like it's going to be busy. But the rumors that the Galaxy S5 is going to be announced, I wasn't expecting it, honestly. I don't know why. But Samsung is going to have an unpacked event. And unpacked events are always the best. So watch our live blog. There's definitely going to be an emcee, and he's going to be insane. There was an interesting report from the New York Times today that actually says this unpacked event is going to be a toned down, quiet affair compared to say like the Galaxy S4 event, which was a Broadway show, and the prior events which were just pure insanity. So that means that there will only be four clowns on stage instead of an entire circus? Is that the game? I guess so. But I find it also very interesting that Samsung plans to launch the, allegedly plans to launch the Galaxy S5 at Mobile World Congress, which has really been kind of a sleeper show for the past few years. Yeah. I mean that was traditionally where HTC used to launch stuff, right? Right. A couple of years ago HTC launched the One line when it was the One X, the One S, and the One V. But HTC wasn't there last year. It did its own thing. Samsung has done its own thing obviously for quite some time now and really made big spectacles of things. I mean if they manage to announce this, I mean it's actually they're a month ahead of time because I think last year the Galaxy S4 was announced in like mid-March, right? Yeah, it seems like they're moving further and further up the year because the original Galaxy S was announced at CTIA, which usually happens in April or May. The Galaxy S2 was sometime around there like May or June, and then the Galaxy S3 I think was April or May, and now we're going to be in February with the Galaxy S5. So, I mean, here's my dream. Samsung doesn't add a single new software feature, and they improve the plasticky feel that every Galaxy has always felt like to something a little more primo. It's going to be fake leather, man. And then they ditch AMOLED. They're not going to do that. I'm trying to think of what I want out of a Galaxy S5 that's within the realm of realism for Samsung. Oh, you want it to be curved. Well, compared to the Galaxy S4, what do I want out of a Galaxy S5 that I think Samsung would realistically do that isn't already on the S4? The iPhone is very realistic. What do I want is what I'm saying. So what they're likely going to do is that fake leather back that is on the Note 3 and is on certain variants of the Galaxy S4 in Russia and Korea. I think that's almost like a definite. I don't know where Vlad is. Joe, Brian wants to know why Vlad is gone. Vlad sent me a note saying his connection dropped, unfortunately. So he got so tired of talking about Lenovo Rola. Yeah. And as far as software goes, the rumors have shown or the leaks have shown these crazy software overhauls that I don't know why. Do you think that, I mean, assuming that this partnership with Google where Samsung is going to tone down its software, they actually, actually they could come sooner than we think because they had telegraphed that they were going to dial things back a couple of months ago. So we could see, if the S5 is a slightly spec bump, slightly nicer S4, just feels a little bit higher quality and the software isn't bonkers, I'm kind of into that. I'm curious as to what the actual quote tone down our software means. Does it mean that they're not going to be pushing their software services like chat on and the Samsung store instead going with hangouts in the Play Store which would benefit Google more or does it actually mean that the Samsung software as we know it will be radically different? Are we going to have life companions? I mean we've heard this thing that they're testing a new phone interface with lighter fonts. This was from January. Yeah. And we saw some images that looked just a little bit chiller. Although this maybe isn't what they're going to do. I don't know. I don't know, man. Samsung just… I think it's very interesting that we are two and a half weeks away now from what is supposed to be the big launch event for this product and we have yet to see any leaks of it. Yeah. Well, that Samsung's gig now, right? Like they've done a pretty good job locking down most of their phones for the past 18 months. They locked down the GS4. I don't think there were any leaks of the Note 3, were there? I don't recall. Yeah, so here's the thing about that. There might have been, but nobody can tell the difference between the Samsung. That sounds very true. That was a cheap shot. I take it back. In fact, the only Samsung product…the Galaxy Gear leaked like just before the announcement. Right. And the Note 8 leaked. Yeah. But apart from that, it's been pretty locked down. Yeah. The other thing that we're expecting out of Samsung is the Windows phone, the Huron, and man, it just looks like they took like the rejects from the Galaxy S4 factory line and just like slapped the Windows logo on them. Well, that's the same thing they did with the…what's the last one? That's been Samsung's Windows phone strategy forever. Yeah. That first one, what was that, the Focus? Was a rebadged Galaxy S. I'm starting to get excited for Windows Phone 8.1. Stop, Dieter, stop. Little bit. Notification center. Remember that feeling you had for Windows Phone 7.5 and then that feeling you had for Windows Phone 8? Guys, come on. It's a cycle of heartbreak. It is. Dude, every Windows 8 phone 8.1 device, which is every Windows phone 8.1…how do you pluralize that? I have no idea. It's going to come with a free jar of Nutella. Windows Phone 8.1. There you go. Free jar of Nutella, man. Free jar of Nutella. That would be delicious. I mean, at this point, unfortunately… And then you can use the phone as a scoop. If they come curved, then it's perfect for dipping into the jar. That's true. When they repurpose… Plus, they're calling their Siri clone Cortana, which is awesome. At least that's the rumor. Well, that's the code name, right? I hope they keep it. Yeah, when they repurpose the Galaxy… Well, it's interesting that they just signed that deal with Foursquare to provide location data. When they repurpose the Galaxy Round as a Windows phone, it'll make a perfect Nutella scoop. Yeah. So I think at this point, unfortunately, it comes down…the ball is out of Microsoft's court for many, many, many users because there's this ongoing shade throwing between Microsoft and Google that they need to resolve. And until they do and get everybody happy and cooperating, Windows phone is kind of an outcast. At least, I mean, for me. I mean, I have too many Google accounts to make that my primary device when I know that at any moment, Google might just pull the plug on everything. What little is there? So… Chris, in case there are any major mobile network CEOs listening, can you define throw shade? Oh my God. Are you…wait, first of all, are you suggesting that there might be wireless CEOs listening? You never know. If you are the CEO of a major wireless carrier or phone manufacturer and you're listening, please submit a question into the Hangout and I will answer it on air. Just tweet at us right now. Or just tweet at us right now. Man, I wish that Vlad's connection hadn't dropped because I wanted to ask about the Z1. Maybe if he comes back, we will talk to him. But speaking of major wireless carriers, sounds like the FCC isn't so keen on this idea that Sprint might buy T-Mobile. Shocker. The fact that Sprint spent a dime investigating this possible tie-up is kind of hilarious to me. It's just so like patently obvious that they wouldn't get this past anyone. I mean, Wheeler is still kind of a wild card because he's ex-CTIA. He's ex…what's the cable association? Anyway, he's ex-lobbyist. And so there's a lot of speculation that he might be extremely pro-business. But I think that if you look at his initiative so far and sort of the precedence that he has set and the apparent emphasis that he wants to continue where Clyburn left off, it's becoming more of a matter of course for him to kind of put the kibosh on anything that is anti-consumer. And this would certainly be anti-consumer in a way that it wasn't in 2011 when AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile. The landscape was very different then. T-Mobile was a much stronger carrier than it was in 2011. Or at least it apparently is if you believe what John Legere says. So it's not apparent that there needs to be a consolidation among national carriers to keep Sprint and T-Mobile strong. So yeah, it's a tough sell. And I think that Sprint still might make a push for this, but man, getting it past both the FCC and FTC, which DOJ has already indicated that they think the wireless market is in a good place right now. Yeah. I don't know how it's going to happen. So welcome to the Chris and Dieter Moleshow. Did Dan leave too? It's a very quiet, intimate – yeah, Dan not only dropped, but I just saw that his local recording, which we all keep, was uploaded to the Dropbox, which means his internet dropped hard. Vlad is back! Hey! Vlad, welcome to the party, man. We just lost Dan, and now you're back. Oh! Yeah, this is an exciting – and plus, if you guys haven't noticed, my video quality is dialed way down because apparently Google Hangouts doesn't want me at full quality. This is why Chicago is better than New York. We have real internet here. Do you have Fios in your new place? No, no. I've been in contact with both Verizon and Cablevision, and they have both told me that I can go get bent. So I'm stuck with Time Warner. Yeah. Yeah. Have fun with that. So, Vlad, your timing is impeccable because we wanted to talk about the Z1 Compact. Awesome. But more to the point, we wanted you to talk about it because I have not held one yet. Yeah. Here it is. Ah! The Z1 Compact. Welcome back, Dan. I see Google is trying to assassinate us all around the world. Like, you'd think by virtue of the redundancy of us being in different locations, we wouldn't have these consistent issues, but there you go. Nope. And I just dropped the Z1 Compact, which is a great example of its ergonomics. Okay. Well, let's talk about this phone because it actually surprised me. I was already curious about it from the start because it's a 4.3-inch phone with just the full 5-inch Android flagship spec sheet. I mean, it is the Z1's spec sheet apart from the battery, which is smaller, but then, you know, smaller size, you kind of have to have a smaller battery. And that was exciting. That was interesting. It's the thing that we have all been asking for for a long time. So in anticipation of this phone, we already had high expectations, but it surprised me because actually of its battery life, which lasted longer than most phones. The only ones that compare with it really on the Android scene are things like the Galaxy Note 3 and the One Max from HTC, which is just wild. And the G2, right? It seemed to be about... Yeah, and the LG G2, which does a really good job. So it's a 2300-milliamp battery. It's 100 more than the Moto X, but as I say, the phone lasts so much longer. And it's the same size as the Nexus 5, which has a 5-inch screen and an intense, epic backlight, which sucks to have all the battery juice. So that's it. The battery life is great, and Sony has finally done the really important thing, which will stick a really nice IPS display on this. It's like Sony finally decided to do a smartphone for the 21st century, and those two things are just outstanding. They're brilliant. Besides that, it's densely packed inside. It's quite hefty for a phone. And it's waterproof, which is also good. It has a couple of flaps, which can be annoying, but again, if you don't have to charge it that much because of the good battery life, the micro USB port having a flap on it isn't that annoying. The Sony software, that's the bit that really kind of drags it down for me. I'm not really a huge fan of the camera software. And yeah, there's a couple of buggy things on it. So it's not a perfect phone, but I really want everybody... I'm talking HT, Samsung, everybody in terms of Android phone manufacturers to try and compete in this size and in this space, because I think people will come around to it. I don't think everybody wants a 5-inch or a 6-inch device. I know there's a market for those, but I think there's definitely a market for 4.3-inch phones as well. What struck me the most when I was reading your review, Vlad, was that the Z1 Compact is pretty much the same size as the Moto X, right? But it's got a significantly smaller display. That's right. I need to answer a question that just came in. 99% sure that this isn't real, but John Legere asks, who's your top five CEOs? John Ledger. Sorry, it's Ledger. Good quality troll there, listener, who is probably not John Ledger. Okay, so great battery life, skin is slightly dialed back, camera, fine but over-processed as usual with Sony. Is that the gist? That's it? I want the yellow one very badly. Come on. What do you mean, come on? What color would you get? I know, I'm saying come on about the camera. I'm the guy that is willing to accept a mediocre camera at this point, I really am because I use a Nexus 5, so there you go. But I mean I am using an iPhone right now. But I guess the thing about the Sony that is disappointing is like, I know that Sony is capable of greatness there, and they just haven't done it. Live up to yourself, guys. I know you can do it. I believe in you. I believe in you, Sony. That's definitely the truth. The iPhone has a Sony sensor, right? I believe it does, yeah. I mean Sony does all the best sensors. They've done sensors for HTC, they do Nikon sensors for DSLRs, and they have the big full-frame sensors in the Alpha 7 camera. So Sony knows how to do camera sensors. Absolutely, as Jesus says, it's inexcusable. And it really is over-processing. You take a photo and then you go and you ruin it. I mean this is the thing that we keep talking about with Android skins. It's like the stock stuff is good enough in itself. Stop trying to improve it because through those efforts of improvement, you're actually ruining the picture. Because what I can say about both the Z1 and the Z1 Compact is, some of the photos that these cameras take, particularly at 20 megapixels, where they really have no right to look that good, just look amazing. But that's when the processing kind of fits your subject. So where it loses detail, it's fine because the subject kind of has consistent color and things like that. And it doesn't get ruined, you know? So it's really dependent on getting the right match between subject and Sony's processing, which is annoying. Processing should be minimal. I've been a big fan of Nokia's habit of doing exactly that, trying to keep it as minimal as possible, even if it makes colors look a bit more muted and just images not as punchy as others make them look. But also, I don't really trust the focusing on this phone. It isn't that quick, and I'm struggling to get into a good habit with it. Funnily enough, with the Nexus 5, I've been using it quite extensively. I use it around CES and things like that. I got into a rhythm with knowing and having the camera being predictable, which to me is the most important thing. Absolutely, it's mediocre, but knowing how much it can do, knowing how it can focus and how it can't, it just became a good habit for me. And then I felt comfortable with it. Whereas with this one, I know I could get amazing photos, but then I have to work at it a lot, and that's not great. Would you buy one? I would go for the OG G2 first. Really? Wow. Okay, let me preface this. He loves him some knock-on. I do. What if you couldn't root the G2 and install Symmetry Mod? You have to use it out of the box. Yeah. Oh, that would hurt. So is it still the G2? Yeah. Oh my God, you're willing to live with LGs. We got to hold them to it. We got to find a way to hold them to that. The good thing is we've got MWC coming up, and there's going to be new, new phones. So LG might do something else. There's going to be a View 7. How many Views are there? Dude, don't be hating on the Views. The 4.3 inch form factor is old rage in Korea. I want to have a TV in my handbag, in my man purse. It's what a magazine looks like, man. 4.3. Yep. Moving on. I'm getting a yellow Z1 Compact. I don't care how good or bad the camera is. I would be really tempted if they did a Google Play edition. Yeah. I was expecting Sony to do a Google Play edition for the longest time, and then they finally do it, and it was with that monstrosity. Yeah, what was that all about? That was really bizarre. Come on, Dan. That was Google filling in a slot in its lineup. That nobody asked for. Yeah, it's a slot that nobody asked for. It's like, is it a phone? Is it a tablet? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. It's a phone. Let's just clear the air. It's a phone that's just really, really big because there's no tablet software on it. I disagree. Also, Julie Larsen Green, the name came to me. Good job. Took a while. Are you sure Tom didn't feed that to you? You know what else? You know what else? You know I didn't Google it because I lost my connection, so it just came to me. Well, you could have Binged it. No. Oh, you know what, before we move on to HTC's insane Next Phone rumors, I want to talk about jailbreaking because I've jailbroken my phone and I'm super happy. Rob wanted to know what tweaks I've applied. Has any of the rest of you guys jailbroken? I haven't jailbroken an iOS device since there was that website that you could visit and do it just like by visiting that website and jailbreak your device. So that was like iOS 4 or something. You're missing out man. Check out the speed of my animations here. So fast. Does it still reboot for you multiple times a day? No, it seems actually relatively stable. Oh, you have an iPhone 5. Yes, I do. Okay, because the 5S, I think that's the big difference between the 5 and the 5. Oh, is the 5S not super stable? Yeah, ask Chris. Well, keep in mind, they're not technically reboots. It's just that it springs. Whatever, it stops what you're doing and it restarts the phone. It restarts the interface. So if you're listening to music or you're watching a video, it just stops. No, so Sam has a 5S and he says that he can actually hold a call through the reboot. Well, I was listening to music on my iPad and it did it and it just like quit the app and quit my music and all that stuff. Interesting. Yeah, I mean 7.1 has been in beta for like 10 years now. So I think that's what everyone is waiting on to fix that. Apple has acknowledged it, right? Like in a very rare Apple move, they've come out and said, yeah, we know this is happening, we're working on it. Well, no, it wasn't like that. It was just like the next update will include fixes to reduce crashes or something. Right. Right. No, I've got the basic stuff. Like I made Google Maps the default, I made Gmail the default, I made Chrome the default, I installed the thing that makes Chrome faster because it gets to use the fancy insecure JavaScript, well not insecure, but fancy JavaScript that Apple thinks is too, whatever. The little thing to make notifications not insanely large and the thing to speed up transitions. That's about it. I haven't done any crazy theming or anything. I saw one. And it's way better. It's way better. Like just speeding up the transitions, oh my God. I was hanging out with some of our video producers yesterday and they've all jailbroken and have this lock screen tweak which is kind of like an Android thing where they hold their thumb down and then they get shortcuts to a bunch of different apps right from the lock screen. Oh really? That one's pretty cool. I actually want animations to be slower. One of my favorite things to do in OS X is to hold shift. Hold the shift key. Yeah. Yeah. It's seriously like you're on some weird acid trip. No, it's not working for me right now, the shift key trick. It's working for me. I use hot corners. I've remapped all my expose buttons because I'm a power user. Yo. Nerd. Yeah. You know, I was actually thinking about this when I was reviewing the Z1 Compact about the software and about the fact that for the most part, whether you're talking Android or iOS like you guys have just been discussing, the best software seems to be the one that people are doing themselves which struck me as weird but then again I thought about it and it isn't all that weird because every time you think about customizations, when you think about grassroots small teams like Sanitya Mod which is growing into a big team now but when you have one or two man developer teams just coming up with their own Android skin let's say, their whole purpose or launch, their whole purpose is just to make it more useful to the person using the device. They're not trying to establish a design language. They're not trying to push a software ecosystem. They're just like how to make this more useful, how to make this more pleasurable to use and that's what ends up I guess producing the best results. And the thing that frustrates me with the Sony software is I will get a notification, an actual sound notification. I'll pull down a notification tray and it will tell me there are new experiences in the Xperia Lounge. And I just want to stab somebody when I get that stuff because I know I will open up the Xperia Lounge and it will be a pile of garbage and I'll be like why did you have to notify me about this? Is the Xperia Lounge where all of the games that are not available in the PlayStation mobile app go to hang out? Xperia Lounge definitely sounds like a porn movie. I mean it's frustrating honestly and it's like there's a Walkman app and for somebody like me who grew up in the 90s, I would love to be opening up my Walkman app and getting some nostalgia out but it's full of things like get music unlimited and album and music event information or whatever. It's like I don't go to music events. I just want to listen to the goddamn music I have on this device and you're making it so hard for me. Wait, wait, I'll add on. I wasn't on the show last week so I didn't have an opportunity to complain about this. This is relevant to what we're discussing right now. So I just bought for the first time in my life an iPhone doc alarm clock. It's Sony. And they have a companion app for iOS. The name of the companion app is not pronounceable. It is D – I'm going to spell it out and you tell me how you think it's pronounced. D – S-A-P-P-L-I. So it's like D-Sapley is the closest thing that I can come up with. This is literally the name of Sony's doc companion app, D-Sapley. What does that mean? Are you sure it has a name like the code number? Look you can look it up in the app store right now. D-Sapley. This is Sony's official app. Like who named this app and why? D-Sapley. Yeah, look it up. I'm doing it. D-Sapley. Is it any good? No. It's not good. The reviews are terrible. I mean the device wrote in the app. I mean the doc is fine. My only real complaint with it is that it's a little, like the doc connector is a little finicky and if you're in the dark it's obviously really hard to like see where to place. Like an LED light that's shining down on the doc connector would work wonders for it. And also it doesn't work with the official Apple leather case so I'm now using my iPhone naked which I don't love. But otherwise it's fine. Well at least the readers will be happy because yesterday in the post we said that it would be a day late. They asked for more nudity on the mobile show. Well there you go. We have iPhone nudity happening right now. I'm touching a nude iPhone 5S as we speak. D-Supply? I'm not finding it but I think my connection on my iPhone is bad. It would have to be, if it was supply it would be SUPPLI right? D-Supply? No. I got nothing. I don't know. It's definitely the strangest name for a Sony product I've ever seen in my life. And that's saying something. Yeah that's a high bar right there. They made a product called Rolly which I still like to call Rolly but anyway. Okay can we talk about this HTC rumor, the next HTC One code named M8 apparently and there's a picture out there now with the second camera sensor on the back. And HTC Two. Yeah it's like a, what is it? I don't even know. It's like a third eye, only it's a second eye. It's just like all the way at the top of the, I mean it's so weird. Like just hanging out up there. If you imagine that my iPhone is an HTC One which looks strikingly similar from the back, it's like right under my finger here and that makes no sense to me why there would be a camera sensor up there. Well it's a weird one. Okay so first of all this is something that Bloomberg reported in mid-January, almost in the immediate wake of CES. And today we came across an image of the back of the 2014 HTC One. It's supposed to be, again coming from the Bloomberg report, it's supposed to be keeping the name HTC One and it looks very much like the 2013 device. One of our readers, ego-wide readers, spotted that it seems to have slightly curvier edges. So it might be just a little bit more ergonomic, a little bit more hand friendly, let's hope that it is. But otherwise the all aluminum design is still there. It's pretty much identical. You just have this extra lens which as Dieter says seems completely out of place. It feels, it pretty much is like a third eye in the middle of your forehead. It's just, here's the standard lens and then there's this extra one immediately above it. And the idea seems to be that you have two image sensors, two lenses and potentially shoot photos at different focal distances so then you can refocus your photos after the fact, kind of like the Lytro camera. Because if there's one thing HTC has learned over the course of the past year with the HTC One, it's that people are desperate for photo gimmicks. They love them some photo gimmicks. They love them some ultra pixels. There's nothing better. It's known since 2011 that two cameras are better than one. Oh man. Look, I'm excited for the new HTC One. The original HTC One was great. I've never owned a phone with better speakers. The screen obviously was stupendous. If they can increase the screen size but keep the same overall size, the same, that would be awesome. Or shrink it down. Yeah, or shrink it down even. But I don't, refocusing, like I don't know man. I can't share that easily with people. I would much rather you spent the money on just a really good camera and camera software than like a second sensor. To me, this is the perfect opportunity to call it the HTC Two. You have a perfect excuse to go with the number two. And now you're calling it the HTC One again. And I do feel like there's an issue there. I was going to make a number two joke about letting it go. You know, it's funny, and I'm kind of in the same boat as Dieter, like the people, or the complaints that were made against the HTC One was that the camera was not high enough resolution and not good enough in low light. And this... The battery was not super. Right. The battery wasn't super, but you know, I, not many, at the time that it was launched, not many Android phones had super battery life anyways. So the camera wasn't good enough in low light and it didn't have a high enough resolution. And from everything that I gather, this secondary sensor doesn't address either of those things. So unless they are addressed separately and resolved, we're still going to be in the same boat, except now you can do this gimmick. It's possible they did both. They may have, like the main camera sensor might be stupendous and I will look like a fool for doubting them. And I hope I do, because I would love, and I mean, how many times do we rant about somebody not named Apple make a great, great camera? A lot. So we'll see. Yeah, one thing I wanted to raise though is I do feel like there's an issue with keeping the exact same name and more or less the exact same physical design. Like a few of our commenters took issue with my issue, saying, well, other people do it. You know, what about the Galaxy S3 and the Galaxy S4, there wasn't that much of a generational jump between them. And that's valid. But what Samsung has done there, and what other companies have done, let's say the iPhone when it doesn't change, is take a successful product and then just iterate on it. HTC, for whatever reason, again, kind of like a Moto X, we can't really explain it, didn't really have much success with the HTC One. Neither with the design nor with the name. So coming back in 2014, you bring the more or less same design and the same name, it just, I don't know, it feels like a company that needs change. Let me, I don't agree with that. I think that HTC just changed to simplify their model line by their naming convention. I don't think that they need to change back. But let me throw out an idea that I think might resonate with you and with our listeners. They could go the matrix route and call it the HTC One Reloaded. Huh? Huh? What do you think about that? Again, you have to have a successful first iteration in order to have a crappy second one. No, it wasn't a successful first iteration. It was successful in lots of ways. Every ways except for sales. Yeah, that's where I was going, but then the camera, so then I... Yeah, but it wasn't a success either. We'll see, we'll see. And we're, like the rumor is what, later March is what Bloomberg suggests? Yeah. Okay. Which will be very interesting coming after the Galaxy S5. Yeah. And, I mean, we could yell HTC for missing their 90 day window to get KitKat out through carrier stuff, but... I don't think that's such a huge deal. I really don't think it's worth nailing them for that. For starters, you know, it was a self-imposed deadline. Yeah. Aside from Motorola, nobody else has delivered 4.4. So they missed it by a tiny fraction. And this is another frustration with Sony. This new phone, brand new phone, is shipping with Android 4.3 on it. Boost just announced a phone that's shipping with Android 4.1.2. You guys want to answer a couple more user questions before we're out for the day? Let's do it. All right. So this one comes from Pat, who wants to know, since Google has put the... Is Google going to put the Google Now launcher in the Play Store? So they renamed... Google renamed the launcher on the Nexus 5 from Nexus 5 launcher to Google Now launcher. They also released a red Nexus 5, which... Okay. It looks very sexy. It does. I... Yeah. I'm not sold on it. I need to see it in person. Yeah. Because the white one is terrible. It's got those slick rails on the side. So it needs... the black one is awesome because it's soft touch all the way around. So I need to see what quality the plastic is on the red. Right? I've heard that the red is the same plastic as the white. Oh, then get out of my face with your red. But I mean, as far as the color goes, I just need to see that in person. I'm not... Yeah, but you have an orange iPhone. You're not really the best qualified person to judge. Look, that's because I'm a discerning, tasteful man. Like, if the red is, you know, not good and it's shiny and whatever, then of course get it out of my face because it's not as good as this. Right? Thank you. So do you guys think that the Google Now launcher is gonna make it off of the hole that is the Nexus 5 and onto other devices? Nexus 7? Google Play Store for anybody to install it? Does anyone care? Well, I think that it depends... I care if they enable syncing of home screens across multiple devices because that's... That's the one reason that I stick with the Apex launcher at this point. It's a superpower user move, but it's sweet. I think that it depends on whether Google ultimately decides to continue with its Nexus program as is or if it goes in a different direction. And that is unclear. I don't think that we have a... I mean, Google just got done saying that the Nexus 5 has been a really strong seller for them. Yeah, and their earnings. They sold on Amazon, which is super aggravating. Like, come on, guys. If you say it's selling well, then give us the numbers. No, you're right, but it almost felt like that statement, that breakout may have been in response to the rumors that were going around that the Nexus program was going away. And so if they want to strengthen and continue to build the Nexus program, I think there's a stronger likelihood that they'll keep some elements of the software Nexus exclusive. I agree, and as far as the comments made about the Nexus sales things, it definitely felt like Google was addressing those rumors without saying as much in the call because in their earnings call last week, they mentioned on numerous occasions, at least three times, about how good of a seller the Nexus lineup has been, especially the Nexus 5. So I think they were definitely addressing those alleged rumors that it was supposedly going away. But what's interesting, Chris, to your point, is that they've not only kept the launcher exclusive to the Nexus line, but they've kept it exclusive to a specific model in the Nexus line. So like the Nexus 4 doesn't have it, and the Nexus 7 doesn't have it, and it's kind of weird that it's been segregated that way when every other software feature of the Nexus 5 save for like the HDR Plus mode of the camera is available on the Nexus 4. So I mean whether they bring it to a broader availability, that'd be cool. It'd be a very, I'd be kind of surprised if they didn't because Google's been releasing more and more stuff into the Play Store to make it more broadly available across multiple devices. And I think Google just cares about people using its software more than anything else. And if they've seen that on the Nexus 5, more people are using Google now because of that launcher, I don't see why they wouldn't put that launcher in the Play Store and make it more accessible. I would just like to make a very thoughtful contribution to this discussion by asking somebody to go back to the video and gif that moment where Dita was like, give us the numbers. That was beautiful. I just want to have that on hand so we can have Evan tap it anytime we are talking about earnings, BlackBerry, talking around sales numbers and whatever. Nobody talks sales numbers. The only people that talk sales numbers anymore are Apple it seems. No, that's because they've got really, really good numbers man. Well you'd think that Samsung would too. Samsung would be shouting from the rooftops. Samsung only ever talks numbers when he turns really, really around milestones like 10 million, 50 million. Right, when it hits those, but like in its quarterly reports it hasn't reported smartphone sales figures in a year and a half or something. So I think we need to wrap because I need to go and eat some food because I haven't done that today at all. So thank you very much for watching. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can. I am Backlund, Dan is DCC for it with an EI. Don't hate on Oreos Adam on Twitter because he'll get real mad. Chris is ZPower, Vlad is Vlad Sabov. We are all at Verge. You can leave a comment on this post on theverge.com. You can do that right now actually. You can also talk to us in the forums. There's an email address, you can find it and we'll be back next week. Until then, goodbye.

Most of the time we hear about crazy tunnels in these cities. Most of the time it's 90% just legend and rumor. It was completely, completely forgotten about. No one, no one knew it was there. People speculated but there was no actual grounds for knowing about that. All the experts were saying it was destroyed and all kinds of bizarre stories about eight foot men and rats inside of it, poison gas. Even though something sounds outlandish, it may be real. I was born in Brooklyn, lived in this very apartment for most of my life. I was always interested in engineering. I always had an interest in trains because trains were kind of like a combination of my two interests which was history and engineering. So it was a combination of both areas so it was a natural fit. When I was in high school, I won a science award for alternative energy sources. I built a working model of a satellite that would orbit the earth and change sunlight into electricity using photovoltaic cells and you could power up the city off of one big satellite. I was going to Pratt, studying electrical engineering, put the radio on and it was the Gil Groh show and he was talking about a book that just came out that week called the Cosgrove Report. And the thrust of the book was that John Wilkes Booth was never killed, that he escaped to England by way of Manhattan and then on his way out of New York, he hid the missing pages of his diary inside of a tunnel that was just closed up on Atlantic Avenue. Oh, by the way, next to it is a steam locomotive laying on its side. So I was like, what? Steam locomotives in John Wilkes Booth? I'm on it. So I figured the best way to start was to get a good map of the area from that time period. So I just kept on digging until I found that newspaper article from 1911, which told about the set of engineers drawings of the borough president's office from 1861. And I brought it home and I looked at it for about two seconds and I saw it was an opening in the roof of the tunnel right here. Come on, Silver, be a good boy. He doesn't like the map. And this opening in the roof of the tunnel lines up right over here with a dot in the middle of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street. I figured that must be a manhole cover. So what I ended up doing was I went to the borough president, Howard Golden, told him the story and he had the water department come out the next day and pick up the lid. So I jumped in and squeezed into a space about this high and you could see the brick roof and the dirt going off to the distance. So I knew there was tunnel under there. I noticed there was a space where the dirt then dropped down again and you could see a concrete wall right ahead plugged up with bricks and cobblestones like a doorway. And when we got through the wall and pulled out all those stones, a blast of cold air came out from the other side. I was just like laying there on my stomach laughing into the walkie talkie because I couldn't talk because I was so shocked that it was really there and all the experts were completely wrong that I couldn't even, I was speechless for a few minutes. But the gas company executives knew I found something because I was laughing so hard. The young man's name is Robert Diamond and we read about him in all the papers. The first subway tunnel ever built in America. That's right. I found it. We've been in the tunnel shut and forgotten for nearly a century and a half. Tomorrow it could take us all for a journey back in time. I took a close look at one man's obsession tonight in a dark hole under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. The tourists actually happened by popular demand and so we had like seven, eight hundred people show up. We got them all in and out of there. But we weren't interested in the money. We're just interested in the experience of getting people down there because it was fun and they liked it. The funny thing to me is that I asked some people why do you like coming here because I had people coming back seven and eight times. So why do you keep coming back here and surprisingly they said because they liked the story of how I found the tunnel. So I'd hear all these people walking past me saying they wanted to meet me and then I'd get up and say I'm Bob Diamond and they would all applaud. I first met Bob when I went on one of his tours. I'd heard about him for a while and I'd heard about this mysterious tunnel underneath one of the busiest intersections in Brooklyn. I said sure, probably somebody's basement. But I went on the tour and that's exactly what it was. Suddenly you're in this enormous expansive tunnel which just stretches away seemingly infinitely away from you. People looking around in awe and then we all congregated at the bottom of it. Yeah, after a while I had kind of like a routine set up. They told me there was exploding gas and poison gas down here and five foot man eating rats, but more about that later. I'm kind of like an artist in a way because I like having people come down and enjoy my work. I get pleasure by them enjoying my work. So we just kept using the entrance that we built and everything was fine up until three years ago. I got a letter one day out of nowhere. There was no warning. There was no due process. I just got a certified letter saying your franchise is revoked and don't ever go back there again. You're going to be arrested. Well, we're there for 32 years, never had an accident. So I guess I was doing something right. So yeah, like in retrospect, like if something happened down there, like if there was a fire or something, then it probably would be rather difficult to get people out in an extremely timely manner, considering that it was a bottleneck trying to get through that, everyone through that niche. Yeah, I suppose that was probably a pretty serious safety hazard. In retrospect, of course, something I didn't notice at the time. The most exciting places for me are the ones that are more raw. A lot of times it's a trade off. The more people you want to be able to see place, the more you have to polish away that that roughness that can be so exciting. We were never given notice that the thing was being revoked. We were never given the chance to remedy their complaints and that basically there was no due process. And so that we've been there for 32 years, we made it into a federal landmark. It's in the National Register of Historic Places. People come from all over the world to see it. And basically the city just comes along one day and just says, get out. I like people like Bob who are motivated by something totally outside the realm of money and even outside the realm of kind of what makes sense. I think he has a vision and he has things he's in love with, fascinated by, and that is what drives him. It's such a bizarre, surreal sort of a story. In the middle of an urban environment where nothing is unexplored, he found a two mile long tunnel. What could I find? It's like, well that could never happen, but it did. The reason I did those tours, because people would come in there and say, oh wow, this is amazing. That tunnel was basically my whole life. That's what I did every week. And now it's like I'm sitting around not doing much for three years. What else am I going to do? I'm 54 years old. I'm too old to go find another tunnel somewhere else.

Microsoft is like a fourth child to me. Children do leave the house. In this case, I guess I'm leaving the house. Hey Bill, what's up? What's up? Hey, what's up? We've been given an enormous opportunity, and Bill gave us that opportunity. I want to thank Bill for that. I want you to too. The pace of innovation isn't going to slow. It's going to get faster and faster. There might be a few competitors that are unfortunately eliminated. I love this company. Yes! I am a PC and I love this company! Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers! Yes! Listen to what else you get at no extra charge. The MS-DOS executive, an appointment calendar, a card file, a notepad, a clock, a control panel, and can you believe it? You can reverse it! Burn them to CD, post them to MSN, you can mail them to friends all with one click! One Microsoft, one strategy, one team, focused, disciplined, professional, and expert in all that we do. Let me use a line from an old movie. Relationships are like sharks. They move forward or they die. I actually think tech companies are the same.

It's Monday, February 3rd, 2014. I'm Nathan Seidkart and I just want to congratulate Khaled Holmes on his win at the Super Bowl last night. I play for the Colts. You take it from here. I got you. This is 90 seconds on the verge. The Seattle Seahawks crushed the Denver Broncos 43-8 last night at the Super Bowl. Well that's boring, so let's talk commercials. Last night, we finally found out that the Seinfeld reunion was simply a promo for Jerry Seinfeld's web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The game was also full of investigate 90 seconds. 90 seconds was perpetrated by Khaled Holmes from the Colts. Battery life has always been a problem for smartwatches. The rumor has it that Apple has figured out a way around it. According to the New York Times, Apple is testing wireless charging with magnetic induction, similar to what Nokia uses with its smartphones. No word on when or if we'll see an Apple smartwatch, but CEO Tim Cook has promised new product categories later this year. And finally, you know how everyone in the world wanted Harry and Hermione to end up together? Well it turns out, so did J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter author this week admitted that pairing Hermione and Ron was quote, a form of wish fulfillment. Both Rowling and Emma Watson, who played Hermione in the films, agree that Harry would have been a smarter choice. Worse still, Rowling once considered killing off Ron entirely. Damn, that's cold. That's it for today's top stories. I had a blast today guys, thanks for having me. I think I'm gonna come back tomorrow. Actually we have a schedule we figure out in advance. I did not even know you were back there my friend. Congratulations again to the Seahawks and fellow Trojan Malcolm Smith for winning MVP.

This is Ellis Hamburger with The Verge. My Facebook newsfeed is a bit of a mess. Especially on my iPhone, where digging through updates from friends, news sites, and ads just isn't that much fun anymore. Facebook thinks it is the answer with Paper, an iPhone app that's part newsfeed, part newspaper. And it's totally ad-free. Welcome to Paper. Paper started as an experiment to make Facebook look better on your phone. There's no chrome, and the place of buttons you navigate with swipes and other gestures. Perhaps most noticeably, Facebook's iconic newsfeed has been flipped over. Each story takes up the whole screen, and you browse them horizontally like in Facebook Home. This means you can't swipe through your feed as quickly as you can on, say, Instagram. But that's kind of the point. A lot of the designers on our team have a traditional graphic design background, and so we started looking at it like you do, like a printed book with a baseline grid going horizontally across all the stories. And as you flip, all the text stays aligned, the photos stay aligned, or if you're going vertically like this, everything has to pull out of frame, and it's a little bit more disorienting. So as you're going horizontally, it's just a lot simpler transition. The updated newsfeed is terrific, pairing a slick interface with super responsive gestures. It's easy to keep track of stories as you swipe through them since profile pictures, text, and photos are always in the same place. No more swipe tap, swipe tap, swipe tap like in vertical newsfeeds. As much as I like the new newsfeed, however, it still won't make your friends' spring break pictures any more interesting. So the company didn't stop there. By swiping over, you can reach the app's news section, a completely new effort from Facebook that blends Twitter, Flipboard, and RSS. The section collects posts from top news sites like CNN and the New York Times, but also posts that Facebook's editorial team wants to draw more attention to. Tapping on a story unfolds it Flipboard-style into a full-screen article view. People are sharing more and more things on Facebook, and they're coming to Facebook for more and more things. So they're not just coming to see what their friends are doing, they also get the news or they follow that restaurant that they're interested in or an athlete that they like. And so as you get more and more of these things, you want some breathing room to get space and be able to know that if I want to know what happened in the Australian Open last night, I can go to the score section and it's going to be there. Papers' news section isn't as good as Flipboard or dedicated news apps like Circa, but it should provide plenty of stimulation for people who already rely on their Facebook feed for news. Paper is gorgeous, but feels like an odd fit for Facebook's current ecosystem of apps. Paper includes notifications, friend requests, and Messenger. There's also a new timeline view that presents a far prettier Flipbook version of your life versus Facebook's main app. Setting aside events and groups, Paper does just about everything Facebook's main app does. It feels like the app Facebook wanted to build, but was afraid to push to its hundreds of millions of mobile users. The main Facebook app is one of the most, if not the most popular app, and lots of people really like it. And so we don't want to tell people what they should use. We don't want to come and rearrange people's furniture. We just want to put out this app that our team thinks is really great and hopefully anyone who agrees can use it how they'd like. Back in the old days of web portals, an era which birthed Facebook, having everything in one place was valuable. But not anymore, especially on mobile, where people want tightly packed, intuitive apps that do one or two things well. Paper still does a whole lot of things, but it's explicitly built for a mobile world. And it's also great for news reading, something many people have come to rely on Facebook for. Especially on mobile, the screen is like the size of a business card. And fitting a whole world inside of a business card is a challenging task. It requires design innovation as well as engineering innovation to make it so when you're looking at something that small, you feel like you're looking at something really big and expansive. Paper might be too intimidating for many of Facebook's billion users, but there are some great ideas here. This is the mobile Facebook I've always wanted.

I am standing in the middle of a nightmare. If you've ever watched the Super Bowl, you know it's much more of an event than just a game. The ads, the tie-ins, the spectacle, it's all much bigger than what happens on the field. But the spectacle isn't just on TV. It's a real physical thing that follows the event wherever it goes, with TV studios and event spaces and toboggan runs. It's like all the ads in the Super Bowl crawled out of the TV and set up shop in the most overwhelming place in New York, Times Square. This is Super Bowl Boulevard, a 13-block stretch of Broadway that's been taken over by the NFL in honor of Sunday's game. You can catch a touchdown pass at the Bridgestone Tent, or Pepsi and Tostitos will set you up performing a fake halftime show. Almost all of the big corporate advertisers for the Super Bowl have a physical presence here. This toboggan run is particularly crazy. There's fake icicles, fake first down markers. To get in, we had to buy tickets that look like the actual tickets to the Super Bowl. This isn't even real snow, it's soap suds. Have you ever wanted to climb inside the body of an NFL wide receiver? If so, this is your chance. This is the Lombardi Trophy right at the epicenter. Everyone wants to see it, get a picture with it. As many as 30,000 people are going to see it just today. Everyone's lined up outside. If you want to actually touch it, you have to win the Super Bowl. This is a big screen tracking the social media reaction to the different teams and the different players. I don't know why they did this. Papa John's brought two things, a 71 Camaro and free pizza. People care way more about the free pizza. New York is a weird place to have the Super Bowl. It's cold, it's crowded, it's stressful. But the NFL ignored all that because Bloomberg's New York is built for exactly this kind of spectacle. Times Square has spent a lot of time preparing for this event, cutting off car access and building out pedestrian areas over the course of years. And as all this is going on, people are still working in the buildings over the street as if nothing's even happening. As strange as it feels, in 2014 you can build a miniature football Disneyland in the center of Manhattan and the city will just go on around it.

It's January 31st. My name is Adrienne. Oh, God, sorry. This is 90 seconds on the verge. Zack Snyder's Batman vs. Superman just got a lot weirder. Jesse Eisenberg, who famously played Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, is your new Lex Luthor for the upcoming superhero film. Eisenberg joins a cast that includes Jeremy Irons as Alfred the butler and Ben Affleck as Batman. Fast and Furious star Gal Gadot, meanwhile, will portray Wonder Woman. Excited? Confused? You'll be waiting a while either way. Batman vs. Superman is slated for release in May 2016. Aereo is sold out in New York City. Less than two years after launching its online TV service, Aereo has reached capacity and is shutting out new customers. Each New York-based Aereo customer has their own physical over-the-air antenna housed in a Brooklyn warehouse. It's all part of Aereo's legal strategy against angry broadcasters. Aereo says it'll reopen after it deploys more capacity, which is to say they're going to need a lot more antennas. Thirty years after Marty McFly went 30 years into the past, Back to the Future is becoming a musical. Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale said the production will quote, "...capture the spirit of the film but freshly interpret it for a new audience." The show will include illusions, skateboards, and many of the songs from the original movie alongside new compositions. Back to the Future the musical is set to hit London's West End next year, with a possible Broadway expansion if all goes well. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, my audition to play Aquaman. Watch, I can totally talk to fish. What's that? Pervert.

Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast, the week of January 27th, 2014. I'm Josh Tapolsky. I'm Neal Ipatel. I'm Dieter Bohn. And yes, that's right. You've entered the Bohn zone. Yeah. Yeah. We've sold Ross Miller to Lenovo. Ross Miller has been sold to Lenovo for far less than what we paid for him. But you know what? He's in a better place. Yeah. Lenovo. Lenovo factory. Yeah. No, Dieter's here, and this is, of course, the Vergecast. We discuss the week in all sorts of funky, exciting topics. This week, plenty to talk about. So much one-on-one. Nazis. Nazis. Google. Google Nazis. No, Google Nazis. Yeah. It's amazing what you find. Out of control maniac CEOs. Out of control CEOs. In control CEOs. Yeah. Cool, collected CEOs. Yeah, cool, collected CEOs. What else? What are the other topics we have? What are some other things? Oh, man. Facebook did a thing. Facebook. Nintendo did a thing. Nintendo. Robots. I want to start with the biggest news of the week, which is- Robots. ABC has commissioned a show called Selfie. ABC has commissioned a show called Selfie, which will feature... I don't know anything about the show. Can you tell us about it? I just literally... Is it a show based on Instagram? My immediate instinct to close that tab kicked in. Hold on. It's a show based on the experiences of Instagram users. Hold on. I'm making that up. I have no idea what it's about. It's happening on the website here. I'm sorry. I just need to have a drink. It's a show based on people who have faster internet than I do. Yeah, exactly. We have a little bit of a problem here in the... By the way, I hope everybody could hear that. The comedy inspired by My Fair Lady tells the story of a self-obsessed 20-something woman who is more concerned with likes than being liked. I'm sorry. Did you say My Fair Lady? Yeah. During a very public and humiliating breakup, she comes to the subject of a viral video and suddenly has more social media followers than she ever imagined, but for all the wrong reasons. Classic. She enlists the help of a marketing expert at a company to help repair her tarnished image. This is the worst. That is some convoluted... That is some extremely contrived shit that I just heard. That show immediately goes from that concept, whatever that is, to three attractive people who constantly stay in one apartment set telling each other jokes about what happened outside of the apartment. You mean don't trust to be in apartment 23? Yeah. One of my favorite shows. Or happy endings. RIP. Don't trust to be is a really good show. No, it's not. You're crazy. I watch... And here's why. There's only one reason. The startling return to form of James Van Der Beek. Now he's on a new show. I know. With E from Audra Raj. That show... Yeah. Nobody needs that. Nobody needs the B from Audra Raj. That's gonna be great. But the B is back. You know what? I have no comment. That show brought him back. I have no comment on that, but what I do have comment on is I watch an episode of Two Broke Girls. Oh, yeah. Why? Like... Did you hate watch it? I mean, well, it was kind of by accident. I've never seen a whole episode. I've seen like a minute of it. Yeah. Like, holy... Hang on. Holy shit. Holy shit. Is that show... It's crazy bad. I wanna know what this accident was. Did your remote... It was like... No, it was like I was watching TV. I can't go over there. I was watching TV. It wasn't an accident. It was like I was watching TV. I was flipping and then I just landed there and I was like, oh, you know what? I've never really watched an episode of this. And then I left it on while I was doing other stuff. And it was so bad. So first off, it's badly acted. It's badly written. It's super duper racist. Like crazy... Really? Like every character is some racist character. There's a little Asian guy who's got a funny accent. And then there's some woman who has some weird Eastern European accent. And then there's a Middle Eastern cook and he's crazy. And there's like... It's just super racist. Everybody's this weird caricature and horrible, just horrible, mean, not funny. There's definitely an article on the Garkey and it's called Two Broke Girls So Racist It's Baffling. It is baffling. It is like a show from the early 80s sitcoms where... I mean, literally like every character is just an insane cartoon version. It only made 50 on Complex's list of the 50 most racist TV shows. It's also the most popular show in America, like second most popular show in America or something. It's like the third most popular sitcom in America. Anyhow, unrelated to everything we're talking about, but we were talking about Don't Trust the Bee. I mean, Don't Trust the Bee in Apartment 23 is probably like high art by comparison. It's got the beak, man. I can't... Anyhow, so let's talk about what's going on in the world. There's huge news in the world of technology. We have a lot of things to talk about. I don't even know where to start, but I think we should start at the obvious, which is... Google. Google. Google. Yesterday... Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. They're trying to. Well, how much are they selling? 2.9 billion. 2.9 billion. Yeah. Yeah. So they bought Motorola for 12.5 billion. Yeah, right. And this is like immediately, now that I've said those two numbers... We're gonna argue on math for the rest of the hour. Android fanboys will begin tweeting at me various versions of where... Listen, I'm sure that they're... Or somehow that means they made a profit. I'm sure there's a completely fine way to justify... There's zero way to justify. No, and I'm sure you can say, well, the patents will in the long run be X, Y, and Z. We can get into it. We're gonna get into it, but I think there's no... I don't think there's a possibility that what Google wanted to do was own Motorola for how many months? 21. Was own Motorola for 21 months and then sell them off immediately. I don't think that was the plan. It's not the plan. You may be able to define or to extract some sort of victory from this if you have a plan and you have a really creative way of thinking, but there's no possibility that they bought them and they were like, you know what we're gonna do in a year and a half? We're gonna sell these guys off to Lenovo. Because that'll look really good for us. It'll look like we totally know what we're doing. And they moved Dennis Woodside, who was a high ranking exec to be the CEO of Motorola. He was allowed to recruit openly at Google. He brought over a lot of really smart people. He brought Regina Dugan, who was on the Verge 50. She used to be the head of DARPA. He took her out of Google, brought her to Motorola to be like, just be smart here and help us make cool things. She did that Project ARA, Project ARA. Which they're apparently keeping at Google. And it's crazy that Google's like, well, that didn't work, but that's cool. You come back here and work for us again. She's taking her whole team back to Google. This was a plan. They built a factory to manufacture phones in the United States. They were trying to succeed as Motorola. They were doing everything right except for cell phones. Yeah. Well, that's all. This is so awesome looking, by the way. Like, yeah, I do want the ARA. I feel really bad for Pierce. Because yesterday, because they launched the Wood phones yesterday. You can start buying them now. And this one is not so great. But I think we were just talking about- They had them for a little while. The bamboo plus white combination, Joshua was saying the plastic is like the wrong- It just feels extra plasticky by comparison. To the awesome wood. They just launched this and David had a cool little story with great photos. Like how Motorola is making Wood phones. And then that happened. And then this morning he put up a Lenovo review. And I was like, oh, Pierce. Over to you, buddy. It's actually really cool. The Wood thing is a great, it's something really different than nobody's trying to do. I think it's interesting. But the Moto X has been a failure. I don't think there's any other way to look at it. It sold, the last numbers we saw something like half a million, which is garbage. How many iPhones do they sell in a quarter? 51 million. Listen, I mean, I don't expect Motorola to sell 51 million, but a couple of million. You know, 500,000 is- They didn't even need to sell that many for it to be a success. It's got no, listen, the phones that are, look, I mean, Samsung is selling Android phones, at least in America. When I see people, here's the two, I do see occasionally people with Motorola Droid devices. I've seen a handful of those. It's always a Droid Max. I think Verizon, yeah. And it's the one differentiating feature I think we all like. It has a gigantic battery. I see the Droid Mini on the subway sometimes. I've seen it. I've seen it. I've seen it. Maybe it's like, you know, when you want something, you see it everywhere. So I see Notes everywhere and I see a Droid Max everywhere. So that's what you want is a Droid Max? I want a giant screen with a huge battery. I get it. I mean, I think, but I think that you see Droids, that's sheer force of Verizon marketing. I don't think I've ever seen a Moto X in public. I don't think I've ever seen a random person with a Moto X. They advertise it. They've advertised it everywhere aggressively. It clearly has not had much of an impact. You know what the missing opportunity of this was? It's great that you can go online, like build one and customize it, but they actually needed to shade more towards that project era stuff where you could have bought like the frame and like put different backs on it. But this is, that's exactly what they did with the Moto G. But don't you feel like this was the start? But regular consumers clearly like, I mean, I actually wonder if- Cases are like the biggest sellers. The number one accessory for your phone is a case, right? Cases are big sellers, but it doesn't seem like colored phones are making much of a dent. That's what's interesting. But I think the reason cases are really popular is because you can get rid of it and your phone's still there. So if you somehow integrated the phone with like, it has a built-in case, you can change it and make it different and customize it. Like you're tired of an orange phone today and now you have a blue one. I think that's a good point. I think if it was an interchangeable like backing, that's actually one of the cool things about the S4 is that you can, the back is essentially like the entirety of the back of the phone once it meets the band. So it's just like the whole, you can just swap it out. And you were saying the Moto G, they got there. Yeah. Like the whole, even the rim. The Moto G is like nasty. Is this the Moto G here that we're looking at? No, no, in the video. Yeah, I think this is G. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you gotta allow that. Yeah. But here's the thing. None of this is making an impact because they don't have the marketing budget. I mean, even with all the marketing they did, I mean, first of the marketing wasn't that good. It was like, hey, it was like we make a phone that you can get in different colors. That was the entirety of the market. They were exclusive to AT&T for a while, right? When was the last time AT&T got a phone as an exclusive and it went gangbusters? Like whenever a phone goes as like- Was the Galaxy S4 on AT&T? No, the iPhone. Everything that's in the iPhone. No, no, no, but when the S4 first came out, I think it was only available on the- It was on all of them. Was it? It's always, the S3 and the S4 have been always on all of them. That's the way you gotta do it. Yeah, that's the way you have to do it. They might've been like mildly staggered, but they announced all the same phones. This is like, here's the problem. The differentiating factor is you can customize, which I think is really cool, but I think smaller screen battery is like okay, not the greatest. Lower resolution display, not a great display, camera is eh, like it's a mid-range phone. I think a very good mid-range phone. I think an excellent choice. Still an excellent choice as a smartphone if you're a buyer looking for a phone of this size. But- I mean, I'm gonna buy, like now it's maybe this is just like sadness and nostalgia. You wanna buy the- I'm gonna buy the one I wanted to buy. The second best American phone you could buy. Now after this, the only American phone is the iPhone. You guys quoted this in your piece and the thing I said about it. Their software stuff was actually really good and innovative. I think really improved the experience. I don't know that it was ever- Well, so Ben and I pulled apart the timeline, right? Google bought Motorola and I have now been told this. Now that the smartphone patent wars are over and it's kind of like it's at a low boil and Apple and Samsung are just gonna sue each other on the side of the world for the rest of our lives. I mean, that's what's gonna happen. It is what's happening. But it's like it's in terms of all of the big stuff that needed to shake out has shaken out. I've been told this over and over again, which is that Google bought Motorola to try to block the iPhone from- They wanted to stop iPhone sales in any way they could. How? Why? Because at that time, Motorola had 24,000 patents, but most of those patents were on like radio technologies, right? They were on things like Wi-Fi and GSM and MPEG-4 and like standards, right? That's Motorola was big in developing standards in their old company, their innovative company. And so it was unclear, like the public policy was not shaken out whether if you contribute to the Wi-Fi standard and someone builds a phone with Wi-Fi, can you block their product from the market? And the answer at every court in the world, every court in the United States had heard it was no, you can't. Because by contributing to the standard and saying, use our stuff, you've already said you can use our stuff. And all you're gonna argue at now is money. And if all you're gonna argue about is money, you can't keep the products off the market because that reduces competition. That was the answer. It was the answer in Europe. It was the answer at the United States. And in court, it was the answer in the International Trade Commission in the United States. And so Google, that answer wasn't shaken out. So Google made a $12 billion bet on let's try to block the iPhone. And when Apple can't sell the iPhone because we have the essential patents on Wi-Fi and GSM, they will have to negotiate an Android license with us. And if they had won that bet, this would have been brilliant. Like just flat out brilliant. I mean, was it worth, was it worth, I mean, do you honestly believe they made a $12.5 billion bet on that one thing? I do. There had to have been another. No, I've been told like at this point, the number of people and the type of people who have basically said they were trying to block the iPhone, like that's what they were trying to do. That's what Sergey Brin told you. Larry Page, Larry Page personally. It was some people like that. So that's what they tried to do. And they lost. And whatever. And the patents, like they're gonna keep, Motorola has 24,000 patents and patents. They have patent applications. Google's gonna keep most of them. 10,000 of them I think are going to Lenovo because they're about manufacturing. So who cares? But the patents are worthless. Like they ended up being worthless. And so you can say when Google bought Motorola, they valued the patents at $5 billion. So they bought it for $12.5 billion. We can round up. Fine. They valued it at 5.5, we'll round up. Patents worth $6 billion. So they have $6 billion of value left. They sold the K-Walks business for $2 billion and they sold the manufacturer, the phone man business for $3 billion. So they're still just, okay, fine. You lost $1 billion. Which is nothing to Google. Plus you lost another couple billion dollars in operating costs over the past few years. You have a failing business. But when you paint that picture, it doesn't sound that bad. But the value of the patents is just, it's nothing. It's paper. It's the value of paper. Well they were valuable enough to cross license with Samsung. Yeah. Unless there's a patent. We should get that. Unless there's patents there that we somehow have overlooked the value of. The value of the patent, and this is why this deal blew up in Google's face. The value of the patent is not the technology that it describes, right? Because obviously Samsung can just make the technology and Apple can sue them. You can violate it, whatever. The value of the patent is how much you can get from other people for it. Because all the patent is, is the monopoly on the ability to make, use, and sell something. So I have a patent on this phone, you can't sell it. If you want to sell this phone, you've got to pay me, right? Or I can keep you from selling it and then I can get all the money from everybody else. Well Google has no ability to get money from people for those patents. Right. Even in the cases where Motorola tried to do it, they sued Microsoft. They were going to block the Xbox 360. If you want to sell them, you've got to license their MPEG patents for them. We want four billion dollars. The court was like, no, you can have 1.7 million. What's weird about it is- A million. A million. Yeah. What's weird about it is it just feels like Google, I mean, they didn't even really try to utilize the patent. I mean, there was a couple- Google has been running on saying we're never going to sue people. Right. They kind of trapped themselves where I get that they have the opportunity to do it and maybe to be more aggressive with it. But then you see the court cases are, I mean, the court cases are Apple and Samsung. And Samsung is, we can say Samsung is a proxy, but the court case is not against Google. And Samsung can't defend itself with Google's patents. Well- They kind of tried. Remember Google signed over some to HTC that they licensed for a dollar. Yeah, yeah. But HTC and Apple settled. Right. Nokia and Apple settled. They were suing each other for a minute too. They settled. And the funny thing is that the game is not about, consumers see it as, I think, Android fans are looking at it going like, this is about the stuff they made. I think that people who bought into the possibility of Motorola and Google creating some really awesome stuff together are like, this was supposed to be about that, like what happened? And I think that it's so much not about the products anymore. The whole game right now of tablets and smartphones and the devices we use every day isn't about, there's really just no players. There's two players, there's Samsung and there's Apple and everybody else is kind of just pecking around for a couple of people here and there. How many Nexus phones do you think they're selling? I'll bet it's fewer than the Moto X sells because they advertise them far less and they are ultimately more expensive when you buy them at a store, if you were going to buy them just like at face value, right, if you walked into a store versus going online. So the whole thing is like, what does Google do here in the sense of Apple sold a lot of phones. They make a lot of money selling phones. They might not have sold as many phones as the street said they were going to, but they did very, very big numbers. And I don't think anybody Apple is too bummed about, you know, the 5C apparently was a bit of a miss. We're going to give them the earnings. We will talk about it, but I'm just saying like, so who competes there? In order for Google to have like made the Moto X or a Motorola phone a success, it would have to compete on the same playing field that Samsung is competing on and that's marketing. That's a ton of marketing money. And had they done that, that would have screwed up the relationship with all of their OEMs. I mean, this is literally, I mean, somebody, I just want to tweet this. They're like, it's like Mike, they're like old Microsoft and it really is. They are now, they have now put themselves in terms of this stuff in a position that Microsoft was in not that long ago. And as we can see with Microsoft, it has been a total clusterfuck trying to figure out how you make a product that competes directly with your partner. I mean, I work for Nokia right now. I'd be like, well, we're screwed. Like it has never been done. Like Palm split itself into Palm One and Palm Source. Then they bought handspring and they combined again. Like that was a huge fail. Apple tried to license Mac OS to the clone maker. Steve Jobs came back and was like, this is stupid. The only way it works is if, is if for Microsoft, as if no one else makes Windows phones and Microsoft proper doesn't make Windows phones. That Nokia is literally the only maker of Windows phones as a subsidiary of Microsoft. And they either collaborate on things like tablets. I mean, but at some point you started to go like, okay, but tablets, your tablets are PCs and so now you're competing with PC makers. And so if you lose those guys, you're totally screwed because Microsoft cannot sell the amount of PCs that Lenovo does or that HP does or that these other parts. And they're all like, meanwhile, HP and Lenovo are like, Hey, Android is pretty interesting. And HP is releasing phones now in India, China. They're all over the, like the Microsoft thing is like the parable for like, or not the parable. It's the next version of this. Google is the parable for Microsoft. It's like Microsoft's trying to desperately turn into Apple. Google's busily turning into like the old Wintel Microsoft. And like we're just switching these roles. But I think so the parable for me is like, if you're going to buy a phone company, you need to desperately, desperately, desperately want to win. And if you can't put everything behind it, if you're going to tie one hand behind their back, you're going to fail. This is Palm and HP. Palm and HP is exactly the situation. Here's the thing, like you have to be all in and you also have to be willing to do something that maybe works against you in the short term. I mean like I think if Google said, Hey, we're going to offer the open source components of Android as a basis for your platform. But if you want to use our apps, like we will charge you because there was a story recently, which apparently was not the case, but they're charging licensing fees for the apps. If they had done some variation of that and said, we're going whole hog on hardware ourselves and like you can either be with us or against us. The licensing fee thing is like, you know, we checked around that story and check out, but we have known for a long time, and this is goes to right into Samsung and why they sold Motorola. We've known for a long time that they restrict those apps unless you do what they say. That's true. Google's even said it to us. I mean the most famous story of that is, oh God, what was it? It's not the most famous story anymore. Well, not anymore. Well, now the Samsung one is, but before it was the sky of GPS. They were going to be in the droid and Andy Rubin called Sanjay Jha and was like, you're not shipping the droid because you got this weird wifi in it and you're going to use our location services. That's like, that's Google. But we also know that they, sorry, go ahead. But to get like Gmail and maps and stuff on your phone, you've got to do what they say. There have to be certain requirements. Well, to a certain point, but the question has always been who has the leverage in these relationships? Who's the manufacturer and it's never clear. And so like the, the, the thing that we're leading up to talking about is that Google and Samsung signed like less than a week before this Motorola deal, a cross licensing deal. And then there's a rumor. And I remember, and they nabbed it and I remember Josh was like, is this important? I was like, no, because I would, now in hindsight that was ridiculous, but it's like, they're always on the same side. Like, of course they signed the deal. Thank you. They finally vindicated. But like, but like going from that to, I bet they're going to sell Motorola. No, you couldn't have made that. You couldn't have made that deal. But, but, but then the other part of this is that there's a rumor that, uh, Samsung is going to de Samsung eyes. It's Android phones and it's going to start promoting, you know, Google stuff more and it's not going to be so touched. I mean, I think, but I think this is based on the maps app or something. But I think this is, yeah, it's, it's John Gruber said that. So yeah, the story, the story literally earlier this week, I mean, why did Steven based on what, based on what? So, uh, maps. So Ena freed at, at Rico dot net re slash code.net. Uh, no, there's no slash in the actual, when you say it out loud, you don't have to say it with slash. You just want to say, uh, anyway, uh, she had a story that was like Samsung announced it's tab pro it's CES it's 12 and screen and the Google was like, cool. And they saw it and they saw that weird windows phone fake UI that they have called a magazine. Yeah. Uh, and they freaked out. They're like, okay, we're, you've gone too far. You're going to come back in the fold. Um, I assume Matias Duarte was like, will anyone ever see my work? That's how I just imagine. And the sad thing is he's like, he just like wanders around designing things, but nobody ever sees it. But it's true. But here's the thing about it. Like it really does that stuff really matters. And when you use like a nexus device versus like the Sony, I really liked, there's a couple of things on it that it's still like sonified, which is not that big of a deal. But on, on, on Samsung devices, it's not just that the visual design and that the UI is like completely blown apart, which it is and bad. The guy was just messing around with the note three for, for a few days. Um, it's not just that, but they disconnect all of what is like native and natural to the ecosystem of Google. It's like, yeah, it's like suddenly you're in, you're being asked to like be in a Samsung store for movies and a Samsung store for music and all this other crap. And it's like, listen, there's no way in hell I'm going to use your Samsung services. Like I have no faith in them and no interest in them. And, and, and so like, but it does break the whole, right? So the story was, they saw this magazine stuff. They saw that like Samsung was even more breaking the UI and the paradigm, turning into windows and they got them to agree, um, that they would stop it. Well, that's the story. And I think that agreeing to stop it, plus like, you know, the concessions were okay, fine. We'll stop it. But Google, you have to give us all of your patents. I mean, do you think the Motorola deal is part of that? And then that's it. And then it's like, well, and look, why? If you're Google at that point, it's like, listen, we will, we will, we will commit to making a more holistic Google experience on our devices, but we don't want to be competing against Google when it comes to hardware. Right. Right. And I think if you're Google, so does that fuel, does that fuel shit or get off the pot? Which one is shit? Which one is shit? I think that doesn't apply in this situation at all. No, with regard to like believing in Motorola and like pushing it. But here's the question. Here's the question. I think we all have two different, very different visuals. So does this mean, does this all fit with the narrative, the story that we've been hearing that everybody's rumoring now that they're going to kill the Nexus program? I don't believe that. That Google's going to kill the Nexus program? I don't know. It kind of makes sense. It's like, stop making like the Halo device because Samsung wants to make the Halo device. Stop trying to compete with us as a hardware maker because we want to be the leading hardware maker. Right. So this is- And like, we'll join, like, here's what Google needs, buying and lock it. I just had an argument with somebody on this, not an argument, but a conversation on Twitter about this. It's like, you need lock-in. Like, I was having a conversation about Apple and market share and people were like, hey, they're doing fine. They made all this money. And it's like, yes, short term, they made all this money. Long term, that may be fine too. But like what Apple needs, what all these companies need is lock into their ecosystem because like once you buy the subsidized device, like then what? And what's the next time? And so like if you don't have that stuff, it becomes, your business becomes slightly less viable than it was, right? If you don't have the lock-in. Then this is the question in between Google and Samsung, who has the power right now? Who's got more leverage? Because you've got the patent agreements, you've got the UI thing. I think they have a real- And then you've got Google selling off more roles. But if you, you asked me that question earlier and I think it's, they both got themselves to a place where they agreed to do the same thing. Right. What they do is let every other Android manufacturer go like, I don't know. And Samsung to take over even more they already have. Who are the other? HTC, failing. HTC, LG, Sony. Motorola, failing. Sony's doing well. Actually, Sony's doing really well. How well are they doing? They're third place or whatever, second place. Okay. So, but so Sony, so then they'll have the same conversation with Sony, but then Sony and Samsung are gonna have to duke it out. Right. I don't know how that- But here's the thing. Like if you look at that classic Wintel model, which is like kind of what I'm looking at now, right? By the way, Sony's making much better devices than Samsung at this moment. Yeah. If you compare this phone up against the GS4, if that's its competition, it's a way better device. Sony's great at hardware, right? Yeah. Like they have their classic Sony software problems with their great at hardware. Yeah. The software is the problem. They should just literally go stock Android. It's so close now that whatever, but they can't actually, again, Sony can't because they want you to lock into their ecosystem. They have their little PlayStation mobile store and they've got their video store. So that's like a handful of apps. Like if Sony- The handful of apps that get in between all kinds of experiences. If Sony would ship the Nexus device, that would be pretty cool. Yeah, but they're, I mean, I'm more forgetting of Sony. It's a giant phone, yeah. Saying that you should come to our movie service because they own a movie studio, right? Like they own Sony music. Like do you know the best way to get access to like Taylor Swift songs is buy it directly from Sony. Like, isn't that what you want in the end? I mean, maybe. Who cares who you buy it from? But do you want to buy it from Google Play? I don't care where I buy it from. What I'm saying is like Sony is the creator of a lot of these things. But I think that's Sony's, but I think that's actually Sony's problem is that they think that that is more meaningful than it is. Like what you're saying, I hear what you're saying, but the truth is like, I don't care where I buy my music from as long as I can continue using the service and I know that they're reputable and reliable and they have the shit that I want. Okay, even on those metrics though, like I trust Google to stick around. I trust Sony to stick around because they've been in that business. I trust Sony less than Google to stick around. If I had to- But that's like shades. Samsung is like, well, maybe this business won't work for you. You're like, stop. No, I don't buy Samsung as a media. I don't buy Samsung as a media. Samsung is a- Like in selling music on their phone? Oh, music. Oh, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. I think- Like selling media? Like I'm not going into that. No, no, no. I don't think so. I don't trust or desire Samsung for like media or services. Right. They may- No, I don't trust Sony either because Sony's going to give preference to their stuff and not to everybody else's stuff. I mean, that is why that is part of the- But Sony's like been, they just have the brand weight to do that. I think what Neal is saying is like they're at least like a trusted longstanding brand that has like done- They're like the media. The PlayStation and Sony Music and all these things like have existed for a while and they are so- It's like the equivalent of Apple's iTunes ecosystem. I'm not saying like Sony like they blew their opportunity to own the music space. They just absolutely blew it and now they're like struggling back. But like I'm saying in terms of, you're right, in terms of their hardware, they've always been superior. In terms of their software, Sony classically is like falling behind. And if all they did was they gave you stock Android and they added in the PlayStation store and a better camera app. I'd be like, that's fine. That would be great. But people don't, but that's the problem is in what Sony hopes and believes and I think recognizes as relatively true is that people don't, average consumers probably are more comfortable with the Sony Music store than Google Play Music because they don't know about it. Right. Like they don't know it, but Sony, you go like, oh, it's Sony. That's the problem because they're going to keep- Also Google Play Music, Google Play anything, worst branding ever. It's awesome. No, it's not the worst ever, but it's not great. It's pretty bad. The problem- How can you add? How can you add to it? The new ads are great. Play everything or whatever. Grammys? Yeah. They've been pushing it harder, but that's the thing. So you still have, what do you do with Android here? You've got this open thing that anybody can use. I'd say since Sundar has been in charge, what you've been seeing is the gradual exertion of control. Yeah. And they've got, so Android is open, it's everywhere. But if you actually want to compete against Apple, who is, like you said, just sitting there selling phones. Yeah. You've got to figure out- And services. Yeah. And cohesive services that nobody's questioning. You don't buy an Apple phone and go, what will I use to download my music? Right. You either, if you don't subscribe to a streaming- That's a daily problem. If you don't subscribe to a streaming service, which most people don't at this point, you are literally still buying with no problem albums from iTunes. And that just feels like a totally natural, enjoyable experience. App Store is the same way. The iBook store, I don't think that's made quite the impact, but it's there if you want it. Google doesn't have that level of security and safety yet in their services. They do in their services like Gmail, but not in their retail services. Although Gmail did have a bug where you pushed the button and it did stuff to your other email. Yeah, but that's pretty rare. Yeah, it's pretty rare. I'm just joking about that. I'll take that over just having to use Apple Mail any day. Yeah. This is the worst mail client. I can't believe people use a mail client like that every day. It seems crazy to me. Yeah. Well, you don't want to get screwed. It just blows my mind. Yeah, I don't care about... You can screw me actually. Here's the deal. Here we go. Breaking news. Google Financials, the call is happening right now. Motorola itself lost $384 million. Their losses were increasing. That didn't work. And then Google overall made 3.9 billion in profit. They made one Motorola in profit. 3.9 billion in profit overall. Up from 3.3 billion a year ago. What was Apple's profit this quarter? I don't remember. Can we pull that up? And the revenue was up to 15 points. So Google's doing fine. Motorola was doing terribly. I think Google's doing okay. I think the question is what does Google do in the future? But here's what I see. It was record revenue for Apple. Profits were 13.1 billion. 13.1 billion. With a B. They have a lot more to sell than Google does, frankly. And their margins are really great. Here's the thing though. There's a real mess going on. Things have not gotten any more organized. They've gotten messier. Apple scale. You don't think about it. I always think of these companies as being about the same size. But their scale is just ridiculous. Apple did $57.6 billion in revenue. Google total did 15. That's crazy. And the thing that's crazy about it is we've just become anesthetized to it. Because every quarter, it's like, oh, record profits, record revenues for Apple. It just keeps getting bigger. They're huge. You look at the top 10 companies. We can just go, right? Oil companies. We're doing earnings here. We can run through Google earnings? Well, I mean, Google's earnings are happening live. We can talk about Apple because they're happening. So there are two big stories, I think, out of the financials. So they sold a lot of iPad Airs, which I think they deserve to. It's a great product. I think iOS 7 is like, actually Gruber had a line today where he was like, iOS 7 is the least playful. And I think that crystallizes my problems with it. The least playful? But by least playful, do you mean most crashy? Because that crystallizes my problems. It's super crashy. But it's not a fun operating system. It's very utilitarian. And they just took it back too far. And all the blurring and the swoopiness, it's like, there's something about it where they just, the pendulum swung too much. But regardless of that, I really like using the iPad, much more than my old iPad. So they sold a lot of iPads, sold a lot of iPhones. The big story was Tim Cook dancing around the fact that the 5C has not sold very well. He was like, makes it stronger to the 5S. We didn't expect people to be as interested in the 5S. The percentages weren't what we expected them to be. So he never said it sold poorly. And then this crazy thing where he's like, you know, they just really love the touch ID sensor. I was like, dude, that's not why. That's like definitely not why. So the touch ID sensor is terrible and works really badly. I hear so many mixed messages on this. I find that it's almost 90% of the time when using it, it does not get the correct read. And I end up having to put my 5S. I've been using a 5 for a while now. And I need to make my own call on this touch ID thing. Because I'm hearing lots of people say it's the best. It's just very minor though. It really doesn't save that much time. I mean, you're literally talking about the difference of- If it means I don't have to plug in my iTunes password and I download an app. That's actually the biggest. The biggest part. So there's that. But of course Apple could just change the way they, they could just say, put your password in and like every seven days we'll recheck. Like not every time you buy something. Well, you want to, anyway. And I guess if like your annoying, I guess if your annoying horrible kids have managed to unlock your device and are buying things on it, maybe just get them their own phone. Here's your own stupid phone. You horrible bastard. Take this. Anyhow, go ahead. So the other piece was he said regarding touch ID, we have, you know, that's one of the mobile payments is a reason we're like looking at, we built this thing. So he hinted at that. He hinted again, very, very like, it's funny how much more explicit the we're going to have new product category. New product category. Oh, so Gene Munster- It was a response to Munster. So Munster goes, look, you know, like sounded all sad. He's like, you know, I just want to make sure like every, even saying you're going to have new products in 2014. Is that still true? And Tim Cook was like, yes, absolutely. You just heard the glee. Yeah. I mean, absolutely like new, they're going to- Yeah, new product categories this year. They're going to have an iPhone. That's everything consensus is. They're going to wearables. Well, it's a new, that's a new- And they're going to- Well, it's got to be done. Hey, he said they built a Sapphire factory. The Sapphire factory is going to be a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. And then- And then there's rumors about the Apple TV. The Apple TV became its own product listing on the store. And then we ran a story. The iPod sales have just collapsed. They're gone. Yeah. The iPod is like, let's be clear. The age of the iPod, this was our, the age of the iPod is over the time of the iPod where it ruled was, which is like 15 years or something. How long has the iPod been around? 2001? Yeah. That's when it came out. So not quite 15 years, but a long time. And wait, what year is it? 2014? Yeah. Whatever. Pretty close. It was like, yeah, October 2001. It's pretty notable. Like iPod sales on a pretty steady decline. Tim Cook even said, we know they've been slowing for a while. It's almost completely cannibalized now by their other products. I mean, basically everybody is getting a smartphone. Lots of people are getting, or an iPad, lots of people are getting either one of them. They both do the same job. I mean, the iPod obviously lives on as a piece of software. It's the music software inside. It is remarkable how many iPods I see on the subway still. Since I'm in New York, I can see everywhere. There's a lot of legacy. I mean, people own these devices and you can use them for years, but the moment where the iPod was this sort of defining device is over. And I think like it wouldn't be surprising in the next couple of years to see them discontinue or severely limit what they're making as far as iPods go. I have a weird, crazy, well, there's like a sadness there to me for that because the iPod was defined wholly by music and it came at a, I don't know, just a period in my life and I think a lot of our generation's lives where it was, I listened to a lot of music and it was like, this stuff is on my iPod. It's always here. I don't have to connect to like a cell network to listen to it. I think it's arguable it saved music. It saved music industry. Like iTunes, the iPod, like they did that thing. And not only that, but gave it a whole different, you know, gave independent artists a whole different life. Gave. Oh man. The original, the original commercial. Oh, this commercial is so bad. It's crazy. It's so ridiculous. I mean, this dude just rocking. He can't stop rocking. And then he got it. He's like got a firework. Fireware. Yeah. It's so weird. And like that thing that he just did, does it happen? His head, his head swing. Oh God. Oh no. Stop that. Hey, the nineties. This is basically the nineties. I mean, I know it's 2004. I mean those pants, like what are you doing? Is this the dude from House? No. What? No, it's not, but it looks a lot like. No, this is the, this is. I mean this guy cannot leave his house. He's rocking so hard. Do you understand? This is the last work this actor ever did. And you know what? It's iconic. The shit's on his reel. It gets all over her. It is. I mean, this was the first one. They were so proud of themselves. Oh man. They should go back. They should go back. So, you know, I was just joking. It's like every morning I wake up and I try to figure out what music service I'm going to use. And like all my playlists are like at 50 different places and nothing is as feels as contained and as smart. It was like somebody, I think it's very much like the iPhone where somebody finally was like, Oh, you have the answer. Like everybody's been trying to get at this. We knew it was going to happen. It seemed like it had to happen. And you finally just gave us like this complete answer to the question. And now it's the same way with everything else. You know, it's, it's, it's kind of a confused landscape. It's that you're not sure where you're going to land. There isn't, I was just talking about this with somebody, you know, the idea that when people, when records were at their, at the top of their game, when everybody's buying vinyl, nobody was sitting around going like, what'll the next thing be? They were like, records are awesome. Like period. And when cassettes came along and started gaining popularity, I'm sure people were like, I mean, I know the eight track was in there a little bit, but people were probably like, what do I want this? This is crazy. You know, CDs, I remember it took forever for CD adoption to become a thing, you know? And this is now it's different because it's not about formats necessarily. It's really about quality. Yeah. I mean, it's about, you have a million different ways to listen to music now, a million different ways that you can take something with you. Like what type of thing you take. It's commodified too. It's, I have a million different ways to listen to the same song at about the same quality. Right. Yeah. Right. Like if I want to listen to. There won't be another, there's not going to be another huge shift. I think quality may get better storage, you know, or lack of thereof, you know, networks may get better. Quality is better on a, on a service like Spotify, quality gets better for you all at once. But now there's so much. We're upgrading our streaming. There's something about the effort of organizing your music and moving it around and like that connects you to it. That connects you to it. And then with the services it's there, it's not whatever. That's why, that's why I think audio had the best idea, but then again, we might just be old. Yeah. You know, kids these days, they just put on Spotify or whatever. Yeah. They get on their hoverboards and put their invisibility cloak on and fly off into it onto it. They go watch that. So the club, they go, they fly up to the club on the moon. Wow. Where there's a huge concert. We can wrap up Google earnings here. I don't know what that means. Yeah. What's that? What happened with Google? So they beat their, they beat their estimates. They beat the street. Beat the street. Well, no, it missed, it missed them. But they missed the streets, but the stock went up. That's what happened. Great. So she wasn't that upset. She was happy with them. Let me see what Twitter says about this. Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay. We should move on. I think that's enough Apple and Google for today. I'm tired of talking about them. I hate them. Let's, what's next? I reviewed the pebble. Yeah. It's on my wrist. It's right here. I thought you were going to like lend that to me. What happened? I'm waiting for mine to get here. Oh. You played with this? Dieter said, yeah, I played, I've seen it. I played with it at CS. He's like, I'm like, get that away from me. I don't even want to touch it. I look, I really like it. I, I still don't really want to wear it, but as a, as smartwatches go, if you really, if you really have like a hankering for a smartwatch, like I wouldn't buy another one besides this. Yeah. This would be the one that I would buy. I mean, it looks like a watch. So do you read the conclusion of my review where I, this is the first Palm Pilot. No, no Palm V. Palm V. Palm V, which is actually industrial design wise has a lot in common with it. Yeah. Cause it was like, it was metal. Remember it had like a metal housing, right? And it, it was like a graphite color. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they had different colors. I think the Palm V in terms of design, it was a little bit better than this. Yeah. Well, this is, this is, you know, this is the first one I would wear. It's, it's a, it's a decent looking watch. It's I don't wear watches that look like that. Right. I mean, I have been trying out the Fitbit force, however, which is actually also functions as a digital watch. Yeah. But you gotta hit the button though. You have to hit the button. I don't know why they don't just make it like a motion sensor thing. Right. They have motion sensors. Right. It should be like a certain kind of like, if I really snap, just do this. Why don't they put old school 1980s style displays on these things? Like big LCDs? Like Casio. Just an LCD like that is just always on. This is how you're going to get this courseware out. You can download one for that. No, I meant for the Fitbit. Why they have this, why would they do that? This is a very cute little thing. Because then you don't have to hit the button. Or do motion, it's just there. Oh, you mean an additional secondary display, an LCD display. I don't know about a second one. I think you're kind of dreaming. I think that's a weird, bad idea. All right. I think you just suggested it's horrible. That's like how for the longest time, like Lexuses had that clock still on them. Yeah. Oh yeah. You'd get one of these. It has like Lexus. With the two buttons. Yeah, it's like, dude, that's an eight cent clock. Like it's a Lexus. Like don't do that again. Yeah, but what a luxurious, what the hell? Well, it's better than having to hit a button. Oh, in fit, yeah. Well, a lot of the luxury cars have analogs. But like a fancy analog clock is one thing, but the Lexus would like have a digital clock against the center of the set. I don't know, but fancy. They're like, they are also eight cents, but they're, they have like a hand on them. It's like you're an old guy now. Three year old guy clock. But I think, I think this, I think your review is fair. I think I, I. Yeah, you didn't talk to a bunch of people. Like I just think if Apple, like people ever be showing this concept of the iWatch, which actually Wire did a really nice, on one of their covers recently, they did a mockup of an iWatch, which was, which had like a leather strap and was sort of like had rose gold on it and was like actually kind of cool. Like it looked like this weird blend of modern. That's actually what I like about the Moto X with the wood backs. It's weird blend of like modern and retro. Yeah. Until you see the front. If Apple does well, but if Apple does this iWatch that everybody's talking about, I mean Pebble is just, their business is finished. Like they can just, they're done. That's what I'm saying. Your search history on this computer, Neal, I. This is not my. Parade of fail. So I only use this account on this computer when, when we do the purgecast. My search history is like two broke girls. The word racist spelled wrong. Neck neutrality, fake chart and brave new world sequel. Sounds right to me. I have no idea. I remember all of that. I remember when all that happened. Yeah. What the hell is it? I was gonna say like, you know, Pebble just into the manufacturing, the designers, the software people to compete with Apple and nobody does. And as we've seen, Samsung doesn't. I mean, at least as far as watches are concerned, like they can sell a bunch of phones. I mean, there's reasons for that that are beyond design and manufacturing, but right. No, here's the thing. The thing that makes the pebble good is like, yeah, okay. It's reasonably designed. Now the first pebble was also good. I think in retrospect, the design didn't age even a year well and it's got a bad display. Like it's kind of a little too big. Everybody likes, everybody's okay with the display except for me. I think it's terrible. Well, I think it's too, if they could just make it black and white instead of this weird blue, I'd be happy. But the software doesn't try to do a lot and that's the whole game, right? I just want this to, I just want this to tell me what my phone is doing. Right. Right. Or like, and now you can send minor data to your phone. So I wonder if that's going to be the, I've thought a lot about this when thinking about Apple's potential product. Will that be the track they take where it's like, this does a couple of things like, you know, they're kind of notorious for making limited, the versions, first versions of things very limited. I mean, I feel like if an iWatch were to come out and it was like, we have an app store for it and it does, it can, you know, there's games you can play on and there's all this stuff. I think it would be a big mess. I feel like they're going to do a thing that's like a really good watch. Some fitness tracking stuff. Yeah, they'll do that. And like, we'll get notifications from your phone and show it to you on your wrist. There's all these rumors that they're hiring all these sensor people to do like even better fitness tracking. Yeah. Yeah. So like, yeah, they'll do that stuff. I think for my theory is that they'll, they will make it be able to connect to apps on your phone, but because they're Apple and they have total platform control, they will get to say something like, well, if you want to update your app for iOS 8, you've got to put in an iWatch like screen. Right. And like, they can just do that. Right. The same way that right now they're saying, if you want to update your app for iOS 7, you got to redesign it. Right. Or you got to optimize for it. Right. And they'll be able to say like, you know, there are some apps that make no sense for them to have an iWatch screen, but they can say like, you can get at the iWatch, but to do it, you have to do it our way and in this fashion. Right. And that makes it more of an extension. What's the iWatch price point? $399. The first one? It feels like $399 to me. I think that's probably right. I mean, this thing is huge. I mean, are you thinking it's good touch screen? Right? Yeah. It has to be. It doesn't have to be. That's not. Yeah, but this is a mess. I don't see Apple making a device that is an iDevice. The color touch screen like makes it bigger and makes the battery not great. The rumor for a year now has been that they were having battery problems. Well, the battery thing seems like the biggest issue. Right. I mean, the iPhone cannot last a day. Right. I mean, I'm stunned and surprised having just been reusing an iPhone again for a little bit how bad the battery life is. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I plug it all day. It's a terror. I don't want to deal with it. It's a terror. You do plug it all day. The battery life on this thing is ridiculous. Is it really good? It's really good. Like, it's really good. Like, I... You should let me borrow that. I can't. I don't think so. Okay. I can't remember. I'm sort of like reinvigorated about the Z1. Like especially after our last VergeCast where you guys were looking at pictures, you're like, oh, that's definitely the iPhone. I'm like, nope, that's the Z1. I actually feel like, you know what? It's a really good camera, but all the other stuff is just like stupidly good. The worst thing about this is the screen viewing angles. No, it's a glass back. It's really... That's the worst thing about that. That's terrible. That doesn't bother me. What's really interesting that I just discovered is that there are a few scratches on the screen. That screen is not great. There is a... This is a... The thing that says Sony on it, there is a screen protector on here that Sony puts on their devices that you can remove. And there's just a screen under here that also has glass on it. Like, this is a adhesive thing. It's like really, really well attached. There's videos online where people are like, yeah, you just get a scalpel and put it under... Not a scalpel, like an X-Acto knife. You put it under here to pull it up and then you peel it off and it's like, it's just a protector. And then your screen gets destroyed the first time you're talking to it. I don't know. Cool. I don't know what the glass is. You just open your phone, you just look directly at the screen and just start breaking into pixels individually. But I don't know why you would take it off. That's the thing. Like it's basically the screen. So I can't understand why. Anyhow, what were we talking about? We were talking about Apple earnings. We're done with that. So now we should talk about, we're just staying... We were talking about IWIPE. Oh, Pebble. We did the Pebble. Then we were talking about IWIPE. We should watch. No, the next... Actually, a surprisingly big piece of news in a very minor way. TMNT, the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pictures from Michael Bay's movie. That looks okay. Did everybody see those? Paramount freaked out and was like, to everybody in the world, you need to pull these or we're gonna sue you for copyright infringement. Or trademark infringement, whatever the hell it was. That was great. But they're also available all over the internet. Just Google it. Yeah. I mean, seriously, like our legal people were like, yeah, they know they're gonna lose and they can't take them down from everywhere. They're just making a big show out of it, so yeah. But they actually kind of look like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the movies, from the old movies. They do. Michael Bay, he's doing it. So that's cool. He's gonna have a meltdown with the turtles in the sewer. They're a little bit closer to comics. Him and Shredder. What? No, never mind. I read the comics. Shredder. He is Shredder. That would be the best. Oh, there are also pictures of Shredder. Yeah. Anyhow. And he looks all right. I hope Krang is in the movie. Krang is the brain inside the robot body. I'm aware of Krang. He's a role playing game. All right. Oh, my God. Are you serious? Yeah, of course. Wow. You should get together and play something, too. Do you wanna talk about Nintendo phone apps or Facebook paper? Paper? I think it's what you were working towards. Am I crazy? I can't tell. I was sort of headed there. So paper? Yeah. What do you wanna... You did a big thing. Yeah, so it's... Paper is like newsstand. Yeah, so we thought it was gonna be... No. Well, that's the thing. It's supposed to be like Flipboard. That's what we were expecting. But that's there. There's all the little news things. But on top of that, it has the standard Facebook News Feed. Yeah. And you can write to it, and you can do messaging, and you can add and remove friends. I thought they were just showing a video of people playing with actual paper. No, this is their... Actually, that's what that video is. This is hilarious. But it's their commercial for the app. But here's the thing about it. It's really good if... If you use Facebook at all, use this app and not the Facebook app because it's faster, it's prettier, it's nicer. This is... My Android phones... Is there anything that you want from Facebook? I use... But here's the problem. Where's the information being curated from? So the Facebook part is just your Facebook. Also, is there an Android app? Because I have... No, not an Android. It's just iPhone right now. Oh, cool. And then the News Feeds are curated by people that Facebook hire. We're on it, by the way. We're one of the news sources. That's wonderful. Well, that's great. There's more breaking news. Ross is literally flashing red at me. Uh-uh. Breaking. Pentagon announces nomination of Michael Rogers. US Fleet Cyber Command is head of the NSA in US Cyber Command. Oh, cool. New NSA boss. Great. Michael Rogers, I know you're watching this or someone... Michael Rogers, we'd love to speak to you. Please talk to us. About your plans for the NSA. Yeah. And how you will further spy us. Yeah. I mean, Ross, you can just see what you're typing right now. You might as well just tell him to call me. Just tell him to call. Yeah. Just can you put in Eli's phone number in Google Doc that you're working from and he'll just be able to ring us immediately. So you wanna know what his interview was like? He walked in and they're like, you think we're gonna hire you? And he's like, yeah, I read that you would. And they're like, you're hired. He's like, I already had you. This is the guy who's gonna hire me. I already know you're gonna hire me. This is the rumor. Yeah, it's the rumor. No surprises here. I mean, like, I don't know. We watched the State of the Union. We were waiting for anything about that stuff to happen. Nothing. Yeah. It's like Obama gave a speech where he said the word metadata was fascinating. The best thing about the State of the Union was Biden going... Yeah. I mean, what's funny about the State... Do we know who he was pointing at? No. Polish. Any human being. Somebody who he really likes. Yeah. Yeah. And the funny thing is that it was all completely overshadowed by the dude from Staten Island saying he was gonna throw a reporter off of a balcony. Like, literally, if you watch the news right now, it's like, yeah, Obama and the State of the Union, whatever, but have you heard about Michael Grimm and him throwing a guy over a balcony? It's like, that's cool. You think that he... Which was more boring, the State of the Union or the Grammys? Ooh. Well, Grammys was started off strong. Yeah. And got boring. Yeah. Dude, it was like three hours and 45 minutes. It's crazy long. They ruined one more than it already had been. They ruined Metallica's one. Yeah. By like... That was terrible. The high hat, all you could hear was... Oh my God. The high hat was so loud. So loud. The whole time. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Some great performances. I'm laughing that hard because every time the high hat started, John, our producer, would just... He would just tweet like, oh my God, that's me. Yeah. No, no. The high hat was crazy. But the Grammys... I like how we're just taking away from... I don't know what the hell we're doing with the Grammys. The Grammys were great. Okay. The Beyonce, Jay-Z performance at the top of the show. That was great. A killer. Even though she's totally insane. Was really, really cool. Yeah. Dark Horse, forget about it. Yeah. Awesome. The best. Like so goth. Look, I like the Imagine Dragons thing too. I did. No, that was terrible. I liked it. That was terrible. I did a little Taylor Swift dancing. That was... Oh my God. Taylor Swift dancing. It was amazing. The worst thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Come on. It was like my brain... She's the only person in the room who was trying to have a good time. My whole brain was assaulted. My eyes and brain were assaulted by... Look, I like... Her boobs are so like... Her boobs are like mom... Her boobs are such mom boobs. It's out of control. Listen. Later in the show when everybody was dancing, everybody was dancing like that and it made me feel so good to know that a giant room full of the most famous, richest musicians on the planet can't dance any better than I can. It was awesome. I don't know. Some of them could dance better than you. Usher was there. Usher was like, he's like, I got to tone it down. But not Taylor Swift. There were a lot of bad performances. There were a lot of bad performances. There was a lot of parties. There was a lot of parties. There was like a Casey Underwood or something. I don't know her name. She's basically Carrie Underwood, but she's like... What is going on right now? I don't know. Oh. By the way, this piano thing... Oh, I should've done a punch there. Leave her alone on that too. This piano thing. The piano thing is all bullshit. That was such like theatrics. And also like... I have this theory. It's like Tori Amos call. The reason that Beyonce performance was good... She wants her hair... This piano thing is all bullshit. That was such like theatrics. And also like, it's like Tori Amos call. The reason the Beyonce performance was good. She wants her hair flipping back. It's cause all of those performers were like, screw it, turn on the auto tune. And I was just running into- Not Katy Perry, she definitely did not have the auto tune on. Daft Punk, Pharrell definitely did not have the auto tune on. No, that was like, John tweeted, like, remember when I put rock music for singing on national television that you had to be able to sing? And it is like true. It's like, I know like Pharrell can sing certain parts of songs, but like, there definitely are parts that- No, that performance of Get Lucky was the worst karaoke I've ever heard. And he's like Stevie Wonder's there just jamming. It's like, dude, Stevie Wonder's here, like, get it together. I was hoping that the shade in front of Daft Punk would actually never come out. It made me feel bad, I was like, oh my God. I was hoping the whole time the shade would stay up, but they would just, they just wouldn't follow it. They would never come out. They're like, yeah. No, but it was awesome when they lowered it. I mean, it was really great. The best part about Daft Punk being there was, and I took a few pictures of it. I literally ran up to my TV and was taking pictures. Daft Punk just like casually being there in their robot helmets. Just like the whole time, which I have to say is the best. Like, it's so awesome for them. And they won so many Grammys. First off, we don't know if it was even them. That's the first thing. Second- Oh God, I didn't even think of that. Yeah, they could send Daft Punks all over the place. What's so great though is like, I mean, you could do whatever you want inside that helmet. You could make any kind of face you want. They could be having a cell phone conversation with somebody on a Bluetooth headset. Like, you don't know what's going on inside. I think you'd be watching a movie. Like, I don't know what's going on inside the helmet. But what I do know is it's their choice. Everybody else has to be subjected to reality 24-7. Anyhow, I think so. I'd like to have a helmet. And they open the curtain. Also, their faces are completely covered. So they don't have to worry that they get a zit or something. They're happy. It's amazing. Well, we don't know if they're happy, but that's the beauty of the helmet. So the question is when they're like not performing, they're sitting around in the living room watching TV. If it's so comfortable- In the nude, but with a helmet on. In the nude with a helmet on. Yeah. I would think that if I wore a helmet whenever I was in public, I would start wanting to wear it when I was at home. I can get you a helmet. I think they, so people do sell really expensive replicas of those helmets, which I definitely have considered purchasing at one point or another. But I think that they, I mean, look, there are pictures of them. They used to not wear the helmets. Like long before Daft Punk wore helmets, they had faces. Then they lost their faces. And their faces were forced to wear helmets. Exactly. Yeah, Chris was saying they could be the first immortal band, right? Because all they have to do is like hand off the helmet. It's true. It's like- Yeah. It's like- Like Daft Punk will be here forever. It's like James Bond only. Sort of like how, oh, here they are on eBay. Wow. This is crazy. There's some really expensive ones like that have the electronics and stuff. Look at that, $1,500 with gloves. Like seriously, if, I mean, let's see the picture of somebody with it on. Yeah. So here's what's crazy about it. If you do spend $1,500 on this and you're like the right height and have the right style, pretty much you could go to like a club and people would probably think you're actually- But you need a friend. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're the kind of person that- I've never seen like one robot solo. Yeah. I don't know what's going on here. Can we see the other helmet? Is there somebody, I don't, this is not my favorite helmet. I prefer the- This is not my favorite helmet. The other thing I like about Daft Punk- Yeah, this is the- Don't try that, that's a good one, yeah. The Guy Manuel one. This one is awesome. Did they make a motorcycle helmet that looks like this? Maybe they have to at this point. This one is not exactly what he had on the other night. You know what's funny is that record I think is not, it's a good record, has some good tracks on it, but it has some extremely weird moments. Yes. And as a whole- Like the Paul Williams track, Touch, the worst, one of the worst songs in the world. Like it's really bad. And like I get that they were like into a certain style that they wanted to do. That record is, I would say this, it's- What's the track with the German dude speaking? Everything is forgiven because of that track. That's Giorgio Bagmurader. Yeah, everything- That song is amazing. But it also sounds like the band Zombie, if you've ever heard them, and it also kind of sounds like Trans Am, if you've ever heard them. So like it's not, it is really good. That's my favorite song on the record. Actually that or Doing It Right. I mean, Doing It Right is really, really like, Doing It Right is like a perfectly formed single- Oh my God, somebody just tweeted the best conspiracy theory at me ever. Let's hear it. It doesn't involve Daft Punk. Did someone die at the end? Daft Punk punked everyone at the Grammys. They were in sitting, they were in there, in the audience with their helmets off, along with the robots, like sitting behind them. That's possible. No. Wait, is there proof of that? Yeah, let me- Is there a conspiracy theory of that? It's like- You're trying to airplay into the podcast right now, aren't you? Just do it, just search. I don't know what to do. Just do the search, Daft Punk, you know, Grammy conspiracy. Literally brought up the like, airplay thing. He's like, oh my, where do I put it? I don't know. I would do Daft Punk Grammy conspiracy. C-O-N conspiracy. What are you gonna do once it's there? That's not gonna help anything. I don't know, man. It's this one. It's a Reddit. No, it's actually this right here. Can we get any live screen up on the screen? No. Screen my screen. This is not helping anything. This is the thing I was just- This is one of the best moments ever. Bridge cast, ladies and gentlemen. These are the, I mean, they're probably wrong. This probably isn't true. Wait, really? Can we, can I see this on the big screen? I wanna get a look at this. Oh, there we go. So here's a picture of the dudes recently. Pump it up behind Neely, would you? Okay. And then here are some guys sitting behind them in this like, sunglasses. That's like very possibly them. Oh, it's possible. Wait a second, wait a second. You're saying the guy in the sunglasses on the left? Yeah. Right, scroll down? And then this is them. I, I- No, those are not the same people. I like this theory. Those are not the same people. No, no, I like it. They're not the same people. Okay, fine. I mean, I guess it's possible, but I don't think it's the same people. It would be incredible who it was. It would be incredible, but I don't think it's correct. I mean, it would be easy to figure this out. It's on Reddit, so let's see. I'm being- There you go, okay. So there's the person who's like, yeah, here's who the people are. It's not them. Wait, who? It's the guy in the comments who's like- No. You know, I think the glory of Daft Punk is that you can believe anything you want. No, what's great about it is that somebody would even suggest that. That's why the helmets are awesome. They're like, there were other people in the helmets and they were sitting casually next to them. Like, that didn't happen. Is there a way that I can transition from here to Macklemore to John Leisure? No. You mean Macklemore? I said Macklemore. Macklemore had a big night- Who apparently has a little buddy and that's like in the name of his band and I can't remember his- Ryan Lewis? He said he has a little buddy. He's the guy who makes all of Macklemore's songs. When you- By the way, hold on. Can we play my game? I have a new game that I play. When you see a picture of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis together, imagine that Ryan Lewis has a small remote control somewhere that he's using to control Macklemore. Now, can we find a picture of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis together? Okay. Here we go. You ready? You imagine he's remote controlling him. How long are we gonna wait for this? I don't know. It's up to Neely. Neely found the one site that cannot load photos. I just meant that whenever they talked about it on the Grammys, it was like Macklemore and- I think if you see them standing together, you'll begin to wonder- This picture will be particularly good for this. You'll begin to wonder- Is that old? Who is this guy? I don't know who these people are. You've completely failed. I went to their website. Google image search. Right here. Okay, here we go. Great example. By the way, this picture is hilarious. Right? Okay, just imagine down, you can't see it, but in his right hand, Ryan Lewis is holding a small touchscreen remote control that operates Macklemore. Can we see another picture of them together? Here we go. This is great stuff. This is great. Yeah, okay. Yep. There you go. Now you got it. Okay, it makes total sense here. He could easily be in his pocket right hand. Yeah. Okay, let's see another one. Can we get another picture out? Oh, he goes right behind me. Holy crap. He's right there. I mean, would it be amazing to discover that he's a robot, right? No. That's the only picture you have? I got a whole bunch right here. Oh my God. His hand in his pocket. He's hiding it. See that? What else we got? You can't see his hands. Can't see his hand right there. Hand off screen. Oh, okay, okay. No, but this one. Maybe it's his wristband. Maybe it's his smart. Yeah, okay. I saw he's hiding it. His hand is hiding. He does this a lot. And I think that's what spurred the thought. I don't know what's going on with these. Okay, great stuff. Macklemore sent an amazing, amazing text to Kendrick Lamar, like apologizing. Thank you for robbing him. But here's the thing. But here's the thing. Somebody on Twitter did the most amazing, they had a picture of the text, maybe one that not everybody saw. I just need to find this so we can show it to people. Because this to me is like one of the best. Really? It's one of the best things ever. Yeah, hold on. Let me just, this is gonna be so hard to do. Is this it that you got robbed? Yeah, there's another one though. Hold on a second. This is gonna be a horrible moment where I try to find. How do you find your favorites? How do I find my favorites in the, this is so horrible. Oh, here we go. Oh, on the, yeah, you're. Oh yeah. Oh, you got it? Is this it? No, there's another one. Hold on. Here it is. How do I send this to somebody? How do I? Are you sure this isn't them? Can I share my screen with you? I think it's them. I told you. I'm on board with this theory. I'm going to. I believe it's them. I mean, maybe it's kind of dressed as them. What's the best way to get you this tweet? How do I? Tweet it at me. If I tweet it at you, are you gonna be able to get it there? Or send it to me in chat? Send it to you in chat. Oh wait, I won't get it here. Is this? Where can I? Retweet it right now. This is some quality. Oh yeah, that's it. Go to my favorites. Go to my favorites. We're literally on. This is great. No, no, no, just go to my favorites. Go to Josh Topolsky. Oh my God. You're right there. Go to Josh Topolsky. We're gonna follow up through faving right now. No, that's okay. Now hold on. I have no idea how to find favorites. Hold on, scroll up. Scroll up. Scroll up. Is it on the left, favorites? Oh, weird. You didn't know that? Oh, you gotta be signed in. What? You can't see somebody's favorites? Come on. You can't see somebody's favs? What did you want me to do? Send it to Ross? Yeah. Text it to him? Hip chat it? This is really. We're gonna see your password. By the way, this is not worth. Jordan. Oh my God, now we know how many characters it is. It's all of the characters. Here we go. Here we go. You and Jordan are in a race. Keep going. Yeah, this is so not worth it. Is this me? There we go. Can you open that up? That's not worth it at all. This is a letter. Macklemoreman. Macklemore on. Sorry, my brother, I think you deserve the Grammy. I'm totally lower shades, Macklemortified. Anyone who thinks otherwise is lower shades. I'm Macklemore on. Come on. No, pretty good. That was totally worth it. Totally worth all this trouble. Why is there a pen? That guy deserves a lot more credit for that tweet. I just wanna say, he only got 90 retweets. Can we get his number up? I don't know who he is. Is it still dad Ross? Hello, what happened? Did our thing go down? We went away for a minute. Oh good, then nobody saw that, right? Well, the stream went down because of. We're Macklemore-ified. Yeah, we're back. See, see, anyhow, not worth it. Hopefully somebody had a guffaw over it. It just was too much build up. Anyhow, what were we talking about? You wanna talk about Macklemore? I was talking about, I was gonna go from there somehow. Macklemore, John Lundra's favorite rapper. Oh God. And then I was gonna do a thing. Oh, John Ledger. But I don't really know how to get there. John Ledger. I mean, how much do you want? Do we really wanna go into this? People are asking me to talk about it. I mean. Yeah, but you know, we're. We were. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. I'm not gonna podiaquily yell that. This is great. And then he deleted all the tweets. Oh boy. The CEO of T-mobile deleted like, angrily. We're going down. Incoherently tweeted at me. We're doing this. That we're no good. The verge is bad. That you should read Inafree and DeRico. He's like switch to Rico. It was really weird. Like I don't know. But then he deleted all. Literally the. All I did was tweet him a screenshot and I was like, if you're gonna like throw shade at me, just know that it's still here. What's weird about John Ledger being mad at the verge for some reason is that. We're on his side. And I like, I don't know, I feel like the last time I talked to him, I was like, yeah, I'm thinking about switching to T-Mobile, because I like what they're doing. But you know, I guess he didn't, that fell on deaf ears. I do think it's insane and psychotic that they put out this fake press release with fake quotes from Ralph De La Vega in it. It's nuts. And not nuts like, whoa, they're really sticking it to the man, but nuts like, this doesn't make sense to me. Like, the thing about T-Mobile is their ideas are actually pretty good, and I sort of respect them for what they're trying to do. And like, John Legend doesn't have to stab somebody in the eye every time he talks to get his point across. I feel like it's enough already with the, you swear and you're wearing T-shirts and you're a badass. You like, pulled up on your motorcycle and ripped off your leather jacket and you've got a bright pink T-Mobile T-shirt and then you put your Batman hood on. He put up this ad everywhere, this is what it looks like when a huge corporation's wetting their pants. I don't think that's what it looks like. What it would look like is there being, It looks like a huge corporation's competing with you. Well, first off, the corporation would have to be wearing a. Look, I'm happy that they're scaring the shit out of AT&T. My entire career is built on yelling at AT&T. I like the idea of a corporation wearing itself if you think of it as like one of their corporate buildings wearing a huge pair of pants with a wet spot in the front of it. Like the incredible picture of the AT&T building. T-Mobile should drape the front of an AT&T building with huge slacks with a wet spot. And that's what it looks like when a corporation's wetting itself. We don't talk about this a lot, and we actually, we only have a few minutes left because we have to be done. Oh yeah. We have a spot on time today. But I will say that I am firmly convinced that like he knew what he was doing. He was playing character for a long time. And now he has like become the character. Yeah, it's like when you tell a lie for long enough, you start to believe it yourself. You know where I heard that? An episode of Mr. Belvedere. Wow. About the older son of Mr. Belvedere discovering. I was just stuck with you this entire time. About the older son of Mr. Belvedere discovering that his parents, like his mother was pregnant with him before they were married. And they'd been lying to him about it the whole time because they didn't want him to feel like he was, you know, conceived out of wedlock. And his dad sets him down like towards the end of the episode. It's like, you know, son, when you tell a lie enough, you start to believe it yourself. And I was like, whoa, that is some deep shit. That is some deep Mr. Belvedere wisdom. I was like eight when I saw it. The next time we do a John Lunger super cut, we end with this scene for Mr. Belvedere. Did anybody find that episode? It was a very special Mr. Belvedere. Oh, God. By the way, most of you who watch this probably don't know what Mr. Belvedere is. Check it out. Check into it. I think you're really gonna enjoy it. I actually got a lot of tweets when I went to the Pebbler review and I was like, this reminds me of the Palm and I tweeted it. I got a lot of tweets from people who were like, we don't know what you're talking about. Yes. And that makes me very sad. Listen, millennials, okay? We're old people. Goddamn kids. We're old. We're basically- Being cast in 10 years is just gonna be so crotchety. It's gonna be a bunch of Andy Rooney's. Why would the lawn be a robot? Why wouldn't it be a robot? That's a good question. If I'm gonna have a lawn, I want it to be made out of robots. The robotic lawn is made by a robotic lawn mower. I don't know. All right, one last thing. That's definitely the end of the first guest. One last thing. One of our worst. Okay, let's see. We didn't talk about Nintendo making phone apps. Oh, Nintendo. Yeah. So they have bad earnings. They said they're gonna make a non-wearable health device. Which is insane. No, it's... Okay. It's gonna be a new scale. An awesome scale. Yeah, it's smart, but the idea that a non-wearable health device that isn't really a video game is going to save or help Nintendo in any way. Maybe it's a mirror. You don't know. Maybe it's a mirror that you put in your bathroom and it tells you whether you're fat or not. We're gonna start making profits again by 2015 because we're doing this. Right. It's like, okay. So Awada said, Nintendo will use smart devices to make connections with customers, but he ruled out releasing existing games on those platforms. Believing the company is unable to show its strength as an integrated hardware software business elsewhere. But it's... Which is wrong. Well, but... It's wrong. But also, it just... It just, service apps will be released this year. The company will seek to use smart devices for services such as selling games that have been previously confined to game consoles. Such devices are likely to provide better experiences, Awada recognizes. Such devices are likely to provide better experiences than Nintendo's own hardware for certain features unrelated to games. And it's like, have you ever... I know, what does that mean? Like, you get to like manage your... No, sort of held the D.F. Just hand. You manage your like backpack in a game. Just because Nintendo made shitty consoles doesn't mean that it's the right strategy to put them on other, on phones. Like, they made a bad console this generation. I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to do the thing Sony did with the PlayStation phone and the phone stuff. That was a great success. And they're not trying to do that. No, but they're not doing that because they don't want to release their games. No, but they're not putting their games on phones. They're doing, they're like toying with things that are in the periphery of doing that, but they're not going to straight do it, right? That's what this is about. And like read, you know, stand by for reporting on this. I'm thinking more, I'm not Sony. I'm thinking more of like smart glass. Yeah. Like that's kind of what they're doing. Kind of like that, yeah. Only you can buy stuff. Yeah, but that's... I mean, I've used smart glass exactly once. Smart glass, when you play... You're talking about the Xbox thing? Yeah, I mean, with the game. I used it one time with the game and it worked terribly and it was not, it wasn't a great addition. The one place it's awesome is on Xbox One. If you play Madden, you can like do all kinds of stuff with smart glass. That's neat. I mean, that sounds cool, but like... Other than EA, name a company that's not as influential and important as Nintendo that only makes phone games. Yeah, no, I mean, the argument is, and I've heard it from everywhere. I've heard it from Microsoft. Like why is an office on iPhone? They're like, well, there's no big company that makes real money selling software on mobile. Right. Okay, well that's... No, the scale doesn't work. Right, so I assume Nintendo's making the same argument, but they're Nintendo. If they put Mario on the iPhone and they sold it for $15 instead of three, they wouldn't make the money. I mean, I think the problem is that... If they did it for 15 or 20 or whatever, like that could be interesting. Yeah, but they're an intent like... Well, they're like, culturally, they fundamentally don't believe that that's the right thing for them to do. I think there's also this issue. I think there's also this issue that like their hook was motion gaming. Well, that was so easily borrowed. No, but I mean, now that the Kinect exists, I feel like that's taken a lot of that fire and excitement. I think like when kids are like, oh my God, mom and dad, we wanna like get a game system that does this like crazy motion stuff there. The Kinect is the thing that they look at. They're not thinking about like... They're not thinking about this weird huge controller. Like I played the Wii U... Every time I use the Wii U, I'm like, why am I using this? I played one game on the Wii U. The zombie game? Zombie U. And it was really fun. I never finished it. Cause it was like after a while, I was like, okay, like it's cool. Like I get all this stuff, it's really exciting, but I just kind of like my interest waned and then there was not another game. There wasn't another game where I was like, this seems really cool. And I get that there are things you could do. They think their biggest problem is they didn't build, they needed to do two things. They needed to build some awesome new way to interact with your games, which they kind of did, sort of, it was like pretty crappy experience in a way because it's a capacitive and all this stuff. But then they didn't build a console that's competitive. They didn't build an Xbox One. They didn't build like a hub for your entertainment. And unfortunately for them, things have moved on. Do you have your TV plugged in your Xbox? It's a question I ask everybody. No, I don't because there's several reasons I have not bought an Xbox One. I don't know about the white one. I don't know if it's plugged in because I don't plug in, yeah, it looks cool. Yeah, the white one looks like a crappy Xbox One. Yeah, I think the black one looks better, but I don't have it plugged in because the sound, it's not passing through sound. No, I keep asking everybody if they have the TV plugged in the Xbox One. I already have enough sound problems. I don't need to add one by like adding the Xbox. I mean, most people are taught to. That interface isn't that much more useful than like Time Warner's refreshed interface. It's only slightly more useful. That is the weakest praise of all time. No, but I'm just saying. That's like, there you go. I'm saying like, yeah. That's like the TV marker. It's the lesser of the evils, but it's not like such a revolutionary way to interact with my TV that I'm like, oh my God, I have to use this all the time. Yeah. And then I think includes the Vergecast. Yeah, we're done, we gotta get out of here. We'll be back next week. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us, vergecast at theverge.com. You can find us on Twitter, theverge is at Verge. Oh, I'm sorry, you can leave a comment in the post when it goes up, you can start a forum topic. You can tell me how much you think Android patents are worth. You can yell at me, well, you can find us on Twitter. The Verge is at Verge. I'm Joshua Topolsky, Neelai is Reckless. Dieter is Backlon, B-A-C-K-L-O-N. There's a perfectly great reason for that. I'm like a broken record. I can't do the same things I always do. It's really annoying. And, oh, and that's it. That's it. That's all we got. We're gonna be back next week. Yeah, it's gonna get weird. By the way, if you haven't seen it, check out the latest 90 seconds on the Verge, which I just, did it air today or yesterday? Yesterday. Yesterday. Yesterday, featuring Bryce Slade, who's one of our newest, one of our hot new performers. Nobody on YouTube understands. That we really like, and in fact, after I sign off, I'd love it if we could just run 90 seconds. I don't know if you guys are set up for that in the booth, but you find a way to make it happen. But anyhow, that's the Verge cast this week. We'll be back next week. John was more than ready. And it's always, it's always, frankly, look, I'm gonna just say it. You know, what we hope will happen with you and your family is not gonna be the outcome. The outcome is far worse. And you know, it sucks, but that's the way it is. demande ton이� Chad!

It's Thursday, January 30th, 2014. I'm Katie Drummond, and as the science editor at The Verge, I'm often called upon to debunk the mysteries around the office. Katie, look at this new magic trick I learned. Get out of here, you waste crafty man! This is 90 Seconds on The Verge. This is Facebook Paper. The company announced today a new standalone iPhone app that rethinks the Facebook newsfeed and foregoes virtually all buttons in lieu of swipe gestures and full-screen content. Paper for iPhone launches this Monday in the US, and it'll be ad-free, at least for now. In the midst of a rough year, Nintendo has promised to release smartphone apps. Not games, just apps. CEO Satoru Iwata announced that the first so-called service apps will be arriving later this year. He ruled out releasing any existing titles, but the app developers are not expressly restricted from making new games or using the company's famous characters. Iwata says Nintendo remains committed to gaming hardware, and also teased a mysterious, quote, non-wearable health product in the future. And finally, a Seinfeld reunion is coming very, very soon. As a guest on the radio show Boomer and Carton, Seinfeld this week confirmed that he and Jason Alexander, who were recently spotted at Tom's Restaurant in New York, were there filming a, quote, short-ish reunion. Fans of Seinfeld will know of Tom's Restaurant as the stand-in for Monk's Cafe. Seinfeld said the reunion was neither a commercial nor an episode of the web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. But he also said it was not, not either of those things. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, in an effort to compete with ABC's new show, Selfie, CBS develops the sitcom How I Snapchatted Your Mother.

Sup nerds, check it, it's Wednesday, January 29th, 2014, hump day! It's your boy Bryce Slade and this ain't your mama's new show, it's 90th. Google is officially selling Motorola to Lenovo. The acquisition is worth just shy of 3 billion dollars. Include a handful of patents, but is primarily about devices like Moto X. Google originally picked up Moto in 2012 for 12.5 billion dollars. POTUS, Barack Obama had a State of the Union address last night and he announced his plan to create six high-tech manufacturing hubs around the US. There weren't many deets on the plan. The president did, however, push for congressional support. Barack asked for both houses to get those bills on his desk so he can get more Americans back to work. And finally, the Super Bowl is this Sunday and it's gonna be mad cold. Luckily the boys over at Fox Sports are using these record low temps to try out their crazy new cameras. The network recently announced that it will film the Super Bowl with infrared cameras, showing players body temperatures along with in-game stats. For more Super Bowl news, we're gonna go over to my main man, DJ FreshDirect. What up? People are hype. It's chilly outside. I'm excited. Back to you. That is it for today's top stories coming a la mañana. My girlfriend starts working at Chipotle and so you know I'm gonna be up in that burrito bowl.

It's Tuesday, January 28, 2014. I'm Addy Robertson, or as I'm known in the hacker community, Hacklemore and Ryan Lewis. This is 90 seconds on the Verge. The era of iPod monarchy has officially become history. Yesterday, during Apple's earnings call, the company announced it only sold 6 million iPods between October and December of last year. That's down 52% from 2012. But it certainly wasn't bad news for Apple, which had its biggest financial quarter ever. The company sold a record-breaking 51 million iPhones and 26 million iPads. Apple doesn't break down the sales numbers of different iPhone models, but CEO Tim Cook did express surprise at the lower-than-expected number of 5C sales. The Department of Justice has reached an agreement with major tech companies, providing more transparency amid growing privacy concerns. The new deal would allow each company to publicly announce the number of FISA requests and national security letters it has received in a given year, as well as the total number of users affected. However, both numbers will still have to be reported in bands of 250 or 1,000. In response to the order, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and LinkedIn have all announced that they are withdrawing their motions against the FISA court. And finally, spoiler alert, here is Peter Capaldi's new outfit for Doctor Who. Each incarnation of the Doctor brings a new actor and a new trademark outfit. Capaldi's fanciful garb is marked by a snappy red-lined coat and a decided lack of neckwear. Capaldi made his debut as the Twelfth Doctor at the very end of December's Christmas special. His first real season won't be seen until later this year. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, Edward Snowden reveals his biggest leak yet. The NSA is wiretapping the TARDIS.

Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. I am one of your hosts, Peter Bohn. I may have started Twitch early, but we're here. Greetings, hello. I am Flat Sevov, one of your other hosts. And I'm number three, Dan Seifert. And Chris Ziegler is in the city of New York, but he is not in our offices and was unable to join us. He is currently wandering the streets. We won't say why. Well I don't know if that's a good point. It is so cold in New York today that I bet you Chris is probably like frozen to a pole right now. If you've been following ZPower on Twitter, you will note that he is currently looking for apartments. And having less than adequate luck, he was complaining about a rhombus shaped apartment earlier, a rhomboid apartment. That sounds like it would be an actually pretty roomy apartment for New York. Yeah, I mean I'm relatively happy with my apartment, but that's because I live in Brooklyn where there's just so much space, it's amazing. I'm relatively happy with my house because I don't live in New York City. No. But we're going to soldier on without Chris. Although I do have to mention that I have, he and another Virgin employee, there's currently a bet going about who's actually going to pull off their move successfully first. And I have 50 bones, 50 large ones, actually not really large ones, just $50, 50 bucks down saying that Chris will not complete his move successfully first. And the fact that his apartment search is going so badly, I feel bad for him as a human, but I feel great for myself as a person with a bank account. So I'm pretty excited. I should just point out that Chris is in fact with us. He's in the background in that Virg portrait behind you, Dieter. Oh yeah, that's true. He's right back there. Over your left shoulder. This is weird now, I feel like he's staring at me. Because in that picture he's holding a phone and he's looking directly at me. I'm sure he's staring at you anyway. How many walls would a rumboid apartment have? Four, right? Four. Isn't that the squished square? Yes. Well, not squished. Slanted square? Yeah. When you go like that. I get my geometry terminology mixed up sometimes. Well I'm a product of the North American US school system, so needless to say, I know my geometry. So weird week in mobile news. Lots of sort of random stuff. It's also earnings week, so we'll probably touch on some of those. But before we get to any of that, we want to point out that our very own Niel Atletel has reviewed this. This is the Pebble Steel. And he let me borrow it here for the mobile show. And it's a, if you look at it from the side, it looks pretty blocky. But other than that, it is a handsome little watch. If you compare it to the original Pebble, it just makes the original Pebble look like junk. I'm a terrible person. People told me I'm wrong about that, but I'm not wrong. And he likes it. I think he gave it a pretty good score, like a 8.5? Yeah. Yeah. He scored it pretty well. I'm one of those people who says you're wrong. I mean the original Pebble Steel looks and feels like a very decent watch. I'm sorry. You're so wrong, Flav. I thought that too. I mean I said steel looks so much better than the original Pebble. It feels like a million times better. No, but hang on. That's not what I said. D2 was bashing the original Pebble. I didn't say the new one isn't good. I'm just saying that it doesn't completely diminish the reason for the old one to exist. That's what I'm saying. It does. It does. Nobody should ever buy the original Pebble. I mean the Steel's going to be shipping soon. You should not buy the original Pebble. You should buy the Steel. Although it is a hundred bucks more which is a lot. But I mean I'm pulling a Vlad right now. I feel pretty good about this. Yeah. Pretty sweet. The one in the middle because I know I'm going to get questions about it is a phosphor e-ink watch, not a smart watch, just a regular watch watch. Man, this is awesome. I'm going to wear three smart watches all the time. I need to get the Gear and I need to get the MetaWatch. Nobody needs to get the Galaxy Gear. That is a categorical statement. So I don't want to steal all of the other stuff because I'm sure he's going to talk about it on the Vergecast proper. But his metaphor at the end is that this is like the Palm, the Pilot, the original Pebble and the Pebble Steel is like the Palm Five. I think that's exactly right. In terms of hardware quality and the jump and functionality and also in terms of potential to be completely destroyed by a major competitor if you don't stay on your game. So I know, I'm sure like you mentioned, Neil I don't have plenty to say on the Vergecast and he can talk about the hardware, but I've been using the new app and the app store to go with it. Yeah, what do you think? I haven't been using the app store yet. So it's greatly improved over the old app. It's much better looking. That's a lot nicer and the fact that you can download watch faces and apps using Pebble's own app and manage them. There's like a little storage space. So even with the Pebble Steel you can only store eight apps and stuff on this Pebble at one time. So it's easy to fill that up so that the mobile app on your phone gives you a place to like hold the ones that you're not using and you can easily swap them back and forth and stuff. But that's really cool. There used to be third party apps that you need to do all that stuff with. There was third party apps to find watch faces and all this other stuff. So Pebble's kind of brought all of that in house. It's a much better user experience. It's way easier for people to grasp if you're not a super nerd. For those of you watching us on, oh man I just picked the wrong question. Sorry about that everybody. I was answering a question about, I meant to answer a question about did you order the Pebble Steel. Here, this is the one. Have we ordered the Pebble Steel? Guys, if you're watching YouTube you'll see this question from Tomas. I just slaughtered your first name. Yes, I ordered the Pebble Steel. How about you guys? I did not. No? I did not. Hey, that's a mistake man. Maybe if they release a wooden one. Yeah, oh god, don't even start. I know you're desperate to talk about your wooden Motorola X. So I'm actually really excited about the app store for Pebble. I'm hoping that they can charge and the developers will be able to make money. They'll probably have to give Apple their 30% or whatever. That stinks but that's life. But finding apps right now for the Pebble without the store, it feels again like the early days of Palm of like hunting through forums and searching Google and ending up at the place. You don't know if it's sketchy or not and finding, downloading stuff from random drop boxes and other random places and not really knowing where it's coming from and not really knowing if you can trust it. I mean there's a reason that app stores are popular on phones because they're stupidly convenient and they instill a sense of trust and Pebble needed that. So I'm really excited to be able to install apps that way and not have to futz around hunting through Pebble's forums to find stuff anymore. The other interesting thing about the new software is that there are apps that Pebble is partnered with, with like Foursquare and Yelp and ESPN and I think GoPro as well. So like these apps that actually run on the watch itself as opposed to a companion app on your phone. So you can check in on Foursquare directly from your watch and look up Yelp listings and things. And Neelai mentioned in the review that it's really kind of cumbersome and I kind of have to agree. It's cool to be able to like look at my watch and be like oh I'm checking in at you know Ray's Pizza but it takes like 8 to 10 button presses. And I don't know why you would browse anything on Yelp on your watch like that I'm not sold on at all but you can. I've never been sold on Yelp. Ever since the time I tried to search for carrots in Manhattan and it completely let me down. Yelp is not for me. I would just like to completely agree with Dita here in so far as, but I won't use the same palm analogy because honestly palm is one of those things that happened before I cared. But it does feel very much like this stage in the development of smart watches is very much where we were when smartphones just started to get off the ground. Exactly as Dita was saying, you go and you scout around and you scram around for apps and you find the ones that really appeal to you and are neat and whatever. And I think that's part of what builds enthusiasm for these platforms and for these you know things that develop over time and things that get the grassroots support. It's being able to find some good ones. And I think that's been the case with Pebble. I'm still a huge fan of that piney wings one that was shown to us at CES which was simulated tiny wings on Pebble which was made by a fan and a user. So that's the beginning stage but as Dita says, in order for things to mature and for them to coalesce and for more serious developers to invest more serious time into it, you need this sort of an app store. So I haven't been using it and I'm encouraged by what Dita is saying in so far as the things that Pebble wanted to achieve are happening. And finally I would like to point out that it seems like all of us are wearing a Pebble at the moment. I am not wearing a Pebble at the moment. I put mine on for the show. You're wearing two. No I took them off, now I'm just wearing a dumb watch. Although I need to ask you guys a question. This is the review unit and it's paired to Neelai's phone and he's next door. Uh oh. Can I check him in to Dunkin' Donuts because I totally can right now. Yeah, well see the thing is like nothing will happen on his phone. The Pebble will pull all the data using the data connection on the phone and it will find the location data and stuff like that but when you're interacting with it, nothing changes on the phone screen or anything like that. Yeah I tried to open Pebble Snap and it says that he needs to open an app on the phone so I won't be able to take creep shots of Neelai. Which would be amazing right now if I could do that. Well it must be pretty close by right because it's a Bluetooth connection. So okay, questions coming in. I'm not going to do this all show but I think it is kind of fun. So here's one, will you wear Pebble Steel daily? And yeah, probably, we'll see. I know there was an earlier question, is 250 bucks a lot? I mean if you're going to spend 250 bucks on a smart watch you better wear the damn thing right? So yeah and what I feel about the cost of this is like the Pebble Steel is a greatly improved hardware over the regular Pebble but if it wasn't a smart watch, it would be grossly overpriced. It's like the hardware that you get on like a $70 to $90 fossil watch right? It's not exactly a high end watch, it doesn't quite match a citizen or a psycho that can command $300 to $500. It's certainly not a watch that's multiple thousands of dollars. So the reason that it's 250 bucks is because you're getting this like $80 to $90 watch with the smart guts of the Pebble. So the reason it's 250 bucks is because Pebble wants to make a profit. Well that's what I mean. You wouldn't pay 250 bucks for this if it was just an LCD display that displayed the time. I think they could justify the cost based on those things but don't expect to get a watch caliber of a few hundred dollars out of it. No I expect to wear it every day. Now what I might do is wear it but every now and then snooze my alarms because I do have a lot of stuff going to it. And that's actually one of the hassles with using it with an iPhone which I've now switched back to is you know, you kind of are all or nothing with what goes to the watch right? Yeah, I mean either if you have it show up on your phone and it goes to the watch and if you don't want it on the watch you have to turn it off on the phone. So the other wearable in the news this week is Google Glass. They have released four frames. They're just glasses frames and they've got lenses in them and you can get your own prescription so you can actually use glass if you wear glasses. And I got a chance to play around with them and put them on and they're fine. They're light, they're thin. They're $225 which is like I would have spent a really long time saying whoa. I mean there are glasses that cost that and way more especially once you factor in the cost of the lenses which these don't by the way. So I know all sorts of people that will spend that much money on fancy frames or just good looking frames. I don't obviously but you're already spending $1500 on Google Glass so I kind of have to assume that the $225 is going to be a sticker shock. But wait, this is $225 for essentially a middleman so it doesn't include the lenses for your prescription glass wear and it doesn't include the Google Glass, it's just a frame to put the two together. Is that correct? That's correct, yep. It's a piece of metal with a special mount for the Google Glass. Yeah, but it's a stylish piece of metal. This is true. And it's titanium right? Like it's actual titanium. I don't think titanium is anything special anymore. I had a titanium wristwatch that was really cool and I got a few years ago because it was so incredibly light and it was like people would pick it up and they were just shocked that it was metal because it was so light. No I had a buddy who was a road biker and he would piece by piece like scavenge together the money to buy titanium parts to lighten his bike up and he would say titanium. And we had like part time jobs, he worked as a bike mechanic, I worked at a photo lab and so it was like every month he could buy like one more screw for his bike. Isn't that what makes it special and what makes you appreciate it at the end? Is that you worked hard for it? Yeah and you can just get little bits by bits by bits and at the end feel like you've built something. Yeah, I mean I don't know whatever. So I'm going to keep going with this, this is super fun. Derek wants to know if I'm going to wear the glass or if any of us will. So I said they look pretty good on Twitter and I do think they look pretty good in the context of like wearing glass. And at the end of the day you're still a glass hole. It looks way better and it looks way more integrated compared to just glass on its own with the headband, but you're still deep in the uncanny valley of gadget weirdness when you're wearing this thing. And I think, sorry I got to finish. How long does a battery life last on glass? It's not all day right? And you can't like wear the frames without glass and it's not easily modular. I mean there's a little screw and you can take them off but then the stem is too short. So basically like you need to carry around your regular glasses anyway unless you want to be walking around with an inoperable set of glass. Well I have another rant about glass. Writing this article is super hard because when you refer to glasses you refer to a pair of them right? One, two, and then you refer to them in the plural like oh where are my glasses? Oh they are over there, I need a pair of glasses. And so that's fine. And then glass is singular. So you have a pair of glasses with a singular glass on them. And I want to refer to glass, it's an it, but my glasses which is a singular containing glass is a they and I lose my mind. So I'm done talking. Well I think I just wanted to make the point that I don't think anybody on our staff has actually paid $1500 to buy Google Glass for their own personal wants and needs. And even though a lot of us might have been able to get, I am? Because I don't know anybody in our office that wears them. Well I'm not telling you that. They don't wear them to the office because they don't want you to tease them. I think that speaks to where we are at with glass. I mean like you know if it's going to be acceptable to be wearing a computer on your face it's probably going to be acceptable in our office one of the first places. And if people are too shy to wear that in our office where there's like literally gadgets all over the place and our job is to like try these gadgets out and like you know somebody, you'll walk by somebody like deep in an Oculus Rift at any given point in the day. I think that really speaks to where the social acceptability of glasses at this point. I don't think adding a prescription lenses changes that at all. It just makes it so that people like Dieter could possibly embarrass themselves in our office with it if they wanted to. It doesn't really like make it socially more acceptable or anything. The thing for me with glass is and I totally agree with you guys, the social aspect though I think it can be overcome if it actually was really useful. So if wearing glass was really something that improved your life, it really gave you something unique that you couldn't get from your smart phone or your smart watch. Some sort of alert, some sort of information, some extra awesomeness that just enhanced your life to a point where you just didn't give a damn about the embarrassment, people would be using it. But what's happening is that people are finding it's got a tiny battery like Dieter was just saying. It's got kind of a crummy camera which is a gimmick which wears off after a while and you do look really rather like an asshole. I absolutely hate the glass whole term but most people who are running around with Google Glass on them do behave either smugly or as you guys are saying, they're too embarrassed and they just don't wear them. So it's kind of really terrible. And the thing that I would say is I've seen one of those like future scenario videos where everybody is wearing glass and it's kind of simulating information about who is this person and whatever and people are meeting each other at a party and what not. And that's just like a terrible dystopian vision of the future to me. It's like forget the personal contact, you just have all this information flowing in front of your face and you can just act like you're a social human being. Yeah, so here's the thing. Google's counter argument to that is 50 years ago if you had seen people walking around with phones, you would think oh my god, the end of society has come. Everybody is just listening to music and not interacting and listening to each other instead. Well that's not mentality folks. And you know this like Twitter is ruining our brains, the internet is ruining our brains, novels are ruining our brains, the written word is ruining our brains. There's truth to some of these arguments and then there's a line of like being afraid to these arguments and the question is like we would be okay if we turned into that society and we would still maintain our humanity but the question that we need to decide is not is it horrible or is it okay, it's like what kind of society do we want to form around the fact that eventually they're going to be able to build a version of Google Glass that looks like this and is relatively discreet and how will that change this because it's happening, it's coming, get ready. So yeah but by that standard of retaining our humanity, anything that happens in the future will be just fine because we'll still be human. Yeah. Right. That's what I'm saying, it's a very low standard and the thing that I would say is actually the headphones point is a good one but not in the angle that you and others are pushing it because I do find this. I wasn't pushing it, I was saying Google's argument. Hang on. Oh yeah, that's valid. But what I would say is you get on the train and you see everybody with their ears plugged up and isolated and not trying to communicate, I mean that is a consistent issue particularly in these big cities and guys from smaller towns and cities are like I just don't understand this because in those communities, you actually have communities and you actually have people knowing each other even if they don't love or have the greatest relationships, they at least communicate. They're some sort of society and in the big cities that we live in, New York and London and San Francisco, there's more isolation and this technology helps it and the thing is okay we have headphones that isolates your sound and now you might start wearing glass and it isolates your vision. I mean ultimately we're just going to end up with a big freaking helmet on our heads and just commute everywhere and just ignore everybody. That sounds awesome. God that would be such a wonderful time. Come on, I just won the Grammy's, I want to live in that future. On a self-driving Segway. Yeah of course. I mean I hear what you're saying Vlad but I also like you know that is not, people not communicating with each other is not a new thing at all. It's funny because like every once in a while people find these pictures of like the subways from like 60 years ago and nobody is looking at each other and talking because they're all face deep in the newspaper and like it's like today we're just facing in our smart phones and we have headphones on. You know people in big cities aren't going to suddenly be more communicative and want to talk to each other and things like that just because they don't have something entertaining them. Like I don't know. That's a very fair point. That's a very fair point. I'm just saying that this is one aspect of technology that is kind of assisting that trend which might have as you say lost it for a long time and it doesn't make me happy. I mean there's a lot of reasons why technology makes me happy, I'm just saying this is not one of them. So this question is like gaining all the upvotes so I got to ask it. This is Luke. What's missing from Glass that if it had it you would actually want it? And then Vlad I think you're the best person to answer this. What would make you actually be like yeah, I really want Glass? Carrot facts. Carrot? Carrot facts. I think the thing that's missing is making the features that it has now but just making it so much more robust. So actually having a camera that kicked ass and actually having a better life that lasted and actually not heating the side of your temple when it operates is actually just making it better. Not like this better rather than beater. Make it really good and then we can talk. But the camera is a gimmick. Whereas if you had one, I would just say it right now, if you had a really kick ass camera I would wear Glass. If you had a good battery that let me use the camera I would totally wear Glass. I would pay the money for it. I think for me personally it would have to be way more discreet. Like if it was something like Deeter's glasses that he has on now or just like a regular pair of sunglasses. Don't even bother me. What's that? If you can't creep shot somebody, if you can't surreptitiously record movies without getting arrested and questioned by the FBI. Well hang on, that is the other thing. When you're taking a creep shot with Glass you look at the thing that you're looking at with your eyes. Right. You're not really creep shooting anybody. You're like, it's your eyes. Yeah. You're still a creep though. It's still really creepy. Alright, so in a break from Verge Mobile Show tradition, the next thing that I want to talk about is the thing that we usually wait until the very end to talk about. And that is Blackberry. Whoa, really? Did I guess correctly? Yeah dude. Version 10.2.1 was released. And it's got a bunch of crazy features. They fixed the incoming call screen. They've got this weird pinch. Okay, they've added a bunch of features but the two headline features to me are completely insane. Dan, you pick one and I'll pick the other one because I'm betting you agree with that. The headline feature to me wasn't even mentioned by Blackberry in its announcement. And that's the fact that you can install Android apps without any conversions. So you can just download an Android app and press install and it installs on the phone. Tom Warren has a Blackberry Z10 in the UK that got the update because my poor American model doesn't have the update or whatever. And he tested it out. He was able to install Instagram right on the phone without having to do any of the conversions he used to have to do in order to get them on the phone. And that's kind of a big deal. The problem of course is the distribution. The distribution is still a problem but the idea that they advertised Android apps but did all this crap to make you do work arounds is annoying. And I get maybe they're trying to stop piracy. Maybe they couldn't figure it out but look, where you're at and what you're trying to do with this platform and this device, yeah guys, just let us install APKs. So thank god they finally got there. Yeah, I mean the thing is you can't really get the APKs for the apps that you really want in an above board way. Like there's apps that you can download from the Play Store that will extract APKs and then you can like get that file and install it and things like that. But you can't just go to the Play Store and be like, give me the APK file from this and I'll install it on wherever. So I know there are third party app stores and things like that but if you want to get Instagram on your BlackBerry phone, you kind of have to go through a few shady steps to get there. We just made that very important with respect to the Pebble, the whole utility of a centralized app store and that is the case with the Play Store. The difference is that people were publishing their Pebble apps outside and wanted you to get them whereas like Instagram is not publishing its app outside of the Google Play Store. Right, yeah, exactly so. Okay so they added the ability to finally do some filtering on the BlackBerry hub but they did it via like a pinch gesture where like you go in and custom set what the pinch gesture does and then you do the pinch gesture and that creates your filter. Come on. You don't have to describe it with such a cringe detail. I know it's weird and everything. That's not even the worst part. Like that's actually really useful and I've been waiting for them. I mean I'm not a heavy BlackBerry 10 user to say the least because Chris Ziegler has mine and so I haven't been able to use it. And I'm sure you've been banging down his door to get it back. The hilarious feature is their new lock screen. Have you seen how this thing works? I actually haven't but the way they describe it. Yeah, no I went like you can go and find like a N4BB put up a little video showing it. Basically you have a picture, you set your picture so it's like Windows. You get to like have a picture be your lock screen. Hooray! And on Windows you can like pick the thing that you want to draw to unlock your screen, right? On BlackBerry what they do is every time you unlock your phone it displays a random grid of numbers. Like just random numbers across the front of your screen. So you get your pretty picture and then you've just got a bunch of numbers on top of it. And then you need to search for your unlock number which you pick ahead of time. So say you pick five and then you drag the whole screen across so the five is resting upon your unlock position on the picture. So like if I had a picture of Ladd for example as my lock screen because why wouldn't I? I would have to take the five and like drag a five so that the five is resting over his right eyeball and that unlocks the phone. God that's so weird. It's just madness. It's just complete and utter insanity. And like okay so it's a number you need to guess that and it's position you need to guess that. I can see how that's relatively secure. At least as secure as like the pattern unlock on an Android phone. But also like the whole point of having a picture on your lock screen is being able to see the picture on your lock screen of your kid or the sunset or whatever. And instead you've got the picture with a bunch of numbers on top of it. Like who thought of this feature? I'm really confused. I'm really confused. I'm sure that there's a BlackBerry fan who is writing angry questions. It's just really, really unnecessary. I mean the point we'll be making is that these guys need to catch up with the rest of the market and just get into step with it. And what they're doing is they're trying to do unique stuff. And it's like no. Because like you were saying, this isn't really enhancing security to such a degree that you want to teach people and you want to make them learn a new thing because they're using your device. But the other thing about the lock screen which actually was interesting to me is they claim to have actionable lock screen items. You guys seen that? Yeah, so you can go directly into stuff. So that's all the actionable elements? It just means that you can open a notification directly into like a message or an app or whatever. Okay, so exactly like OG and Samsung were doing in their skins in like 2010. And like iOS does and Android does. That's not much of an action. I was really hoping for, because look, you can differentiate. We've been talking about the fact that you can go into your notifications in Android but that only really gets you to go into Gmail or messages or whatever. Whereas a lot of us would like more of the capability of like you can with Gmail and Android now to delete or archive a message right from notification, right? And particularly if we could do that from the lock screen as well, actually take action with a message or a notification, that'd be great. As opposed to just opening it up. So there's a trending question right now that I have to put up from Derek. Why are you talking about Blackberry? It's just like shot to the top of our list in terms of pluses. I can change the subject really quickly. Okay, that's fine. But like it's funny, it's worth noting that they're still trying and this Android thing is pretty crazy. If you're a guy or gal who got stuck with a Q10 or a Z10, you should try and get a hold of this update if you can't unload your phone. And you know, they're still going to sell this in enterprise. I just find it funny that… Fifth platform, what do you want? They're calling this like 10.2.1, so it seems like a really minor update, but it's like got a whole bunch of crap. Yeah, yeah. Alright, Vlad, you were going to move us away. I'm teaming you up for the transition. Make it a good one. It was actually going back to Glass for a moment. This week… Reverse segue. Reverse segue, I like that. It's true. But this week we got a report, not a rumor, but a report out of the Korea Times citing unnamed Samsung officials who say they're working on a, wait for it, Galaxy Glass. That's the tentative name. Yeah. So all of the rumors we do about it are going to be fixed by Samsung. Of course they are. Name a single category of consumer electronics that Samsung isn't in or trying to get in, a rumor to be in. Name it. Foot massagers? I bet you five bucks if there's such a thing as a Samsung foot massager. What about those little bulbs at Panasonic and other Japanese? They do? They have them? The foot massagers? No, but they have professional foot massagers at Samsung stores. I know at Samsung call centers they give them foot massagers. They've got foot massagers. But there are those little air humidifiers that I remember Panasonic and other Japanese companies do which puff out little puffs of steam. Do Samsung do those? Because I know they do kitchen sinks. That's the really fascinating thing to me. Samsung do kitchen sinks. I have a Samsung washing machine in my house. I have an LG, I think I have an LG one, it's terrible. Yeah I mean, so Samsung doing a glass like product, if they do in fact pull off their simplified UI that's supposedly coming on the next Galaxy S. And it is in fact based on the tile metaphor that we've seen on the Galaxy Note Pro which is definitely not ripped off from Windows phone. That sort of tile idea, I mean Google took it from Google now and stuck something like it on Google Glass, Samsung could easily do the same thing with S Glass, right? Galaxy Glass. Galaxy Glass. Get the name right. This is going to be such a hot selling product. Galaxy Glass with S lenses. S lenses. Okay, let's just clarify a few things. S lenses. Oh god. The way Samsung has been talking about this very much sounds like the way it had been talking in the build up to the Galaxy Gear. Everybody posting comments, we found the YouTube video of the Samsung focus. I'm sure it's fine. Continue Vlad. The boy you know man. Samsung is building up to this the same way that it builds up to the Galaxy Gear. I mean wearables are going to be the next big growth area. We want to be there, we want to have a first mover advantage and we don't care about immediate profitability. In fact, we don't care about immediately having a good product. That is true. I mean that's valid. But one of the quotes of the Korea Times is wearables aren't going to generate a profit immediately. So they're essentially saying we're going to go through all of these ugly first iteration products in order for us in a couple of years to be there, to be in the race, to be competing. Which I think is fair enough even though it's going to be rough for anybody who gets caught and actually buys one of these things, kind of like the Galaxy Gear. And the report says that this is probably going to be coming out around Ether time, so September. Okay. So that's still time. Great. So Apple sold all the iPhones and made lots of money. They sold 51 million iPhones last quarter. Is that the right number? Yep, new record. Every quarter new record. And if there's any dark downside to it, it's that the 5C didn't do so hot. Well okay, so basically Apple didn't say the iPhone 5C didn't sell. And they didn't even quite say the iPhone 5C didn't sell as well as they expected. The thing they kept saying is stuff like the mix was stronger to the 5S and it took some time to build the mix the customers were demanding. They were saying the 5S was… We got the percentages wrong, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, well they were saying the 5S was like in short supply pretty much the whole quarter, right? And they were trying to say the mix things and things like this. But it's hard not to see the 5C as like a thing that's pushing people to buy the 5S. Like a lot of people have said like the 5C is not good enough, people are just spending more money for the 5S. And it's like okay, whatever, Apple sells more iPhones so how is that not a win for Apple? Whether it sells a lot of 5Cs or a lot of 5Ss, it's still sold a ton of iPhones. Yeah. Yeah, a metric ton. Tons and tons. I think the 5C might be the higher profit margin device just because it has a cheaper parts, it doesn't have all the golden defense stuff on the 5S. Yeah I'm sure that's the case, it's probably got a slightly higher profit margin than the 5S but the iPhone is still the most profitable product in Apple's lineup. Like the profit margins of the iPhone are highest of anything that Apple sells. So if people buy a 5S or buy a 5C, I'm not sure how much Apple really cares. I appreciate that Dan, but Apple would care because they want to keep the average selling price high. And it went up. If you look at the average selling price, it went up from under, it was like $580 around there and now it's like $617 or $620. If you look at the average selling price for the iPhone, it went up in Q4 because people were buying the 5S. You're almost arguing against a fact in person here because I'm not really disagreeing with you. I'm just saying people are going to get really granular with the details with Apple's earnings and profits and they're going to be like, well this didn't match expectations and that and whatever. And it's just kind of, you shrugged. I think you're absolutely right. The headline figure is the phones are still selling like crazy, Apple is still thriving, everybody else is struggling to compete apart from Samsung and the status quo will just continue. I mean that is really the situation we're in. Anything else we want to say about it is really just picking away at the details. I mean the thing that Tim Cook said was it was the first time we'd ever run that particular play in reference to trying to sell two different models of iPhone in a single quarter instead of just last year's model as the cheap model. And the demand percentage turned out to be different than we thought. Basically like they tried a thing and it didn't work that well and they didn't quite come out and say yeah that was a miss, that was a whiff. But they didn't not say that either. And I think that if there's a downside to this, it's one they didn't get supplies in the 5S ramped up because they spent time building 5Cs. Two I bet you that the 5C could have expanded the market and they could have played around with prices more for them and that isn't happening, especially in North America. And three it just looks bad for Apple to have a product that isn't a hit when it's a new product for them. And the 5C isn't really a new product but it's kind of a new look for them and it didn't do that well and it doesn't look good and it doesn't feel good to have missed the mark on the market. And it's not going to hurt them, they're going to be doing just fine. They brought in a bunch of revenue and a bunch of profits and they're going to be able to enter new categories and they tease the fact that they're going to enter new categories this year. But it doesn't change the fact that there's a thing that Apple sold that didn't have stratospheric sales and didn't match up to what Apple was hoping it would do. Unless Apple's strategy was to drive people to drive 5S. You introduce a whole series of colorful phones, your first colorful iPhones and that's just you. The goal at the end of the day is to sell more phones or sell more product or whatever and they sold way more product last quarter than they did any other prior quarter. Dan you seem to be getting more cynical when you shave, you should rebuild your beard. Come on man, I don't care what the goal is, we're having this CFO level discussion right here which to me is just garbage frankly. Apple sells a lot of iPhones, Apple makes a lot of profit. We could be saying this for the next three years, it doesn't matter. What actually really bothers me about Apple and the reason I'm not using an iPhone right now is that there are fundamental problems with the UI which the company is not addressing. There's software. We could say that to a blue in the face and people could say that the iPhone screen is too small to their blue in the face. But at the end of the day, Apple is still selling lots of iPhones. That's right. We're still buying it. I'm in the same camp as our editor-in-chief Josh Polsky, I just switched back to an iPhone and man the screen is small and if I hadn't jailbroken this thing I would have already switched away because the transitions on the UI are just way too slow and there's significant problems with certain apps, mail in particular and you can't set your defaults if you want to switch browsers or switch email apps. I mean I agree with you and I use an Android phone 99% of the time because of all this but those are also all power user feature things. The fact of the matter is that Apple is still selling more phones than like anybody else. Okay, yeah but Dan, that doesn't really excuse the fact of bad usability. It just doesn't. I mean, because here's the thing, we don't have stats on people satisfied with their phone 12 months down the line. Yeah they do and Apple's like satisfaction is like 90%. And that's why people keep buying iPhones. The people that are buying iPhones in America are not first time smartphone buyers. They've got really super high loyalty rates too. I will say that I am not super sympathetic to like power users don't matter because I think that like as a… Guys, let me cite you just one example and this is not at all a power user feature. If you go into… Let's have doing interruptions for like the next 20 minutes. What interruptions? I'm just joking. I blame Hangouts. Keep going. I'm sorry, maybe just lag, I don't know. But here's the thing, if you go into the Passbook app and you scroll through your apps and you want to drag one down, the action is you take a thumb and you pull it down, right? And that comes down to the bottom of your screen. So if the action to pull it down is that downward swipe, the action to pull it up naturally will be an upward swipe. But you try and do that and you bring up the control center, right? So then you pull down the control center and you're like I will do this more precisely because obviously the reverse of the initial action is… Wait, what are you talking about? If I bring down the notification center and I swipe up from the very, very bottom? No, not the notification center, the Passbook. I'm talking about Passbook. Cards in Passbook. Oh, okay. Yeah, well that's your first problem. Yeah, I'm using Apple's default apps. That's my first problem. And okay, so you keep trying to swipe up. I mean I've done this like six times and I figured it out and it's actually you tap it and then that brings the same card coming back up. And it's just things like that which is just super frustrating and you don't have to be a power user for them. Right. I mean you just got to be a user. I agree there are major problems that I would love to see addressed especially in iOS 7. You're giving a good example of that right there. But the point is that for the vast majority of people that are buying iPhones, they're not big enough problems for them to be like I'm going to buy a different phone or I want a different phone or I'm going to get rid of my iPhone. Yeah, there's a segment of the user base and the population that doesn't want to deal with that and there are plenty of other options as well. But you know, I could ask my wife, hey have you ever had a problem with the control center showing up on your iPhone when you don't want to do and she'll be like what's control center? I use Facebook. I mean it's just like the average user, the average person that's buying a smartphone which is everybody nowadays are really, really happy with their iPhones and that's why the satisfaction, user satisfaction scores are through the roof for Apple all the time and that's why people keep buying new iPhones and that's why Apple sells more and more every quarter. Well my question here would be how old is iOS 7? iOS 7? Yeah. Like the last seven years? Well it came out in the fall. Right, so I mean fair enough, Dan and I can agree to disagree but what I would say is the polls and the rankings and user satisfaction numbers that we have so far aren't for iOS 7, they're for the previous version. Yeah and I mean let's be clear like Dan, it's okay for us to say something is garbage even though it sells really well and I'm not saying that it's garbage but I am saying that like there are significant problems. And I agree with you. I just don't see, like I know I want Apple to address them and fix them and things like that but if you're just looking at like a business profitability and like success thing, like does it have to? I don't know. I mean do you guys, if we want to be equal opportunity complainers right now I could talk about my Nexus 7. Which is a beautiful wonderful device that resets itself now once a day and I don't know why. And the apps, they're like not awesome. You still have a problem? So I don't know, that's all I have to say about Apple. Unless you guys have more that you want to get into. Oh you know what we got to talk about this tease about mobile payments. So basically said Touch ID like we were thinking about mobile payments when we made it and it is like, it was the phrase, not intriguing, interesting opportunity in this space I think he mentioned. So yeah Apple like first of all thank God they're not doing NFC but second of all they might actually get into this space. Now I am nervous about actually drawing any conclusions about vague hints about being interested in a space from Tim Cook because how long has he been talking about TV and like with these kinds of words right? Yeah I mean I hope that if they do something with mobile payments that it works better than Touch ID because Touch ID does not work for me at all. I've complained about this numerous times and that's a great example of something that I'd love Apple to fix. It's not hurting sales for them apparently but I'd love for them to fix it. But you know if they do do something with it hopefully it works better than Touch ID actually works. I'm just reminded about Apple Maps and it made me sad. Just straight up trolling, just out of nowhere you know let's just bring up Maps. Let's bring up all the misses. No but frankly I do hate this thing that Dieter raised, the whole equal opportunity complainers. We shouldn't really be complainers but actually when you look at Apple's track record and software recently it just has been kind of sucky and I think there's a lot of inertia going on with the iPhone and a lot of Apple benefiting off the back of really great developers and really great apps for the iPhone and iOS. Like Dan, like really great apps like Dark Sky, it's awesome and you can only get it on iOS. That's right. Why is Dark Sky so awesome? I paid four bucks for this weather app and I don't know why. Because it's got this like pinpoint location so it not only knows that you're in New York or that you're in a specific neighborhood like Midtown, it knows that you are at this specific street address and then it tells you it's going to rain in five minutes at your street address and it's like right. And then it tells you it's going to stop in 13 minutes and then it's right. It's just like it's really hard to explain how cool Dark Sky is until someone is actually using it and then it's like it works and then like it's one of those things where it's just like oh my god, it just told me that it was going to rain for 13 minutes. I care way more about the temperature than I do about the precipitation most of the time and you have to swipe over to that screen so screw this app, why did you make me spend four bucks on it? You open it and it tells you the current temperature right away. Yeah, I don't want the current temperature, I want the temperature like over the course of the day. I have to swipe over for that? That's like one whole gesture. How many months of my life are going to be spent swiping from my thumb from the right to the left to look at these temperatures? I don't know what to say. But this is why Dark Sky is so cool. Actually it is a very pretty app. Although what is in the background that it's sort of… So if you hit the map button that's your radar. No you can keep swiping, you can just swipe right into it bro. Yeah. Yeah. This is really fascinating to our audio podcast listeners, watching you two guys swiping your app. Listen, check out this globe man. Look at that, look at it spin any direction. That's useless UI, particularly for what Dan is saying like pinpoint accuracy and you get the entire globe. It shows you an actual weather map. So like the map does default to where you actually are right. And then you can hit play and it will actually show you, you know, like there's my pin and I can zoom in right on the globe and I can hit play and then it shows me the precipitation animation. It's pretty cool. Yeah I admit that's pretty cool. I'm not paying $4 until I can actually order up the rain myself. You know, instead of forecast just be like okay we need rain now. Vlad, you are the one who said that we have to stop complaining and we're trying to be enthusiastic about a thing. Yeah this is good, this is good. I do like that and I would say particularly in places like Amsterdam where our colleague Thomas Ricker is really sensitive about the rain because it rains, actually it rains more often than not. He's been wearing stuff like 200 days a year in Amsterdam or drizzles. So he's got a radar wrap on his phone and all sorts of things to track the weather. So I'm sure for places like that this would be really, really handy. Well like I've used it, I've used it, I've used dark sky for a long time and I've used it to be like it's Sunday morning, I need to mow the lawn, is it going to rain in the next hour? And I've actually used the dark sky and it's like it's going to rain in 37 minutes. I'm like well I probably shouldn't start mowing the lawn. Yeah that's fair. All right Vlad, if you want to talk about depressing things we can do that. Nokia Lumia sales. Okay that's not true, it's not actually that depressing. They did double year over year right for their holiday quarter. It's just we're not used to seeing them go down from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. Well there is that. Fourth quarter is the money maker. No I think they doubled for the total for 2013 relative to 2012 rather than just for the fourth quarter. Ultimately it's kind of like going out with a whimper for Nokia but I think you can kind of say that was predictable because a lot of people, I mean assuming a lot of people are rational would have lost faith for the company given that it's being taken over and is going to be subject to a lot of change and tumultuous few months while Microsoft takes over. So I mean that's just not a great time to be going out and buying new advice. You know what do you hope for long term support? Yeah well in that in which case I'm going to recommend that if Nokia does in fact manage to squeak through and release this Normandy Android phone before the Microsoft acquisition, if you're hoping for future support, probably stay away. Just got to put that out there. Somebody tweeted something interesting that they might, it would be interesting if Nokia just released it like they did the N9. Like we've worked so long on this, it would be a shame for us to actually can it. We're just going to release one version of it and send it off. Yeah. That's a very likely scenario actually. I mean yeah I think that's exactly what's going to happen and that's actually I'm okay with that. Yeah I don't know. You guys want to – okay well actually I want to take a few more questions before we do. Palm is dead. Goodbye. See you later. So yeah Qualcomm bought their patents. Former Palm CEO Joe Jogger besides on Qualcomm's board and yeah they bought it from HP. There's nothing left. LG got one part. They're going to rest. Goodbye. I have nothing else to say. And when we're talking about mobile patents. Farewell mobile accomplishers. When we're talking about mobile patents, Palm owned or had a lot of patents for really obscure low level stuff. I think Dieter you've mentioned that they had the patent on airplane mode and they had the patent on really silly things like pocket sized smart computers and really low level things. I mean it's things that always worked well in Palm's advantage when it was actually making phones because nobody would sue Palm. I don't think it's something that Qualcomm will turn around and suddenly crank out a phone. No, I don't think so either. I don't know, they might license some of this technology and you know like Palm has never been sued in a major way over most of these smartphone patents in the modern era of the patent wars among smartphone makers. So these haven't been tested so we don't know for sure how strong they are. But like to the untrained eye, they look pretty strong. And so Qualcomm could make money off of these, maybe do interesting things depending on what else they got. But mainly I don't know. They can keep from getting sued. So that will be fun for them. You know if we pull these two bits of sad news together, you know the final demise of Palm and Nokia heading in the same direction, it identifies a trend for me which is that the whole independent phone maker, big time independent phone maker company is kind of dying. What do you mean like Samsung I guess, because they make washing machines too. Well that's the thing, now the guys who are selling the most phones are really big vertically and horizontally integrated companies. You know you're talking LG, Sony, Samsung, Apple. We keep thinking about this Amazon phone which seems like it might eventually happen. Again it's these companies which have these whole other businesses and then phones are just part of them. The dedicated phone maker is really left with HTC which is struggling and Blackberry which is just a zombie now. Yeah that's really depressing, thanks for that. Motorola is a dedicated phone maker right? Google, Google. El Google. I mean like if anything, Motorola shed its side businesses. It like sold off its heiress home business and Motorola solutions that made walkie talkies is like a completely different business now. So some schmuck named Tom Warren, maybe you've heard of him, I don't know, some guy. Tom Warren wants to know if Nokia releases Normandy X under the business that's not transferring to Microsoft, then what happens? Tom probably knows the answer to this question. I was going to say this sounds like a question that Tom Warren might know the answer to. This isn't actually him asking the question, this is Tom Warren asking us to see if we can get it right and then we can complain about it on Twitter or in other questions. So I'm not going to rise to your bait there Tom. No, would they, okay, if most of Nokia goes over to Microsoft, but for some reason the crazy madmen who created Normandy X managed to not be part of that acquisition and are part of the old Nokia, they would spin off and they would become what, Sailfish 2.0? That sounds like a not awesome future for that phone and that platform. What do you guys think? Do you have any other, what is the success? The thing that Microsoft is acquiring is Nokia's devices division. So I don't really see how you can, like what Nokia has left is things like Siemens Networks, and all that infrastructure stuff. Well here's a better way to ask this question. Under what scenario does an Android phone produced by Nokia have any chance of success long term? And the reason why? It depends on where Microsoft, the thing is like Nokia has its line of Asha phones right now, they do not run Microsoft's apps. It could release an Android phone that will run Microsoft's apps and it could do some really cheaply. And like so I could see that happening, I don't think it will because I think Microsoft could just be like well jam Windows phone on there because it doesn't really take that many much resources. And I think Microsoft could, if it really wanted to push Windows phone further down market to where the Ashes are. But there is that other option where if they wanted to release an Android phone it could run Bing and Outlook and all these other Microsoft apps that the Asha phones don't. Right I mean that's possible. It would be a weird surreal world but we already live in a weird surreal world where Microsoft makes a bunch of money off of Android phones as it is off of patent leasing right? Yeah would it charge Nokia the patent leasing? I'm sure it already does. Yeah so there you go. Okay actually so basically there is this question that has been getting up votes from this person. Shashank? Shawshank? I'm screwing your name, I'm very sorry. So we need to address it because everybody wants to know, what do you think the future of Google's Nexus program is? This is a good spot to wrap this up because we've been waiting for at least more Nexus tablets for a while now and there's been you know, it's been a long simmering issue. We never know what the Nexus program is. I think we finally do but it's weird because of Motorola. So I don't know, lots of stuff here. What do you guys think? I don't think it's going anywhere. And you know it's like a lot of people have said that the Google Play Edition program has kind of like superseded it. You know the fact that Motorola exists you know gives a lot of reason for the Nexus program not to exist. But you know the Nexus program has always existed to give a reference platform for developers with the latest software that Google releases and it's also worked as a way to put the latest software that Google has in competent hardware at a really low price. And the Google Play Edition program doesn't do that. If you want a high end phone you're paying high end prices. Motorola does do its own thing and it's got great prices but it's got its own software on there. It's not really a reference device at all. So I think that the Nexus program is going to continue. So yeah go ahead Vlad. Well I'm the same as Dan. I saw, I mean we've all seen the past few months where Motorola introduced the Moto X and the Moto G and you still had the Nexus program going alongside it and I don't see any conflict arising between the two. I think the two can coexist. There's space in the market for both varieties. There's a lot of space for a lot of variety of Android handsets. You know such as Sony's waterproof phones and guys can find unique little selling points to distinguish between them. So I don't see why Google should feel the need to curtail the Nexus program. Yeah I mean basically Google could keep running the Nexus program for a while and it would be fine. It's a way to keep their other OEMs happy. I'm sure that they get a healthy subsidy of some kind from Google for these cheap devices. I'm sure Google pays a higher price than we're paying for this kind of stuff. I don't know what the business deals are but I'm sure that they are just as good for the manufacturer if not better as they are for Google. You know that said, if Google wanted to kill off the Nexus program it could if it were to go all in with Motorola and believe that Motorola could make the devices that it needs. But more than anything, in order for Google to make Android it needs to have cutting edge devices with the latest processors and the latest chipsets and everything else that goes along with that to develop Android against to make sure it will work on that stuff. And that is one of the reasons for the Nexus program to exist. And whether that exists as the Nexus program that means cheap devices made by a random manufacturer that can be bought by consumers or if it means they have Motorola handle that for them, that has to happen. The second part I think, I mean I think it has to happen because the way that they, I don't know, to do it any other way doesn't make sense because they end up giving away too much to other parties, right, to other manufacturers, to other carriers for control of Android. They want to have something they control that they can play around with. The other part of this question I think is, and this is the big question for me, isn't so much about the Nexus program as Nexus tablets. Because weren't we supposed to, like we didn't see the Nexus 10 get refreshed. We saw the Nexus 7 recently and I bought one and I'm nail fine about that. But yeah it's been 2012 since the Nexus 10 was refreshed. And in theory Android is a better sort of desktop get work done operating system than iOS at least if you ask Google because you can attach all sorts of crazy form factors with keyboards and other crap on it and the multitasking is different. If you are Samsung you can window stuff and you can have eight little apps running in the same screen and you know all this crap, right. There's all these possibilities and all this extensibility that you can have with a big Android tablet. And so far as I know beyond the Nexus 7, Android tablets are kind of like, I'm sure Samsung sells a bunch of every single screen size that they've got and they've got every single screen size. But I haven't seen Google have genuine success with like a 10 inch or anything bigger than the Nexus 7 when it comes to tablets. And I'm wondering if they really are going to try again with the Nexus tablet at that screen size and be serious about like having it be a bad ass device that you could use to do stuff. Well that sounds like a goal that Google would obviously be interested in but I mean how do you go about that? Because ultimately it really comes down to the apps, right. Yeah, or not good. Well the apps maybe browser performance, maybe the 10 inch Nexus tablet needs to be the long awaited time when like all the work they've been doing with Chrome OS applies to Android. Like maybe that's what we need, like proper Chrome and Chrome apps on a tablet on Android. What about just a Chrome tablet, Chrome OS tablet at 10 inches? That might be more interesting than an Android tablet at 10 inches honestly. You could play Bastion on it. Yeah, really what else would you ever want to play that, dots. Actually that's my biggest problem with dots right now on my iPhone is for some reason it won't connect to Twitter and it's super annoying because I don't want to play it on my iPhone because I won't be able to show off my high score. And then on the Nexus 7. I'm perfectly okay with you playing it on your iPhone either. On the Nexus 7. So that way I could be at the top of my score list. It's twitchy and it doesn't actually. Playing dots on a tablet doesn't make sense to me because you have to travel further to make each draw so it's like you're taking longer. You're going to be all swoopy about it. Plus I don't play the speed mode anymore. I play moves mode. I've played speed mode forever. Of course you still can beat my high score in speed mode. Listen. Listen. I don't get dots. I'm not good at it. You keep playing. I keep trying and I keep falling on my face. That's gumption man. That's the right answer. I pretty much play it just to troll our games editor Andrew because he hates the game so much. So I play it. I tweet about it. It makes him mad. Yeah. Well, you know what? We've been going an hour. I'm going to call time on the Verge Mobile show. I appreciate everybody who asked questions. I appreciate everybody who watched. I appreciate everybody who listened. And I'm pretty sure Vlad and Dan do too. Although maybe they don't. You'll have to ask them. And you can if you want to. You do it on Twitter in fact. If you want to ask Dan or talk to him in any way, shape or form on Twitter, his handle is DCCFIRT. That's with an E-I. Vlad is Vlad Savov. I am Backlund. Our esteemed missing colleague is Zpower. We are all at Verge. If you don't want to talk to us on Twitter, there's other ways. You can email us. It's the Verge Mobile Show or VergeMobileShow at Verge.com. Or just leave a comment on this post. You can do it right now. You can do it when it goes up. Whatever you feel like really. So that's it. Thanks for watching everybody. See ya. See ya.

I'm Neelai with The Verge, and this is the Pebble Steel. The Steel is the newest version of the Pebble smartwatch, last year's Kickstarter darling. The original Pebble was the first smartwatch worth buying, mainly because it didn't try to do too much. It sent notifications to your wrist and let you control music playback on your phone, and that was about it. For $150, the only real problem with it is that it's kind of ugly. You can change the band, but it's still a chunky plastic watch. The Steel changes all of that, at least on the outside. For an extra $100, the $250 Steel takes those same Pebble internals and dresses them up in a tighter, smaller metal case with your choice of leather and metal bands. It's still not perfectly beautiful, but it's far more attractive and virtually indistinguishable from a regular watch at first glance, especially if you prefer larger, funkier timepieces like I do. Here's an Octao I bought in Paris last year, and the Pebble's a little smaller. This Nixon of mine is a little smaller than the Pebble, but it has a much thicker band. And while the Steel is heavier than the original Pebble, it's lighter than this Seiko Kinetic. All in all, the Steel is a perfectly wearable watch that draws very little attention to itself. A big victory for a device you're supposed to wear all the time. Pebble did make two changes to the case that aren't great. The power connector has been revised, so you can't use the one from the original Pebble, and the band is now proprietary. You can't just use any old watch band like the original. That's a big drawback, but at least the design is open source, so replacements should appear soon. In addition to the new case, Pebble's also completely updated the watch's software, and the Android and iOS apps that make it all work. There's now a proper app store to download and manage apps and watch faces, and Pebble's working with some big names like ESPN, Yelp, and Foursquare. I tried all these out, and the results are a little mixed. While everything works well, I wanted these apps to be more front and center, kind of like the watch faces. For example, while checking in on Foursquare from your wrist is awesome, diving eight button presses into the menus to access the check-in screen is a little more cumbersome than just pulling out my phone. These are just the first set of apps, though, and the potential is so obviously there that it's hard to knock them too much. I want to do all these things for my wrist, I just want to do them a little bit more simply. And with the new software in the app store coming to the original Pebble as well, there's going to be a lot of incentive to iterate and get some of these ideas right. Where the Pebble continues to shine, though, is the basics. Any notification that hits your lock screen appears like magic on the Steels display, and that's still so fundamentally great that it's hard to complain about these bigger ambitions. I wish there was a better way to manage which notifications get sent to the Pebble from iOS. Right now, it's just kind of everything. And there's no way to deal with a notification if you're on iOS. I'd love to send a quick reply to an iMessage from my wrist or just dismiss a notification entirely, but that just can't happen on Apple's platform. The situation is far more customizable on Android, where Pebble has a rich ecosystem of apps, but the updated Android software wasn't ready in time for this review. That's really the whole story of the Pebble Steel. It's definitely the smartwatch for Android users, but it still feels kind of incomplete on iOS. A one-way receiver of information instead of a true extension of your phone. That's the dream. The question is whether Apple will ever let it come true. The Pebble Steel is far and away the smartwatch you should buy if you're in the market. It's much more focused and useful than competitors like the Samsung, Galaxy Gear, and the MetaWatch, and actually exists unlike the rumored products from Apple and Google. That's important. It's fun and useful, and you'll probably like it. And that's important too.

You send a robot into a hostile environment where decisions have to be made quickly and the algorithm will have to take care of that. The question is will there be humans in the loop or will they be on the loop or will they be out of the loop? Killer robots are weapons that would make drones look primitive. At least with a drone there is a human being who looks at a computer screen, sees the target and pushes the buttons to fire the missiles and kill. As we begin to approach the possibility of having machines select and engage targets, we want to be very careful not to cross that line without high-level policy review. As technology races ahead, as we achieve these fantastical advances, what decisions are we going to be comfortable delegating to machines and what kinds of decisions are we going to insist on reserving for the exercise of human judgment? We're a long way off from the day when armies of robot soldiers will march in perfect formation shooting lasers across enemy lines. But the U.S. military has stated its intent to use robots on the battlefield where they can theoretically carry supplies, bring cameras into dangerous places and yes, even kill. Some experts are calling robotics the new arms race. For that reason, an international group of scientists, professors and activists, including the Human Rights Watch and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, are calling for a debate on the questions that inevitably arise with robots that can be used in war. I'm Mark Guberude and I'm a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. I'm a physicist by training and I proposed a ban on autonomous weapons as early as 1988. We go to war and when we see what's going on, we decide there's a point we don't want to go beyond that point. If you look at the history of the Cold War, there are many incidents where people interrupted the chain of events. If you look at the crisis decisions at the highest level that were made during the human missile crisis or other major international crises, there's always a point where somebody says no, don't take the next step. And if we automate everything, there's not going to be that human intervention. Nobody always has to do that, otherwise wars will never end. Either you won or you lost or it's just too much blood and it's not worth it anymore. At some point people say stop. But if we outsource war, if we outsource the process of conflict, if we make that all a matter of machine decision, then we're not going to have that intervention of the human heart. This is going to be just the program that's running. Good morning everybody. For all of us in the DARPA community, there's no place we'd rather be than right here today. And the reason for that is that at DARPA, our mission is about breakthrough technologies for the future to help make our nation and our world a safer, a more secure place. DARPA is a 55-year-old agency in the Defense Department. We were started in the wake of Sputnik. It was a real wake-up call for the United States. It was a huge surprise. And then as now we understood that technology is the cornerstone of our national security. People were pretty clear that we did not want to go through that kind of surprise again. So DARPA was created specifically to live outside of the rest of the way that we do our science and technology investments, to be a projects agency with a specific mission on breakthrough technologies for national security. The general desire is to build machines that amplify the effectiveness of people. During the Iraq War, there was a very difficult problem that the Defense Department faced with improvised explosive devices. And so we had funded a number of robots before, and DARPA helped to see that those machines could be adapted for getting rid of IEDs. Really, when you think about what robots are capable of today, it's very, very, very early. And here at the DARPA Robotics Challenge, I think that really comes home to you when you see robots taking 30 minutes and not being able, even in that much time, being able to do the things that we as humans would find very, very simple to do. But focusing on disaster relief in the context of this challenge, I think, really allows us to push the technology, first to see what we're able to do today, and then start pushing it to the next level so that eventually we will have robots that have far more capable features for disaster relief, and I think for many other applications as well. We're not building weapons systems here. We're building the underlying technologies that can be used in many, many applications. Our main focus here is recovery and disaster relief. But just like DARPA worked on the internet, GPS, fiber optics, all of which we use every day, and so does the military, robotics will be the same. We will use robotics in our homes, in our work, and some of that will be military, but not all of it, to be sure. If somebody came up to me and asked me to build a robot that could fire a gun, I'd probably say no. I like what I do now. I like the research, because the research is fun. The technology itself doesn't say what it's going to be used for. In certain cases, of course, like a particular weapon and a bullet and things like that, those have primary uses for military systems and are not dual use. But these robotic systems are very general purpose, and you really need to understand that they are neutral with regard to the concern of are they military or non-military. So whether the Defense Department funds them or some other company funds them for whatever use, that development of technology is in fact possible to end up in any kind of system. Given the outrage over the military using unmanned drones and lethal strikes, many people may not be comfortable with the idea of robots as weapons. And most people in the robotics community seem to agree that now is the time to have that conversation before we have killer robots, not after. Really it comes down to how people use technology. It's a matter of human wisdom and being thoughtful about how technology gets applied. I'm very confident that we will have the wisdom to use robotics for mankind's benefit. But we can't assume that'll happen. We have to make that happen. This is an issue that, well, when I first started talking about it 25 years ago, people would just kind of stare at me. And then 10 years ago they would just say, oh yeah, Terminator, yeah, I saw that, you know, and it was a big joke. Just in the last five years, you know, the giggles have stopped. People are realizing this is serious. Our job at DARPA is to invest in advanced technologies and we pursue them because of their promise. But robotics is a great example of an area where we also recognize that in driving those technologies forward, we're also raising a whole host of very important broader societal questions. I don't have a position in terms of whether the U.S. should or should not sign any kind of ban. I think that the directive that the DOD has itself signed with regard to lethal autonomy has been, is really good. It's been very carefully thought through. It says that the primary concern is one of reliability. You want to make sure that if these systems decide within a particular set of instructions from a human operator whether to go to one place or the other, that that choice is always in line with the intent of the operator. So it really reflects back to a human being's choice. If someone like me comes along and says, we should have a hard red line that we should not cross, that's what they don't want to hear. Instead what they want is, well, we should think about what the ethical rules are. Which is just a way of deflecting the concern and saying, we're going to do it. We have, there are rules about how we're going to do it, but we're going to do it. Some people will say, oh, well, you know, where do you draw the line? And I always say, well, you draw it somewhere. That's the important point.

Google Glass isn't ready for the masses, yet. The augmented reality headset has technical problems that still need to be overcome. The software is still in active development, battery life isn't that great, and we're not even sure what we want to do with the tiny screen on our face anyway. But before we figure all that out, Google needs to make sure that Glass can work for everybody. The Google Glass Explorer program has been slowly expanding over the past year, but I've never used them. That's because I have prescription glasses. But now, Google is releasing four different frames that work with prescription lenses, so I can finally see what life is like through Glass. While there have been rumors that Google would partner with Warby Parker or other established glasses makers, today the company is announcing that it's going out on its own with four new frames. Instead of completely redesigning Glass, Google kept the electronic parts the same. You just attach that part with a tiny screw to the new glasses. Google calls these four frames the Titanium Collection, and sure enough, each is made of the metal. The designs are simple and fairly elegant, you might say restrained, and the design goal was to try to pare down the broad categories of glasses shapes into their most iconic forms. Google calls them bold, curved, thin, and split. We started looking at what are people's favorite styles and what are things on the market, and when you look at it, there are only about eight kinds of styles that people actually do wear. So we looked at those and took inspiration from those, but then made them more iconic and simplified them into kind of the silhouette. There's also a few new sunglasses that can be clipped onto the original Glass headband. Now Google isn't filling your prescriptions. You'll need to pony up the $225 to buy the frames on top of the $1,500 you're already spending on the base unit. Then you're going to need to get your lenses cut afterwards. Google has a list of eye care professionals it recommends. But it's not the massive expansion of the Glass Explorer program that many have been waiting for, and though the four frames are pretty good, they're certainly not going to appeal to every person's tastes. The Glasses are surprisingly comfortable and just slightly less weird looking than Glass on its own. They're thin and light, and I guess you could say inoffensive, which for a set of hardware designed to put a screen and camera above your right eyeball is kind of exactly what you'd want. Now we're definitely focusing on slowly expanding the Explorer program, and of course with this release of this new collection, it opens it up to a lot more people. The frames are simple and elegant with clean lines, and they're pretty light too. I don't know if it's going to make people want to try Google Glass, but at least now they'll be able to see for themselves.

It's Monday, January 27th, 2014. I'm Ross Miller and I predict it's gonna rain right about...now. No rain? This is why we have rehearsals, people! I mean, for f***'s sake, this is 90 seconds on the verge! A surprise performance by Beyoncé and Jay-Z kicked off this year's Grammy Awards. Perpetually silent robot staff punk took home four awards, including both album and record of the year. Grammy performances are iconic for their bizarre, almost mad libs collaborations. This year, exceptionally so. As the story goes, after winning Best New Artist, Macklemore actually texted Kendrick Lamar, fellow nominee, to say, quote, Much love. Speaking of the Grammys, here's one government agency who probably knew all the winners well in advance. The Guardian and the New York Times have published new documents showing how both the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ collect massive amounts of data from smartphone apps. It says one slide, quote, Alright then, well, enjoy this one. Finally, Microsoft has firmly locked down one of its biggest franchises of last generation. The company this week has acquired the Gears of War franchise from Epic Games. It appears to be a similar arrangement to when Microsoft nabbed Halo from Bungie in 2007. While no games have been announced, development for the series will be handled by Microsoft's Vancouver-based Black Tusk Studios. That's it for today, Stop Stories. Coming up tomorrow, Madonna pledges to appear in every performance on the planet. Oh, you made it! Strike a pose, Ross!

This is Ben Popper with The Verge, and I'm riding a childhood dream, literally. The Rhino one-wheeled motorcycle can be traced back to the moment when Chris Hoffman's daughter asked if he could build something just like what she saw in an anime cartoon. A few years later, the Rhino is now a reality, and since it's street legal, yesterday we took one for a spin on the mean streets of Brooklyn. The Rhino uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to balance and drive. I've tried to learn how to ride a motorcycle before, and I found the Rhino was actually easier and more intuitive. You sit down, lean into it, and you're off. Getting comfortable takes a little while, and turning was way too advanced for my 20-minute lesson, but I was still able to have lots of fun zipping back and forth on my motorized unicycle. The Rhino is a beautiful machine, with the slick lines and mechanical vigor of a sports car or high-performance crotch rocket. While it is street legal, the Rhino only has a top speed of 10 miles an hour and a range of 10 miles on a full battery. Still, it could work for some urban commuters. Unfortunately, the Rhino itself weighs about 160 pounds, meaning the subway stairs are out of the picture. And with a price tag of over 5 grand, it's significantly more expensive than comparable electric vehicles we saw at this year's CES. The Rhino seems like the kind of thing you would splurge on if style was your thing. It's definitely alluring. While we were testing it, a half dozen people stopped by to gawk, take pictures, and ask about the bike. Riding it is a unique and enjoyable experience, one I'm sure would get better with a little more time spent learning how to operate it. It's not the most practical or economical e-vehicle I've been on recently, but it's not trying to be. The Rhino is more about taking a crazy dream and making it come to life.

It's Friday, January 24, 2014. I'm Sam Sheffer, and a polar vortex can't stop me from hosting 90 Seconds on the Verge. Happy 30th anniversary, Macintosh! Let's celebrate with some Apple rumors. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is developing two new larger iPhones with 4.5 and 5-inch displays. The smaller of those two is reportedly being prepared for mass production. Meanwhile, 9to5Mac reports that the company will unveil a new Apple TV in the first half of 2014 with a new interface based on iOS. I'm still holding out for an Apple mood ring. Revenge is a dish best served by the FBI. Hunter Moore has been arrested by the FBI for allegedly buying nude photos stolen from hacked computers for use on his Revenge Porn website, IsAnyoneUp. The now defunct site was infamous for posting nude photos uploaded without the subject's consent. Nine separate victims are named in the indictment, as well as six individual payments from Moore to his hacker accomplice Charles Evans. And finally, Wonder Woman fans rejoice because you're going to be seeing a lot more of her on the silver screen. Gal Gadot, who will play the lasso-wielding superhero in the upcoming Batman v Superman, has signed on for two additional films. One will be a standalone Wonder Woman movie, while the other will be a Justice League film, a move that mirrors Marvel's Avengers. However, Warner Bros. will need to test the waters with Batman v Superman to see if there's any interest in additional Wonder Woman appearances. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I move to sunny Los Angeles to get out of this cold weather. Enough is enough!

Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of January 20th, 2014. I'm Josh Tupolsky. I'm Nilay Patel. I'm David Pierce. Was that like a, was that a magician? Was that a, that was like a boxing match? I don't know. I started, it was like Don Pardo meets magician meets a spiritual advisor. It works for you. No. I believe in whatever you're selling right now. I want 12. What I'm selling is the Vergecast where we discuss the week and all sorts of stuff. I mean, I used to have an intro where I said like consumer electronics or something, but like, God, we haven't talked about consumer electronics for a long time. What is going on? There's a little, little guy hanging down here. Got it. There was like a weird little point. You want to move my mic down, John? There's a voice in my ear telling me where would you like it? That is never as stealthy as you want it. John, is that the right place for my mic? Nipple mic. Just want to be sure. Is this, is you want it over here? Is that good for you? Is that right? The support control. The nipple mic is a pretty good idea. I don't go into your control room and tell you where to put your mic. Where is your mic? Yeah, yeah. I don't hear you. So sounds like your mic. It's on the ground and it's left the controller. I'm having a technical problem here with this. This is a piece of crap. How's that? It's my technical problem. Does that work for you, John? You broke John. It looks great. Just now you broke John. It looks great. It's exactly where it was before. Sorry, I don't know. Where do you want it? Covering my mouth. Well, it's a microphone. It's supposed to be near the mouth area. I don't know if you have these work. I know you're supposed to be an expert or whatever, but I like that I'm having a conversation with a person that don't listen. It's always reasoning. By the way, none of us can hear John either. Are you serious? Of course we can. I don't know. Anyhow. Is there even a John? I have no idea how to transition from this into beats music, but we're going to try. Anyhow, though, we're going to talk about some things that happened this week in the news and what a week it was. This week was really strange because we didn't... So this is... We usually... Years ago, we only ever worked from home and now we have this office. And the first two days of this week, everyone just worked from home because there was a snowstorm. It was wonderful. And it was strange. And I walked around asking everybody how their weekend was because... No, that makes sense. Monday is when the weekend... No, I came on Wednesday and asked everybody how their weekend was. Oh, you were on Wednesday. You asked. This week. So I'm confused just as a baseline. I'm also feeling confused. It's horrible. This is the kind of weather that makes me want to leave New York and never look back. It is... Honestly, we don't really have much good weather here. It's like disgusting in the summer. It's really disgusting in the winter. There's like one month in the spring and there's one month in the fall. And then it's just... And then it's awful. It's like a hurricane or a blizzard or a heat wave. Right. Like it's a good thing New York is New York. It's good that they have hurricanes. Or like a homeless man hits you. Yeah, right. Those are your options. It's not a weather issue, but it's still... That's why... These are all the reasons... Hold on. Hold on. Sorry. Excuse me. I think... They just come for David. Hello? Yes. Where are you? I'm at the sushi place. I'm at the sushi place. I'm at the sushi place. I'll send someone down. I'll send someone down right now. Thank you. Josh, what score would you give the Seamless app? Hold on a second. Sorry. I've been waiting for a food delivery and I had to take that call. Are you going to eat the sushi on air? No, I'm not going to. Okay. But here's what I will do. Yeah. Can someone go down and get that food for me? Sam, you got it? Really? You can Instagram it or something. Yeah. That's right. I just don't bring it here. Like just put it out there or whatever, like somewhere safe. Don't let Rondo see it because he'll eat it. You can really tell that there was no news this week. Anyhow, so that's what happens when I get a delivery. And the Seamless app, I actually feel is pretty good. Though it does some weird things like the way it functions. Like when you want to, it makes you save your options on something. Like if you, okay, if you like, let's say I'm ordering a sandwich and I'm like, I want cheddar cheese on the sandwich and they give you the option for cheddar cheese. When you select that, then you have to say save and go back. It should just be like you said it and that's how it is. Now you can back out to the rest and do whatever. I don't need to confirm my desire for cheddar cheese. It seems a little weird. So I give it a seven, 7.5. Can I ask you a question totally unrelated to everything except that I had a very long conversation with somebody about this last night. Do you feel bad making people deliver you food in bad weather? I've been debating this ever since it started snowing and I don't at all. And I've been told that I should. I think a human being, you look at a human out in the elements and you're like, oh, that sucks. But, but you know, I don't feel bad enough that I wouldn't order the food. Yeah, I don't like it. I just tip well. Yeah. That's what I do too. That's the move. I think you got on your bike and it's snowing. Here's five. I don't think Manhattan is that bad. I'll be honest with you. Compared to Brooklyn. Yeah. Like, like the sidewalks are clear and the streets are clear here. Brooklyn, there are, there are literally piles of bodies under, under the snow. There's people who just were snowed over and nobody's going to discover them until. There's not actually that much snow. It's just this full of bodies and this much snow. That's all bodies. And then a few edges. Right. But yeah, no, I don't, I don't feel bad enough that I don't, that I wouldn't order. Okay, good. I feel bad for a person. Anybody has to be in the elements. I'm like, yeah, that buzz for you, but that's why I'm please have you my food and get away. Here's some money. Okay. So you want to talk about news? Is that what you want? I mean, yes or no. It's up to you. Whatever you want. So, well, we don't, we should not start with beats by Dr. There's a lot, there's sort of a lot of weird streaming media sets on it, but we should actually, also we have, yeah, we should just do that. That's what I was going to say. You know, before we get into the topic, well, this is actually what's been happening. Well, yeah, this is the biggest thing happening this week by far is Sundance. I don't know what you're talking about. This, this thing. I just keep talking around it. This thing that this has been happening is a big deal. Yeah. Sundance is happening this week, which is a film festival that takes place in beautiful Park City, Utah, where it's probably much nicer than it is here. It is in Park City. Yeah. I've been to Robert Redford's house. I was at Sundance one time. Yeah. I was on the panel with Edward James Olmos. Nice. And several other people about like science fiction and film or something. And it was awesome. Edward James Olmos. That's pretty awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And also like was saying stuff that was really crazy. Like we're all doomed and like pretty soon we're going to be getting like art. We're going to have artificial body parts. And like, I was like, yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. Like he's like, he's like, you know, I'll probably have like a robotic body. And I'm like, not probably not before you die. But he also was like the way things are going. Like it's basically a post apocalyptic nightmare world. Yeah. He's like, this is like the road. He always struck me as really optimistic. He's cool. No, he's awesome. He was awesome. He's a great guy. All right. Well, Brian and Casey are in there. Speaking of Sundance. They've been there. They've been watching movies. I'm just like complaining about lines. My one name drop. My Sundance name drop. I just want to keep building it. Theoretically, we have Brian. So we have Brian here. There he is from Sundance. Hey, Brian. How are you? How's it going? I like the backdrop. Yeah, look at that. I'm glad you're being filmed in such high quality. Yeah. Yeah, I was just hanging out here with Edward James Olmos and we were talking about the future. It was cool. Does he have a robot body? Cool troll. He does. He actually was just his head on. He's like, show Josh. He was like Robocop. Brian, you're at Sundance. You've been covering the festivities for several days. There's some belief amongst certain people on the staff that you're really just on vacation. But tell me and you're just hobnobbing and canoodling. You're hobnobbing and canoodling with celebrities. What do you see? What's happening at Sundance? Tell us what's going on. Tell us what you've experienced. There's been a couple of interesting things. The first thing that really kind of surprised me was that we saw Zach Braff's Kickstarter movie. Obviously, it was here this year. That was a big story last year. I was not expecting it to be good, I guess. I'm not necessarily a big Zach Braff fan. And it's really good. Do Braff have a name? He's in the movie. Yeah, he's in the movie. And it's still good. He directed it. And it's still good. He stars in it? Yeah. And it's still good. And it's like this father-son movie. The cathedral was crying. I talked to other people in other screenings. They were crying. So it wasn't just weird gags in our screening. It's legitimately good. And people like it. And it's really bizarre. Wow. And this was the movie that he started funding on Kickstarter. Wait, can I ask you a question? And this is going to really color the rest of this conversation. Did you like Garden State or hate it with every fiber of your beating? I was just very blah about Garden State. But I thought it had a good soundtrack. I thought Garden State was absolutely terrible. One of the worst movies I've ever seen in my entire life. And- It's because you have no soul. So that's why- No, it's because my soul is- I have a soul that wants to do things. It's because I have a soul that's authentic and not phony. Well, Josh, did you see it after it got talked up or beforehand? I don't think I was aware of the hype factor. It was many years, I think. Was there a hype factor? I could have been- It must have been after it got talked up. But it still, I wasn't like, oh, this is going to be great. I was like, I'm just going to see this because I don't know what it's like. I came in, I think I went into it being relatively open-minded about it. Big Natalie Portman fan. Zach Braff, not a big fan, but I don't have a hatred for him or anything. After Garden State, I lost some respect for the guy. I can be alone in a desert island with only a happy garden state and that shit would still not entertain me. Love Peter Sarsgaard. You'd be like, oh, the desert's cool. Wait, is it Sarsgaard? He's a Sarsgaard. Peter. Does he guard against Sars? Yes. Every day. No, because there's the Sars guards, which are Stellan and- Peter is a Sars guard. He's a Sars guard. Brian, tell us what's happening now at Sundance. Brian, are there any Sars or Sars guards at Sundance? No one has Sars here, at least that I have seen, but they're pretty much in outbreak. Okay, so the Zach Braff film was surprisingly good. What else have you experienced? That's surprisingly good. Raid 2 was the other night, which is amazing. It kicks all kinds of ass. Did you like the original Raid? I appreciate it for being a big kick-ass action movie, but I felt it was a little bit thin on character and story. I got the trick that it was pulling off, but it necessarily wasn't the best movie for me. Hey, spoilers. No spoilers. This has all of that, but more, and it has this big epic gangster drama thing going on. It just straight kicks ass, I'll be honest. The entire theater was freaking out. It's a really, really good time. There's a lot of breaking bones and blood and super crazy violence and insanity. Was this the same theater that was crying after a Zach Braff movie? Different theater. It was the same exact room, and then they started playing the other movie. Blood! And now the Raid 2, where people are just on an emotional rollercoaster. That would have worked for you. You would have seen Zach Braff, and then, I want blood, and then they give it to you. And I killed it for two hours, and the theater was cheering. Actually, Brian, can you tell us, I've never been to Sundance. I know some of us have hobnobbed and canoodled the celebrities there. Canoodle up, canoodle. Hollywood's Topolski here is a big Sundance fan. That's me. Thank you. What's it like? What happens there? When you get off the plane, what do you do? Well, you have to plan your in Salt Lake City, and you have to drive about half an hour, 40 minutes to Park City. And Park City, it's a bit of a cluster, logistically. There's the Main Street, which is this small, hometown feel. It's a couple blocks, four or five blocks, super packed. There's lots of people there. There's traffic situations. There's only one theater that's actually on Main Street, and the rest is people walking around to restaurants. There are parties, that kind of stuff. But there are basically lines everywhere. The thing about Sundance is that it is a very line-centric experience. And whether you go to one of these other theaters, and they're scattered around Park City. There's a shuttle system that's free. It's great. You can go around. But there's lines for the shuttles. You get to a screening. You have to stand in line if you have tickets, if you don't have tickets. If you go to a press and industry screening, you have to stand in line there, which is kind of like part of the problem. But one of the cool things about Sundance is that historically, if you didn't have a ticket, they do have some tickets there on site. So you can basically do what they call the wait list. You can just show up early, do the Star Wars thing, and line up as early as you want and be crazy. And hopefully, you'll get a chance to see a movie. The problem is that creates logistical problems because people are standing in lines everywhere. So they have this thing this year called the e-wait list, which is a great idea. Very controversial. Yeah, in concept, which is basically it's a website. You can bookmark it. It's like assuming you have a mobile app on your phone. And two hours before screening, you basically say, yes, I want this. And then you can, in theory, get your place in line then. So you don't have to wait in line like five hours in advance. The problem was that it didn't really work. We were basically sitting there trying to go and get tickets for screenings. And it went launched, and I said, cool, press the button. And I was 105th in line, which was kind of weird. It was about a quarter of a second head past. So it was basically trying to go. And when Ticketmaster first put tickets on sale online, it was like that, except you weren't buying tickets. You were trying to get a place in line to get the chance to get a ticket. So it was kind of a mess. They had server problems. Just goes to show you, you got to wait in the meet space. You can't be waiting online virtually. Yeah, you got to go there. That to me is like the whole idea of the internet is to circumvent waiting for things. Don't put me in a situation where I'm going to digitally wait. I don't want that. You just look at your phone. Of course, there are very few things I would wait in line for in life. Certainly a movie is probably not one of them. I would just, at this point, just say, well, I'll see it when either no one's going to see it or I'll wait until it's available. I waited in a line when you were a boy. No, it's a dance. I waited in one line for a film there and it wasn't that bad. It moved pretty quickly. The problem was it was freezing because you're in the mountains. That's the other thing, right? Because there's a, you know, you're at a, the altitude is very high. So you're drunk all the time. No, but people, well, people do get drunk easier. They have, Utah has very strict ways of serving alcohol. They have little measurement guys. Like they'll give you a specific measurement of alcohol. Really very hard to get drunk. Very hard to get drunk. Did you say or a body shot? No robotic or a body shot. You can have a one shot or you can cover your entire body with alcohol. But no, but they, but they give you warnings. Did you get any warnings about the altitude you can get? You can pass out. You can it's, you know, they sell little air things, little oxygen masks you can buy at the convenience stores. Yeah. I haven't seen that. There is just a lot of, anytime you have to like walk up parks. I mean, main street is like a slope. There's a lot of out of breath people all the time. I could just get everyone's extraordinarily out of shape or maybe it's a combo pack. Now this is the way Sundance works is there's the weekend that leading up to you're now in the midst of this actual festival. The weekend leading up to it is there's a bunch of parties, right? Well, there's been parties going on the entire time. Like it started like last Thursday. It ends, I think the final award ceremony is this weekend. Have you been to parties? I went to a, there was a party for this Nick Cave documentary that we went to or that I went to where Nick Cave played a couple songs on a piano, which was cool. Casey went to a Bill and Sebastian performance. YouTube has been here. They've been having parties. Kickstarters had parties. Airbnb has the Airbnb house, H-A-U-S, which is their dope little hangout. Yeah. It's the worst. Is it cool? Did you go to the house? The house? I did not go to the house. I did not. Casey went. He did not have glowing tails of splendor and What else? So what other? Yeah, this is an Airbnb. They probably actually got an Airbnb. What other, what other films have you seen or are you going to see? Are you excited about? I saw Boyhood, which is Richard Linklater's new movie, which is this movie he's been filming like year by year for 12 years about a kid literally growing up, which was just as a feat was kind of crazy because there've been documentaries where they've caught up with people, you know, like five, 10 years after we meet them or you see sequels where they'll see the same actors years after the fact, but doing like one year at a time for 12 years is kind of insane. It was interesting. The actors that he had for it were this unknown kid, Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette and his own daughter. And his daughter apparently was not into the movie and like three years in, like came to him and was like, so dad can I character die? Which you know, she's like an app, you know, she's like a nine year old girl. She does not want to film a movie with her dad. So it's not a documentary. It's a narrative fiction, fictional film. Yeah. That's crazy. So wait, did you just spoiler the movie for us? Is that character, one of the main characters dies? She does not die. I will unspoiler or maybe that was the spoiler. No, now you've spoiled it twice. That in a movie about children, none of the characters die. Well, we don't know that. We just know that his daughter apparently now doesn't. So is that one a good movie? I was curious, like reading the stuff that you were writing where it's like, it's a crazy thing to do, but was it actually a good movie? It is surprisingly, it seems super stunty and it could just be a colossal failure where you're like, you know, good on you for trying that, but it doesn't work as a movie. But it is like Linklater has done all this stuff with like the before series where it's just people talking like little slice of life stuff and he's gotten really good at it. He's awfully obviously done like a lot more, you know, broader comedy stuff and even sci-fi stuff. But the actors are just really, really good. And there's, it's this, there's this weird perspective you get knowing that they shot a movie that way. Like there's this reference to Star Wars sequels never happening earlier on. It's like this great laugh because you know, you know, if you saw that in a fictional movie that was made today, you're like, Oh, that's funny. Cause they know they're Cummings. They made a joke and ha ha, but it's like, you know that they actually thought they were never happening. Oh, so that's, that sounds really interesting. That sounds crazy. And is that going to be, is that going to be in wide release? I'm going to assume not anytime soon. I know what's coming out this year. Okay. VOD. So I don't know if they're going to get a wider deal. That's all I care about. How soon can I torrent it? How soon? Yeah, it's probably torrent. So we should talk about Star Wars sequels cause that's the other big movie news of like the day pretty much. Is that Seven is the script is complete, which seems awfully fast. JJ Abrams, did he announce it that the script is complete or has said that he said it's complete. It's finished. Um, I, uh, will not be shot in IMAX, which is like, cool. Yeah. So I guess that's great. Uh, I don't know what to think about it. I don't know how to feel about this. I thought the last three were pretty bad. I thought the third one was probably the best of the, of the prequels, uh, which is the faintest praise of all time. Yeah, no. I mean, they weren't very good. Like of all the times you punched me in the face, the last one was the least. I don't think they did anything to, to improve the world that was created with the first three Star Wars films. I mean, I just feel like they're, they were just there cause they could be there. Brian, what is your take on this? Um, you know, actually you say JJ Abrams, people get really excited. There's a lot of hope there. The one thing I think that is very promising is that. Why is there hope? Can I, can I ask? I don't think he's handled, I don't think he's handled Star Trek particularly well. I think I really liked the first Star Trek. I felt like both of those movies are deeply confused about what they want to be. And, and as a Star Trek, as a next gen fan and some of the other stuff, I mean, I felt like they are, they favor wildly favor bombast over a great, a great story. And Star Trek has actually traditionally been about great stories and to like, especially the latest one I thought was just completely confused in what kind of movie it wanted to be. And it, and really like it's all plot devices to create big set pieces. Like, I mean, to me, everything is about. Isn't that movies? Yeah, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, there are actually good movies with great stories that are like create wonderment in the viewer. Yeah, but I, but you can't have a, there's no way to make a Star Trek movie without it being a big budget movie. Right. Well that's. And then there's no way to make a big budget movie without like basically having dialogue that sets up set pieces. As far as I can tell. Right. I think you could do it in a way that's really good though. Oh, like I'll just say Gravity. Gravity is an hour and a half long science fiction movie that is like completely thrilling and gripping from beginning to end. I said it's also basically just one big set piece. Well, but it is, but that's what that movie is, but it's really well done. And it's really, it's the story. The story is context. I mean, I think there's, but, but, but if you look at that by very different than a Star Trek film, but it really consistent, a singular sort of thought about what that movie was going to be. And it's super effective. A Star Trek feels like six different action movies crammed together with stereotype, like stereotypical action movie characters and stereotypical action movie situations. Like yes, the city is going to be blown up. And like there's going to be a thrilling sequence where people like jump or fly through space, trying to dodge something like just as it's going to happen. Brian, sorry. You're just, just hanging out there. Well, no, I think it's, I think there's a couple of things on what you just said about it feeling like the Star Trek movies feeling like different movies. I think part of that was the first one especially felt like a Star Wars movie. So I think, you know, it felt like it had that energy and bombast. I think he gets, you know, how to do that. I also, I may agree. I had lots of problems with the Star Trek into darkness, but he also didn't write that movie that was, you know, other writers. That's the transformers guys. That's Linda Loff. And he basically rewrote, you know, Star Wars. They had Michael Arndt who written Toy Story 3 that had the original draft that, you know, he Lucas and all those guys were working on. And Michael Arndt left the project and Lawrence Kasdan who wrote Empire. And then Abrams basically rewrote the movies and they say the script is finished. It's like their brand new version that, you know, supposedly has a lot of new stuff and they just like ditch what came before. And I feel like a guy like JJ Abrams, he's pulled off great storytelling before, you know, look back his early TV stuff. He knows how to do character. He knows how to do that stuff well. And Seven is going to be, it's going to take place after the first three, not the prequels, but the original, which are four, five and six. It seems a little like it's pretending those three movies just didn't happen. It is Seven. In the sense that it is a true sequel to the third film, Return of the Jedi. So that I will say this that what it has going for it is I am very interested to see what happens after those movies end. I was not as interested to see what happened before they started. Like that didn't interest me as much as what might occur after those films ended. Like I would like to see it start. So it's got that going for him. I just, I disagree with you about the first Star Trek film. I think it has the same kind of confusion. Actually the only Star Wars movie I want to see is 3.5 when Darth Vader just fucked shit up for like 10 years. Just owning it. How awesome would that be? Well that actually, actually like Darth Vader, no what they really didn't do was, that's true. Like you don't see any of the development. That is also an interesting era where Darth Vader is running things where he's already in the, he's got the outfit, you know, and like he's just doing bad stuff everywhere because we really just saw a taste of it in the third one. And then it's not even a taste. He's like, no, and then it's over. You get a taste of his evilness, but then when he kills a bunch of kids for no reason, right? Then they Vader him up and then boom, you're out. And like what happened to the injury? This was like 20 years in there, right? Where he's just killing it. How old is Luke Skywalker in the first film supposed to be? Like 16, 17, 18? Yeah, like 17. Somewhere like that. So like there's like a good 18 years there of just him going off. He's going off on people. Just like he's camping, shopping, he's going to do different. He's going to throw lightsabers at people. Presumably I guess, I don't know. Yeah, like a big cannon that fires lightsabers. I mean, they should get the guy who did the raid to do a Star Wars movie. 3.5. Oh my God. Now that would be, don't, don't, let's not, you know, for people who haven't seen the raid, I don't want to. That guy's at Sundance. Go suggest that to him. That's good. That's a great idea. I just made him a million dollars. So anyhow, so JJ Abrams is going to now going to do Star Wars. Yeah. What else is going on? Yeah, what else? Anything else? You know, right now the city is starting to slow down a little bit. The first four or five days were really, really crazy. Now it's starting to mellow out. There's been a lot of like acquisition deals, like movies getting picked up, that kind of thing. So right now it's just kind of like, you know, people are batting clean up the, and seeing a bunch of stuff. There's this really, really weird movie. I think right now is when people are saying like, what's the weirdest thing at the festival and trying to see it. There's a movie called called Wetlands that I'm not going to talk about on the podcast. I'll start people to go to the Sundance site to research that if they want to, but it's the most bizarre, perverse, insane sounding movie I've ever heard of. Have you seen, have you seen nymphomaniac? Wow. No, that was the secret screening. That was just part one. This movie sounds much more insane and worse than really disagree with Brian. Don't ever go to this website ever, ever in your life. That's exactly the fact that's all the Sundance website is insane. That's the lead picture. That seems okay. I mean, I could read you this. I'm not going to. Right now we're like crashing. We're going to crash the Sundance site. There's just no, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. Don't not read it. This is so upsetting, Brian. I wish you hadn't done this to me. I am very interested in Wetlands now that I've seen that image. Also you did not see nymphomaniac, but there was a secret screening of it. Part one. Right. Part one. Yeah. I mean, I think it's like released internationally as one big five hour epic, but in the US there's going up into one and two. So why not just show the full five hour version? I don't know. I mean, it's Sundance. There's your opportunity right there. I mean, right. There's your movie buffs. Nymphomaniac is the new Lars von Trier movie, which apparently I read a review of it and somebody was like, Sheila Boeuf is definitely actually having sex in this movie. Like if this is a CGI, if this is CGI or a prosthetic, like it's better than any effect I've seen in any movie. So that, you know, that to me, that's like, I'm, I'm where do I sign up? Where do I buy my ticket? I'll wait in line for that. All right. I think we, I think unfortunately we have to move on Brian, but thank you so much for joining us. You guys have been doing great work and looking forward to a full, a full rundown from you about, about wetlands. I just accidentally went back to the wetlands. Close the tab, bro. Thanks a lot, Brian. Close the browser. Take care guys. All right. So, so that's good. Little Sundance report. I am, I am excited about that. The Richard Linklater film. It sounds really crazy. Sundance is funny. It sounds a lot more like CES than I think they want to let on where there's like this big glitzy thing going on. And then the actual show is everybody in the back making deals for movies. And that's like, that's why everybody goes. The funny thing, the funny thing is that it's such a bummer that like all these festivals are like basically the same, you know, that you end up in it. It was, you're in a trade. It's just some kind of weird trade show, but you know, Hey, that's how business gets done. You got to get everybody in the same place at the same time. All right. What's next on our list of exciting topics. It's funny cause we ran the fan boys piece and then I'm going to say the news from today. Do it. Wall Street Journal man back, back at it to new iPhones next year. You're going to be big, basically bigger. Best iPhones ever. This is like, this is the new like Gene Munster, but there's going to be a TV. No, they don't do a big iPhone. The only whatever it's what's Wall Street Journal for one will be over 4.5 inches and one over five inches. I know that. Now that seems crazy to me. I do a 4.5 inch sounds realistic over five inches sounds you're in, you're getting into, I don't know if they made like a five inch and it's, it's big. I think they have to make some compete with the note. I mean like the only, the only reason people have those phones is because the screens are big. I don't think that like, I mean, I just say, I don't know any single tech journalist or people person who really cares about phones who has an S4 running stock touch with. They buy it and they, they like the big screen and they root it. Those are the people. I know people would do that. Everybody I see in the subway at the phone has like really big phones cause they're like big screens. I mean, I think the galaxy S3 extremely attracted to the big screens. I see a shocking number of galaxy. I think the galaxy, I see notes everywhere. I think the S3, the S4 and the note have been like, I think the S3, the S4 and the note are have been enormously successful and I don't, I don't think that's true. I think breaking news. Qualcomm acquires Palm, IPAC and Bitphone patent portfolio from HP. What? So Palm is officially just gone forever. Please bring back the IPAC. Ruby is on Qualcomm's word. Yeah. Maybe Qualcomm is making tiny phones. Yeah. Well, what are you gonna, anyway, what were you saying? You're saying something about Samsung. Speaking of, it's maybe the least important breaking news. No, I was saying, yeah, that was pretty, but you know, okay. Palm's officially blown to pieces. I was just saying that I actually think that most S4s, S3s and notes are not rooted. I think that they are bought by regular people who go into 18 to stores and are like, I want a big screen. Yes. That's what I'm saying. I don't think they are attracted to the software or any of Samsung's nonsense. Having been doing the dance between iPhone and the Z1 lately, like it is crazy how small the iPhone screen is. Like it is time now. We get it. It fits fine in everybody's hand, but that's sort of, that's like, you're not really fighting the real battle. Yeah. It's not like, can I reach the corner with this thumb? It's like, I'm looking at a visually complex webpage on your phone or a visually complex app and it's hard to look at and use, you know? So I think they're going to do bigger phones. I think that's kind of an under. No, but I think, but I'm saying, I think the over four is to basically hit the middle of the market and the over five is. Well, they have a four. There are lots and lots, over 4.5 is to hit the middle of the market and over five is to hit the note. Because the note is incredibly popular. Will they keep the regular size iPhone? I think they will. They'll do like the five C. They'll just do the thing they're doing. No, does this article say they're discontinuing the five C? My parents, if I try to get my dad a Galaxy Note size phone. They'll do like the five is, the five S is the new phone. But this says they're discontinuing. Maybe they'll put another case around it. That's what I'm saying. Right. They'll do the five C. Right. This does say they're, which I think you're about to say, that they're going to stop producing iPhones with plastic cases, meaning the five C. Which is really odd. Yeah. Considering they just started producing an iPhone with a plastic case. But all the indications are that it's not selling particularly well. If this report is true, I mean, I don't know. We don't know. We don't know. But everybody's TV for earnings. When are Apple earnings? Soon. Yeah. Like real soon. This is good timing for Apple earnings. Well, the reason all these rumors are happening is because it's earnings season. So Netflix had earnings. Microsoft just had earnings. Their earnings are really good. That's also sort of breaking news. Yeah. So Microsoft record revenue and they sold 3.9 million Xbox Ones. That's something, by the way, you can think about with Microsoft, which is so weird, is they actually have been doing, if you look at their stock, it doesn't fluctuate wildly, but it's been steady and there's been incremental growth, steady incremental growth. Their big core business of selling Office to people and infrastructure to people is doing fine. It doesn't seem like Google has had too huge of an impact, though clearly they're fighting the threat of an impact from Google. They sold 3.9 million Xbox Ones, 3.5 million Xbox 360s. Still not talking numbers for- Bizarre. They won't tell you how many service, but they made 893 million in revenue, which is not profit, which is kind of like- But last year, the service was a huge write down, was it not? Those two as well. Yeah. No, it was last earnings, I think, for Microsoft. Am I crazy? Where it was a terrible- It was a couple ago, I think. It was a while ago. Yeah. They took a few- I don't know that there, I have seen a few services in the wild, but- All I see them on is NBC shows. Yeah. Like they bought- I don't know why that is. I watch Parks and Rec, and it's like everyone has a Surface and a Windows phone. Oh, yes, there's a lot of- Every, it's crazy. So here's where there's enormous Microsoft product placement. Parks and Rec and the Mindy Project. Yes. The Mindy Project is out of control. They're using all the sounds, and they're using the graphic on screen- It's crazy. Like on screen text bubbles and stuff. It's crazy. There's so much, like people using Surfaces, everybody has a Windows phone. Well, my favorite is when- This is the most unreal, like this show is great, but you've just robbed it of all realistic- Well, there are all these moments in Parks and Rec where somebody will be sitting at their computer, and they'll turn to talk to somebody over here, and their monitor will be facing this way, which is just like blatantly- Yeah. They wouldn't have been able to see it sitting at their desk. Yeah. It was all like, here's Windows. My favorite thing on Parks and Rec is that before Instagram was available for Windows phone, somebody was like, oh, just Instagram that. And it's like, no, you didn't. You're using a Windows phone, and that's- And that's like the nerdiest thing to notice, by the way. I'm like, no, I don't think so. Yeah. I'm not adjusted by glasses and pocket protector, but anyhow. So- Anyway, so- The hell were we talking about? This is why- Oh, big iPhones. Big iPhones. So Microsoft, Nokia didn't do so well, but they're not going to do well. Nokia is, doesn't matter. They're being absorbed. Yeah, they're being absorbed into the revenue machine. Into the revenue generator that is Microsoft. But anyway, so it's earnings season, so rumors of big iPhones are happening. Apple, there was another, I don't know, when you look at the sourcing on this one, new TV coming definitely in the first half of 2014. Well into testing an extra- And now a new Apple TV. The little- Not a television. No, a new Apple TV. That's the biggest problem with the TV is they need to have a name that isn't TV at the end. So like, oh, Apple introduced the Apple TV, and it's like, with the TV- This is 9to5Mac. They're saying they'll have more channels, a revamped UI, which is like the 50th time they revamped this UI. More iOS, new types of content supported, perhaps games. New UI- All of this is astonishingly obvious. This isn't a rumor, this is like, what would they do? New UI makes sense, at least in the realm of visual update, because it doesn't match iOS anymore. It looks like some weird bastardized, whatever, iOS 6. Yeah, well, I mean, but do you want... They're so different. I don't want iOS 7 on my TV. I don't want... Why not? It just wouldn't look good. It doesn't make any sense. One of the best things about jailbreaking an iPhone is that you can skin it. You can get- How have you skinned your iPhone? You gave up, by the way. I have. Well, I gave up, and I'm going... I'm flip-flopping back and forth. I'm gonna go back, because I've been doing a lot of... The camera is still... It's still like, you know... The phone... I mean, I don't wanna get too far into this, deep into this rabbit hole, but it's extremely annoying to use. If you were going from Android, like, here's what I'll say. All of the people who think that the iPhone is just like the best for getting things done and is really fast, and you're excited about the 64-bit CPU, and it's like you're living in a dream world where you think that your phone is faster at doing things. It's actually kind of unbelievably slow for doing things. The freeze and defrost of apps is crazy. I have an animation reduction thing that is like a jailbreak that makes it really fast. It flips through animations. Oh, that's nice. I love that. It still feels like I'm getting stuff done slower than on an Android phone. It's actually kind of crazy, because I remember a few years ago talking about the iPhone and just dissing the hell out of Android, just going like, it's so ugly, it's so messy. You have like 100 different ways to do something. It just feels like a total piece of junk. I remember I was talking about this at length, and I was like astonished, like, the iPhone is just a completely cohesive system. It really works. It's like they really turned a corner, and now I'm actually having gone back and forth. Obviously, I use the iPhone when they first came out, the new iPhones. I understood the limitations of the software and what it was going to be like. I wrote something about iOS 7 before it came out, and a lot of that stuff is true to this day. But I had enough time with it that I know the OS and know the improvements they've made. But going back to it as the full-time device, it's kind of astonishing how different things are in 2014 than they were two years ago. What's happened in Android and what's happened in iOS, it's like they didn't keep pace. iOS did not keep pace with the kind of growth that Android has experienced. They were at a certain point, one was clearly better than the other, in my opinion, and then it just has gotten completely flip-flopped. The one place I think the iPhone is just objectively better, and it's really funny watching your Instagram because I can always tell what phone you're using at what time. The camera is just better. Can you? I'd love for you to go through my Instagram right now and tell me which photo you think is an iPhone photo. This is the worst. Which photo? I bet I'm right 98% of the time. Let's do it. Let's get it up. Let's do this. Here we go. They're all photos of the dog. Also, watching... We got it on screen. Here we go. This photo. This is the iPhone. Okay. Yeah, 100%. That's the Z1. That's true. Go ahead. What's this? This is just an awful picture. I don't even know. That's a Lumia 1020. Is it really? Yeah. Keep going. Oh, man. All right. If there's a lot of phones in here... No, come on. Keep going. What's this? Oh, this is taken off of TV. Yeah, this doesn't count. That's a Z1, though. Let's keep going. This is exciting. This is a Z1. That's a Z1 with a VSCO filter on it. Nice. Here we go. This is exciting. I cannot figure out VSCO. This is, by the way, thrilling audio. This one's tough. I'll be honest. I like how, by the way, we're finally... Our audience is loving this. This one... We're finally doing the thing we're answering in the comments. No, this is every picture I post, they're like, what phone is this? I'm solving the problem right now. Go ahead. That's true. This, I'm guessing, is also... No, this is an iPhone. Z1. Keep going. Is it? Yeah. The Z1's a really good... The one thing I hate about the Z1's camera... All right, here we go. I'll have this one. I think the Z1's usually really good, but it tends to overwrite some shots. No, I had to zoom this one in because that building's really far away. I was on the Williamsburg Bridge. Yeah, it's hard with a big digital zoom, it's impossible to... That was the Z1. Yeah. Okay, here we go. This is filtered. Yeah, I mean, when you filter it, it's just cheap. Well, that's what you do with photos these days. I mean, if you have a Z1, you do. No, you do with the iPhone too. I don't know what that means. What are you saying on the bar photo? These both look like the Z1 to me. Yeah. Which one? The bar and the bag. The bar is Z1. The bag might be iPhone. Bag is iPhone. Yeah. Okay, now how about the next one after the bag? This is the worst game in history. This is like an HTC One. That's the iPhone. Really? That's the iPhone. That's a bad picture. I know. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's a door. Keep going. Well, we know what we're doing. I took that off, by the way. I was like, this is taken with the iPhone. How amazing would it be if this was taken with the iPhone? I should stage that image somehow. Okay, now we're past the point of no return. So I take this back. No, we're not. What is this? These are good pictures. That's the iPhone. That's the Z1. That's the Z1. Yes. So you have no pictures taken with the iPhone. You took a picture in that bag. Let's see. There may be some others. Let's see. Well, now we're at CS. No, but there is stuff before CS. Well, that's obviously the Z1. So stuff at CS is the Z1. Yeah. Let me see. Okay, no. So I take it back. So this camera is good. It's like you have better pictures on here than I thought you would. That's the thing that is annoying. Or you're lying. No, I'm not. I mean, that is also just out there. That's a great point. I would never lie about what phone I took a picture with. That's my, listen, guys, my promise to you, to you guys in here and to those people out there, I'll never lie to you about what phone I used to take a picture. I'll always give you. I will lie to you about everything else. I will lie to you about everything else. Everything. My name is not even Josh, but I promise you I'll never lie to you about that. Anyhow. It means a lot. By the way, for yesterday, people were wondering it was the iPhone on the left and the Z1 on the right. And it's annoying because both pictures are actually really excellent. I did a comparison of Penny, of course. But the detail, the color detail on the iPhone, it's noisier, but the detail is so much, you know, better. But then the other pictures, like if you saw it, you'd be like, that's a good picture. Like it's a, it looks like a lot of detail. It's annoying. Anyhow, let's, let's keep moving. Airplane iMessage. That's it. That's it. That's right. You say airplane iMessage? That's it. Being able to text from my computer is by far the best thing about owning an iPhone. Yeah. And yesterday I let my phone die and I didn't plug it in because I was like, oh, what's going to happen? Oh, Airplay. Airplay and iMessage. I thought you were saying there's like a feature, a new feature called Airplay and iMessage, which was like you could text just using iMessage on planes. You can do that because it's a personal iPhone. No, I know. I get it. Right. But I, okay, so here's the thing. Like text messages are increasingly in like short supply for me. I'm not a, like Hangouts has replaced. I mean everybody's on Gchat all the time. Yeah. So a lot of times I'm having those conversations. I also have a lot of like group me groups now where I'm like group me-ing with people. Really? I use group me, like we use group me at CES. Yeah, only at CES. It's just destroying my battery. No, I, I, I, we actually, we use, like we have a family group me and like there's all kinds of like. It doesn't just rip your battery to shreds? Doesn't seem to. I mean it's Android, you know, it's just better at everything. So I don't know. No, I mean, you know, it's actually. You should look at your battery meter and see what you're doing. It's not, it's not. I'll show you. First off, oh, that's the other thing. The battery life on the iPhone was really bad. Yeah. I forgot how bad it is. It's crazy bad. This battery is ridiculously good. That's another reason to keep it. Let me tell you what's going on with mine. I mean that's another. That's skin though. That's another huge upside. It's so, it's really so minor, like once you get used to it. So yeah, Sony did a decent, Sony did a good job. This really is the screen. I mean it's, it's group me's not even touching it. And I have 74% left. It's been five and a half hours off of a charger and this will be at like tonight when I go to bed at three in the morning, it'll be at like 30% or 40% or something. Yeah, you got to use that, that Mophie. That Mophie is so gross. I hate it. It's the worst. No, Laura got one for her one. I bought a cheaper off brand one. Yeah. I'm pretty sure like they hacked it. Why would you do that? Cause it's not as ugly as the Mophie. Oh, okay. Yeah. I bought an off brand one cause I thought it was cooler. What was it called? I was looking at the Max boost defender. It's not good. Come on guys. But it's soft touch. It's like nicer. I'm a hundred percent certain that they have. Can I see the Max boost defender on screen? They had to hack the firmware to make it past the iOS seven verification. I feel like like for the people who hung in there for the Sundance conversation, like come on, I want to hear tech conversation. Here you go. Like you're getting, oh my God. Look at this piece. Oh yeah. That is not, that is an off brand. It's a hundred percent. Look at the description. Dude, chill out. Just tell us what it works with. Yeah. Oh, it's got a kickstand. That's not mine. That's the Max boost atomic S. Dude, Max boost defender. Can you not hear us in there? Which is a hundred percent Mophie rip off of the old generation. So we, there's more news to discuss. Let's talk about it. So Amazon also rumored to be making a teat, rumored to make a set top box for a while. Rumored to start a cable service. Companies being rumored to start their own cable service is now a thing. Sony obviously did it at CS and told it a year ago. Amazon's on the mix. They flatly denied it. It's just a matter of, and it wasn't even like, oh, we don't comment on rumors and speculation. They were like, nope, not doing that. Here's what they need to do. I mean, clearly like there are deals to be cut. They need to basically license Aereo as like their provider for, for broadcast. Yeah. The second Aereo gets bought, it's like, yeah, it is bought. Well, but not from IAC, I mean, by one of the big guys. Well, but I mean, or they just, they just start licensing the technology and suddenly Sony's got a bank of, of antennas in every city or what, or they're just using Aereo as antennas. Yeah. And that's the business. I mean, that's one of these guys. And that was how the original cable TV company started. Right. So, right. I mean, I think, I think they're going to hit that wall at some point. And I got to tell you, I think I was in a car today and the driver was like, have you heard about this thing with these tiny antennas? And I was like, oh yeah, Aereo. And like we started a big conversation about it. And I used Aereo to watch football at CS. Yeah. It's out there. It works. There's an Aereo for Roku. Yeah. Yeah. I got it installed. I just remembered. It's really great. I got a Roku 3, which I really love. And I really love and like also actually found an app where I can stream video pretty effectively off of my phone to the Roku and it works. It's called juice. But it works. It worked. All right. Airplay and iMessage. That's the platform lock-in. And that's one of the things for the iPhone that I love is I've got this air video server. Do you know air video server? Yeah. Basically you like can download something on your computer. Yeah. Just sitting there. And then just send it through a phone or a tablet to the Apple TV. Here's juice. Yeah. I mean, so juice is really janky looking and it looks definitely like it's going to be a virus all over everything. As far as I know, it's not. Yeah. It hasn't been phished or anything recently hacked, but it definitely, man, crackle. Does anybody watch anything on crackle? Crackle is everywhere. But juice does seem to work. I put a movie on my phone. It's on crackle. And just streamed it to my Roku and it totally worked. It actually wasn't a movie. It was an episode of Sherlock. Yeah. But yeah. Well, first episode I did not care for it. The last two were amazing. The third one, incredible. Did you see it? I just started the second season. Oh my God. I got to catch up. Yeah. You need to get with the program. Okay. So then moving on from Amazon to their big, if they're going to do a TV service, they said, we're not going to license channels. We're going to invest in prime content, which leads right into Netflix, which had a great quarter. What if Netflix included a service that was like live broadcast in their, inside of Netflix? They would win. That'd be pretty crazy. Here's the thing though. Netflix doesn't have that much stuff. I mean, they've got a lot of stuff, but there are definitely things that I want that Netflix does not have. I mean, Netflix is also smart enough to know that the day they do that is the day all of their deals evaporate. Like no one else would work with Netflix ever again. It just wouldn't be worth it to them. But it's like, yeah, maybe. I feel like they, at some point, they can pick this fight with HBO, but picking it with Comcast is like- But Comcast is- But they're in a permanent fight with Comcast, right? I mean like- Right. Yeah. I mean, Netflix used the pan with Comcast. At the end of the day, this net neutrality thing happened last week and Netflix put out their earnings this week and they're like, look, if any of the ISPs screw with us because they don't have to follow net neutrality rules, we will provoke our customers into boycotts in action. And straight out, they're like, this is how we're going to handle this. And I don't think it's as simple as like, oh, people will just pull their deals. They need Netflix too. They need Netflix because there are a ton of people watching their stuff on Netflix. It's a third of the internet bandwidth. And Netflix pays them money for it. And they get good money for it. And I think that it is- But I think if they went to Amazon and were like, hey, we'll give you the same deals we've been giving Netflix forever. No. Amazon doesn't have the viewership. Right. But they get it. That's the thing. That's why it's like there are competitors everywhere. I think you'd be surprised with how people would actually react to that. Maybe. I hope so. People would be like, well, I'll watch something else on Netflix, I guess. I don't think people would be like, oh, I'm getting rid of Netflix. I mean, that's Netflix. That's why they have this content recommendation system and all this stuff is because they want to give you the next closest thing to what you really want. It's really annoying. I went looking for Justified the other night and I searched for Justified and it showed it to me. It's on Amazon, but it's not on Netflix. It's not. It's gone. It's just Amazon now. Yeah. It was just on Netflix a day ago. I think it was like January 1st. Literally, I was like, oh. Yeah, I was looking for it last year. Was it? Yeah, because Dan Rubinstein from SB Nation was telling me I should watch it. Yeah, apparently it's great. But Amazon is your thing. If you're in Amazon, if you ever buy anything from Amazon, this is a no brainer. Prime is awesome for deliveries. And then just this is then a thing that you have. So they have no scale because right now they don't have a box. And so the big rumor is- Oh, but it's on every box. Yeah, but you have to- I mean, it's on every console. It's on every TV. It's on every box. I don't think people there... So is Netflix. Yeah, but Netflix is more popular. Right. So why? I mean like- Because it's Netflix. Because of rules. No, I think Amazon has to get scale and compete with Netflix head to head because they're all in the same places, but they're not doing quite as well. They have to be able to sell you Prime video for $8 a month, not $75 a month. I agree. I agree. And they need a box. And they also need a differentiator. I keep hearing that this box... Right. And so this differentiator, the rumor was they're going to do a TV thing. No one can do a TV thing as far as I can tell. If they could do a TV thing with broadcast. I don't think they can. You can also pay for Prime by the month if you're so inclined. Who would do that? You have to pay for all of Prime. Yeah, but it's cheaper than Netflix. How much is all of Prime per month? Well, $79 divided by 12. No, it's a weird different... It's $6.58. It's cheaper than Amazon. Why did they advertise that? I don't know. They should. No, actually, I think I had a conversation with somebody at Amazon and I didn't know that and I said the same thing. This all is sounding very familiar to me. If they were like, this will be $6.50 a month, people will just get Prime. Right. You'd just be like, oh, okay. That sounds like a lot less than $79. But the problem is the differentiator. The differentiator for me is you get great free delivery. But that may not be the thing for TV watchers that they need to hear. What is the different... I think that you're right that a TV service, if they could do it, would be the thing. It's like a complete holistic solution. There's no way. I mean, as far as I can tell, to get... Anybody can launch this TV service right now. You just have to pay the exact same money as Comcast. Well, Amazon can do that. Amazon, of all companies, is gonna do that. I think Apple might do that. I think Microsoft, if they're desperate enough, might do that. But then it's like, how does that sit with... So you're saying literally Apple would say, we're gonna do a national cable plan. Over the air, or over the internet. Okay. I just think that it's gonna be tough for them to get that deal because Comcast and Time Warner are gonna be like... Right. I think if I was ESPN and I go to make that deal, Comcast flips out at me. No, because Comcast can't flip out at you too much because A, they're region locked. B, they all sign these deals. Like there's 100 cable companies in that sense. Comcast and Time Warner are... Right. I mean, Direct TV has the same deal as Comcast and they're national. But then the issue becomes like, hey, this is the perfect place where these new net neutrality, the new dashing of net neutrality is gonna be perfect. Because Comcast will go like, oh, okay, you wanna have a cable service? No problem. But unfortunately, it uses a lot of bandwidth, so we're gonna have to tax you for it. So Comcast is actually the wrong company because when they bought NBC, they agreed to all these rules. That's true. So Comcast is actually... They voluntarily agreed to a suite of... So like dis-... Essentially, non-discrimination. Yeah. So like Time Warner Cable or Fios, they're not under any of these agreements. Verizon will definitely do whatever it can to destroy net neutrality. Your freedom to watch what you want, where you wanna watch it. Yeah, but so I mean, this is like... I just don't think they can do it. And so what's interesting about that is that same day, the CEO of HBO was like, I don't mind if you share passwords for HBO Go, it just makes people love HBO more. So use your parents' passwords. Right. And when you're older and you finally make some money, kid, you too can pay for HBO. It's true. That's what I did. I used my parents for years and then I was like, I'm gonna get cable. Yeah. I'm like, now I have my own HBO and it feels great. You're a grown up. You're a grown ass man. Here's the thing about cable TV, it's in its own crazy way, it's not a bad deal. No. Right? You can get a bunch of channels. Well, just the interface, the UI and all this. The problem is that you get a bunch of channels and the possibility of watching them. But the truth is you only watch like 15. I would love to see, I'm sure there's a statistic on it, what the average cable owner, how many channels an average cable owner watches on a regular basis. I bet it's like 20. What really interests me is whenever somebody, and it's all obviously speculative, but the Atlantic does this once a quarter, go through and do the math on what it would cost to watch the 10 most popular channels. We do this. Yeah, we do it too. But then they're like, if you just wanna watch ESPN, they do sports. So it's ESPN and Yes and Comcast and Fox Sports and whatever, and they found out it would be way more expensive just for the sports channels than to just get cable. So if you're in San Francisco, you want local channels, HBO and 25 down, five up internet, you're paying 40 bucks a month, which is not terrible. That sounds great. Like that's not terrible. That's a cable package? Yeah. No, I don't have a problem. That's Comcast. Time Warner just for HBO. But then, just for HBO. And if you move to New York and you get Time Warner cable, the lovely delightful Time Warner cable, you're paying $75 a month. So I pay- That's competition. That's the free market, everybody. My internet, which is DOCSIS, which is 50 down and five up when it functions. Is $100. And then the cable service with HBO, I have HBO and Showtime is an additional, when all said and done, it's an additional $150. So I paid $250 every month for cable TV with two special channels and internet. The internet's $100 a month. It's crazy. I mean, I don't know if this is just a New York- You gotta get some Fios, dude. I'd love to get Fios, but Verizon can't bring it to my neighborhood. There was a Fios truck a block away from my apartment the other day and I ran over and tried to hug the man who was installing Fios. No, you don't understand. We got somebody dropped a Fios flyer in our mail slot and I was like, what is happening? Did it happen? Did they do this? And I hurriedly went online. I'm like, oh my God. And it's like, nope, sorry. But you can get this shitty, ridiculous- There's just somebody that's controlling your house. You can get Verizon's regular DSL service, which is like one down and 0.5 off or something. And it's like $60. And they're like, and you could get Dish. Or not Dish, yeah, Dish. Yeah, and you can have Dish TV. It's like, oh, great service offering for me. You live in like four blocks away and you're, no, it's not four blocks, but then you have awesome Fios. You've all digital everything. You have Fios? Yeah. I'm like, I'm just going to go to a movie channel and 50-50 internet and a phone line that I never use for like 175 a month. That's continually my favorite thing about my capabilities. We have a phone line also. Is that a pay for a landline? Yeah, no, it's great. It's not a landline. Thanks for the phone line. I'm going to plug my fax machine into it and see what happens now. But we do occasionally use the phone. Like a home phone is sort of nice sometimes. I don't even have one. We have one. That's great. Okay, so that's happening. Also, Charter wants to buy a time. The TV space is heating up. People see opportunity here. Well, TV is like unbelievably awesome right now. I mean, obviously everybody watches a lot of TV, but we started watching the fourth season of Boardwalk Empire, which we had not. And it's so good. It's insane. It's like a movie. It's like a 12-hour movie. It's like a 60-hour movie. This is our whole thing at TS, right? Netflix is going to change the TV industry. Because when every show is a 60-hour movie, you want to binge watch them all. You're just going to watch them on Netflix. It's also like from an art perspective, a totally new art form. Completely unexplored territory in the sense that it used to be like you do a two-hour movie and it's very high production value. So you spend a lot of time on the script. You get the best actors. It looks amazing. And then it was like TV was like, yeah, it's kind of half-assed because you can't really spend that kind of money. Now, it's like, look, this is a 12-hour or what did you say? 60-hour movie. And people are telling stories in a totally different way. We've been watching True Detective. Have you watched True Detective? Yes. Oh my God. It's so good. Really crazy good. Yeah. And it's like you're just watching like, okay, now I have 10 more hours of this movie to watch. Yeah. It still freaks me out that Matthew McConaughey is an amazing actor. But it took me like a half hour to get over that. No. He's always been an amazing actor. I know. He's not just an amazing actor. He's like the most amazing actor. He's incredible. Yeah. He's like the American Daniel Day-Lewis now basically. We finally have our own Daniel Day-Lewis. He's going to go make like 11 Things I Hate About You and call it a day. It's time for him to be in a movie where he gets fat though. So skinny. Yeah. I saw you do skinny. Now get real fat. He's skinny in True Detective. I want to see him as like a 300 pound obese person and like not a fat suit. That would be magic too. By the way, True Detective is just beautifully shot, amazingly written. And to your point about 60 hour movies, nothing happens in the first episode. Nothing. Yeah. Just like surrounded. Nothing except like dread, overwhelming dread and horror. No, but this is how I feel about House of Cards too. At the end of every episode of House of Cards, it's like, well, that's over. Yeah. Next. I guess I'll just swap to the next one. Right. There's no, like the episodes have no act structure. Yeah. So they're just kind of like flowing. Because they don't have to because it ends and- You're not forced into that. The most brilliant thing Netflix ever did was just automatically roll into the next one. They didn't used to do that. Yeah. Yeah. The new one doesn't. You used to just have to press the play button. It's like a countdown. It's like 15 seconds. It's real. It's like you watched an entire season of Parks and Rec on Saturday. That's great. Just totally by accident. We just- Just like sitting there on the couch doing this. I actually smoked a huge bowl. It was immobile and watching a whole season of Parks and Rec. I couldn't help myself. We just got caught up with The Good Wife. We will watch all five seasons or like all the way. That's the other show I need to get into. Dude, The Good Wife is- It's The Good Wife and Justified and Port Wagon. It's weird The Good Wife. I was going to say this. It's weird that The Good Wife is on CBS. Because CBS is historically not known for... I mean, they do some really hilariously bad procedurals in my opinion, like CSI and NCIS and all these other shows. Just shows. Letters. Two broke girls. Two letters. They're really like- The CBS story. Hawaii Five-O. They're really like two broke girls, two and a half men. Seriously, they have a lot of shows with numbers in their titles. But numbers and letters. But it's like really good for a network, for a 45 minute network procedural, like crazy good. And it's like five seasons deep now, right? It's been on a while. It's five seasons deep and it really, you should just... It's on... Do you have Amazon? You have Amazon Prime? It's on Prime. Becky loves this show. But there's something weird like... Oh, well, the latest season obviously isn't finished. I think it's on Hulu. It's on Hulu. It's on Hulu Plus. It's the whole thing. It's on Hulu, but you have to watch commercials. Oh, true. Which I find- They have a lot of commercials. A lot of commercials. Like a lot of commercials. It feels like a lot of... And they always show me the same two commercials 11 times during an episode and then I just want to murder Sharmin. Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah. And I think they're the sad desperate one. Yeah. That's how I really feel. Which is weird because they have the back way of all of the industry players. Then I think that's why they're the sad desperate. They can't do new things. Well, they have to... They're doing... Their basis is commercials and here's what I've learned. When I'm in the midst of a really gripping drama, I really don't want to fade to black to see the Sharmin commercial. Right. It's not... Hulu is also miserable at knowing what I want to see. Yes. I get a lot of commercials for elderly people insurance. Yeah, there's also... Yes. I don't need that. I can't... You can't click on Hulu that is sad relevant to you, but. But I clicked it so many times. You see my tweet there. At some point, I'm going to click that button so many times, Hulu is like, do you want to just buy a fucking gun? Because you don't like anything else. Yeah. Do you just want to buy a gun? Buy a gun. Well, there are. Buy a gun. It just comes on screen, it's like, just buy a gun. There are. Just anything. I mean... This is the only thing left. I want to see ads that I am excited about the product or whatever, but you... That's the other thing about Hulu is to your point, is in your point is that you do see the same ads. Yeah, first time second time. I was like cool interesting. I might check that out like six time 10th 14th I'm like, you know what dude? I'm not in the market for a Ford Focus I don't even know what car it's for Where the car is the baby and he key like opens his garage and the baby's sitting there What you've been seeing this commercial are you drawing you talking about? No, you guys suck But so I literally have seen this commercial probably 400 times For and be By the way that auto completed way too fast a lot of guy nationwide insurance commercial no Laura did something we were talking about something We're talking about something. He's why he's watching his baby We're watching gravity and Laura was like I want to know how this was filmed and typed in how and It was how was gravity film was the auto predict? Yeah. Yeah, if you type how w it goes to how was grabbed? Yeah, yeah, it's that it was it was nuts And the next one is how will I know? What is that that one just keeps going that's a What's so crazy about this is that that this is like the zeitgeist like really literally Everybody is going to Google and going like how is gravity filled? Like yeah That's weird to me that we know that now that that that's the thing that it knows that you're most likely to type that in If you type how w yeah, like the magic of Google how? Will I you know, it's me great. How will I die? That's probably very popular one I've googled that a lot. I would never google that cuz Google doesn't know how you're gonna die You don't know you've never googled it. I can I know they're gonna be watching the time by my hands Wow, why are these all quizzes a lot of quizzes? People love quizzes I Do you know people love quizzes you saw the New York Times most popular story 2013 was a quiz Yeah, they just put out like in in December. Yeah, or some crazy big. You know why people love Anybody take the New York Times quiz it was like where's your voice? I was in Delaware, which is immediately totally wrong. It said I was like from New Jersey or something But you got Laura got Laura's Pittsburgh. Yeah, so I was immediately placed in Wisconsin All right, what else what else do we have? Should we talk about beats music? Media, so I don't want to literally my question was how on earth could this possibly not fail? I think the answer is so here's here's what I want. I was actually I was talking to to Joanne about this too All I want is for somebody to make iTunes But with a subscription on the end of it so I can just use iTunes the way that I was using it before and then What I want something I just have it that was the promise of RDO You mean as opposed to this thing where it's like we're gonna help you discover all kinds of new music Yeah, I don't want your radio. Yeah, I want radio. I don't want all the music I don't know if my stupid I put John West them on all the time and it's like, you know What I've heard this song like a billion times. You're so so unoriginal. Yeah, and Google Play is really close I think they have the best like we'll take all the stuff you have we'll set into the clouds or be there Yes, then we've got a thing and then the apps are miserable Yeah, the apps are the interface is terrible and confusing. Yeah, they just need to just Google by RDO replace the music interface with RDO do their streaming whatever and like you're done. Yep. You win. Yep You've got it. Right? I know I Play here's the thing play is kind of awesome because you can like you're like I'm just gonna stream this thing Yeah, or download it or play it on the web Yeah, it's like it's gives you any desktop client. I mean Google They do need a copy of Picasso that still exists. Yeah The thing for me about beats is like hasn't this exact thing been done before like this is what Slacker radio was They just made it again, right? Literally bought Mog and made it again. Yeah I will say the the interface at the beginning where it like there are little bubbles and it asks you to pick which artists you Like and don't like and genres you like and don't like is neat and then I get past that and it's like well I have no idea how to do anything. Yeah, I am in bed With a banana and I want to listen to reggae music Yeah, you don't like do stuff you tell it like where you are how you're feeling what you want to listen to you play Mad Libs I gotta try it out. So I gotta try be people like I mean, it's fun. Have a free trial So I have a theory about all of this No, I think that they all pay money to the labels per stream and I think that it's in their best interest To be like look at how much different music people are straight instead of what I did with iTunes or my records or My tapes when I had those or my CDs which was listening to the same stuff over and over which is what I end up doing Right. Yeah for sure because I mean, maybe we're just old we're old people Well, so wait, are you saying like if I stream something like the first 5,000 times beats stream something It's cheaper than the next 5,000. No, I think it's I think it's in their interest It's a totally diversify their streams and like spread the money around basically, right? So they're always into discovery They're always like they want to show this right is always about new they want to demonstrate I want to demonstrate to artists and to labels that it can be an effective tool for discovering and then like purchasing or listening to New music because the whole point is like if it doesn't if you just keep listening to Beyonce Then like they are just like you know, they're just like you know Beyonce then like they already know Beyonce is popular Like that's not their problem Their problem is like they want to make some other like sub Beyonce character popular But the problem is all of these services and I have this problem with audio too is they bury things like Beyonce No, because that's when Beyonce comes out with a record Like I find out because I hit the play button on my Mac and iTunes magically opens I'm like, oh Beyonce has a new album out, right? And it's like that's I've found this out recently that's like talking to friends and stuff that most what a lot of people I know Do is go to iTunes find out what's new and cool that they should listen to and then go to Spotify or audio and yeah They're discovery. They're discovery That's because they use social they're using like social to like predict what is like popular when they really should be saying like we're curating What's popular that's the difference between iTunes and already? Oh is that pop social pushes up like the social stuff pushes up like what is pop? What is like listen to or new and listen to by like this your sphere? Whereas iTunes just like hey, here's actual new stuff like a record store, right? The the which I think is what most people want one thing that I have to say talking about this I've been thinking and just thinking about it One of the things that I've learned in our new reality of streaming Services like video on demand and music on demand. Here's what I've learned. Just love it I mean to be really be like really patient about things I wasn't patient about before the guy used to be like I gotta hear the new thing I gotta listen to the new thing right now I'm gonna spend $15 on this record or I have to see this new movie I'm gonna go to the theater and spend like the ticket price and watch it. Yeah now like yeah, you know what? I'll just wait. I'll just wait for it to come to the thing that I use and then I'll listen to it Yeah, that's me with TV a long time. I think it's a weird thing that I'm not sure They may be like an accident. They didn't want that to happen They thought people would be like well just pay for it wherever I can get it, right? But in actuality people are pretty patient. Yeah, and they'll just go like y'all just wait for or the people who aren't impatient They're gonna backstop their streaming services by just pirating the stuff right? Which I think it happens a lot. So Definitely happens for me with movies. Yeah, I just was like, all right. I have to see Captain Phillips. I can't wait any longer iTunes I haven't actually watched all things. It's good movie. No now it is now it is today like yesterday, but it wasn't Like a video like the GoPro just not popcorn Screeners my man screeners around the ward season. It's all about screen. What was it? Wasn't it? I also have I also have some screeners that I did not illegally Acquire and I mix up for it. The point is it does When the police come I bought the Sega game Wonder Boy in Monster Land. So if I have the ROM, it's no big deal Yeah, no, there's a lot of think about it. Think about that. I really through you guys I really threw you guys for what else is what else is out? What other new movies are out? I'm not looking movies only music. I'm just really Phillips. What else let's look they have an Oscars. I Don't know it's terrible crap. I think most of the officers always so much bad crap. It's still I'm just gonna play theaters Is Nebraska out No, I think now these are just like the movies that are nominated. You can just pre-order them. Yo, yeah, that's my favorite digital pre-order This is my favorite new thing that Apple does on the Apple TV, it's like oh my god her is available I'm like, oh my god, I'm gonna watch it right now. I'll buy it right now. No problem Like no pre-order her like get out of my random other interface Apple what are you doing? It's just walking Phoenix Amazing. Hey, what do you see her? Yeah. Did you like it? I loved it. Shut up. Okay, really good stuff Everyone be quiet. Shut up. I didn't like the way it ended. Is everybody dying? I was surprised Yeah, like I didn't expect the building to blow It was a lot more stabbing than I thought this is weird The computer actually attacked him with the knife. I don't see how was it holding it the worst I didn't understand Scarlett Johansson could do anything she wants and that face will and then at the end that the girl computer was a boy computer Shock it. That was twist. Yeah, I Did not say that comment and then the explosion right? This is a bit surprised Yeah, and then instead and then I thought Captain Phillips ended weirdly to him. They were like in the matrix That was a weird ending to Captain Phillips. It was all simulation, but I totally bought it cuz Tom Hanks is so great Exactly he's amazing. He woke up in like a hyperbaric in like the year How by the way, how amazing would that be if that's how Captain Phillips actually? Was like in a matrix simulation and they're like welcome to like, you know the year 4000 anyhow Training and then he actually goes out. That's the worst he wakes up at the end The lead pirate is the guy who's been operating the thing the whole time. It's the they're actually best friends It's the worst reboot of Total Recall ever made the total Total Recall Total Recall 2014 Would be pretty good if I don't see a Photoshop poster of that in All right, I think this is devolved to an appropriate level where we can end yeah, okay good. All right. Well, that's the verge cast What time is it? Oh, yeah, we're good What we're at the verge cast for this week If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us at verge cast the verge calm you can leave a comment on This on the verge cast post when it goes up You can put something into our forms, you know contribute to our forums say something about the verge cast a positive negative We'll take it all you can also find us on Twitter. The verge is at verge. I'm Josh with the Polsky. Neely is reckless David Pierce's Pierce David will never understand Did I tell you that there are a large number of people in the world that think my first name is Pierce Pierce Yes, like if it's here's come up to me and be like, oh hey Pierce. I'm like, hmm, sir, but now It's fine. Call me whatever you want. This is a weird Is it also weird pierced an actor here's David David Hyde Pierce Who I could see like you guys you have kind of have a similar thing going There are a lot of people who are positive that we're related and I'm like, that's you're not And that's it for us, I think we'll be back next week with more verge casting Something will happen more verge cast and bridge gets it torrenting the movies live next we're gonna be watching Turning next week while we while we watch Captain Phillips Together to find out if they ever get off the island And and as always I wish you and your family the very best for this upcoming weekend, which will be It's gonna be a weekend filled with physical pain and emotional pain for you and the ones you love You

Today, one year after Lisa, we are introducing the third industry milestone product, Macintosh. It's a personal computer from Apple, and it's as easy to use as this. Macintosh. The computer for the rest of us. It's an idea so intelligent, it can transform itself. If you thought a really powerful business computer was way out of your reach, we've got news for you. Introducing the affordable Macintosh Classic II. Some people think the Pentium II is the fastest processor in the world. The chip inside every new Power Macintosh G3 is up to twice as fast. Well today, I'm incredibly pleased to introduce iMac. The excitement of the internet with the simplicity of Macintosh. The 1999 new Power Macintosh G3. It's built out of polycarbonate, which is the same stuff they use to make bulletproof vests out of. What they wanted was an iMac to go. iBook is the name of this product. Let me show you what the G4 looks like. That's a lot for one day. But there's one more thing. Possibly the most beautiful product we've ever designed. The computer is in an 8 inch cube, and it's suspended in a stunning crystal clear enclosure. We want both. The power and the sex. So today we're introducing a totally new PowerBook. This is the new iBook. 1.3 inches thick. There it is. I don't think it could be more black and white. Today, we're going to say goodbye to that iMac. Because today we're announcing a new iMac. John Rubenstein and his hardware team have outdone themselves this time. It is the thinnest PowerBook ever. The new 17 inch PowerBook. A new 12 inch PowerBook. We are delivering today the world's fastest personal computer. And we're calling it the G5. Question. What would the creators of the iPod do for their next computer? I'd like to be the first to show you the all new iMac. And so today, we think we know what they have in mind, and we're introducing it. It's called the Mac Mini. And this is what it looks like. It's very, very tiny. We announced that we were going to shift to using Intel processors. Steve, I wanted to report that Intel's ready. Wow. The Intel chip. The Intel chip. Wow. The Intel chip will be set free. And get to live life inside a Mac. We're going to put an Intel processor inside a new iMac. We are introducing a new notebook computer that we are calling the Macbook Pro. I am so excited. I get to be the very first one to introduce all of you to the brand new Mac Pro. There is one other product that you don't really think of as a Mac, but it's a really important product in our product line, and that's ExCerv. Yes. What would an iMac look like if we upgraded it and made it out of aluminum and glass? Well, it looks like this. This is the new iMac design, and it's just stunning. We're introducing a third kind of notebook. It's called the Macbook Air. Yeah, there it is. I'm trying to design some new unibody enclosures for some new notebooks. Some of you are familiar with our current Macbook Pro, and today we're going to replace it with this. What would happen if a Macbook and an iPad hooked up? This is the result. It is our new Macbook Air, and we think it's the future of notebooks. What would make a next generation Macbook Pro? You want a next generation Macbook Pro to have a killer new display. Yes, it is a retina display. The Mac Mini is our smallest, most affordable Mac. And if you haven't looked at one lately, it's packed with a lot of great features. It's so great today for you to be the first to see the next generation of iMac. So I am really pleased to give you, our closest friends, the first glimpse of the next generation of Mac Pro. Can't innovate anymore, my ass. I'm glad you had a chance to see Macintosh. Macintosh is the neatest product I've ever seen in my life. And it's going to be able to make a qualitative difference in the way that we communicate with each other. And coupled with this radical ease of use, which Lisa technology provides, I think we're going to be able to bring these products to not just hundreds of thousands or a few million people, but tens of millions of people. And that's really what the personal computer revolution is all about.

It's Thursday, January 23rd, 2014. I'm Nathan Seidkret, and I'm so happy we were able to fix that reboot glitch. It was just acting. It's Thursday, January 23rd, 20... It happened again, didn't it? This is 90 Seconds on the Verge. Can we get this fixed, please? It's been a very good year for Netflix. The company revealed in its fourth quarter earnings report that it now has over 44 million customers worldwide, with just over 33 million of those in the U.S. Not one to hold back, CEO Reed Hastings is also taking a strong stance for net neutrality, warning internet service providers that he'll provoke customer protest should anyone impede the data flow of Ms. Brizal's The Magic School Bus. While President Obama last week hedged on sweeping changes to the government's surveillance program, an independent federal watchdog is suggesting more closure. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's report this week said the NSA's phone record collection program is illegal and should come to an end. Two of the five board members reportedly disagreed that the program is illegal, but all five agreed with its ten other recommendations. And finally, my mother may call me to ask why her internet is broken, but the Pope calls it a quote, gift from God. In a statement for the Catholic Church's World Communications Day, Pope Francis praised the internet's ability to connect people of different religions, saying it creates a quote, sense of unity of the human family. The Pope also added that the internet and social media should be used to foster connections and real relationships. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, the Pope takes back everything he said after he discovers the world of subreddits.

It's Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014. I'm Valentina Paladino and since it's my first time hosting, I thought I'd bring a little CGI movie magic to the show. This is 90 seconds on the Verge. Verizon today released a tally of the requests it receives from law enforcement at all levels, totaling over 320,000 requests. These include phone numbers and content like text messages and emails. AT&T has promised to publish its own report, but we're still waiting for it to follow Verizon's lead. They say it pays to play, but if it's an Xbox One, it really does. Microsoft's partnership with the video gaming site Machinima is getting flack for paying YouTube personalities to promote the Xbox One, but forcing them to keep quiet about the deal. Microsoft has since halted the program and is bringing any existing videos in line with the FTC's requirements. For all updates on this story, remember to check out the 90 seconds app exclusively on the Sega Game Gear. And finally, terrible weather often brings leaks to homes, and it looks like the biggest leak happened to Quentin Tarantino. The first draft of the director's next film, entitled The Hateful Eight, was leaked online after Tarantino reportedly gave the script to six people, including actors Tim Roth and Bruce Dern. Because of the leak, the quote, very depressed Tarantino will now hold off on making the film and move on to direct another project in the meantime. However, Tarantino has also said that he might just completely change his mind and make the film. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I start my own film festival composed entirely of Brendan Fraser's classic The Mummy and all of its sequels and spin-offs.

Bitcoin is an experimental virtual currency that mysteriously appeared in 2009 when a programmer operating under a pseudonym introduced it on a cryptography mailing list. Since then, Bitcoin has gotten more and more popular. The price of a single Bitcoin has peaked at over $1,000, and there are about 10 million Bitcoins in circulation. Jack and Laura Sommer are selling their lavish home in Las Vegas for $7.85 million, and they're accepting Bitcoin. If a Bitcoin buyer comes forward, this would be the single largest transaction in the currency ever. Hi, we're Jack and Laura Sommer. I'm Laura Heasjie. The house grosses out at about 25,000 square feet, including a separate guest villa, which is about 3,000 square feet. And we are on about, well, it's over an acre, but these are golf course lots, and it's listed for $7.85 million. We've added the dynamic of accepting, in addition to other currencies, I suppose, but Bitcoin as an acceptable currency for this transaction. One of my sons said, you know, dad, you should expect, wouldn't you accept Bitcoin? I said, sure. He said, well, why don't you tell the world? Because you'll get more exposure for your property, and it's a pretty exciting thing to do. So about a minute later, I went to the video that I had produced on an uplink to YouTube, and I put in the tag, you know, Bitcoin accepted. We're getting a lot of attention. We're getting a lot of attention. Obviously, I monitor the amount of views on the video, and it jumped. So that's kind of cool. That's very interesting. Tell me about it. What's Bitcoin? Yes. That's typically the reaction. It's a very simulated questions about the space. And I think that's positive. It's healthy. It's healthy. It's positive for the real estate. It's obviously positive for Bitcoin. But I think Bitcoin, the Bitcoin universe is far larger than just us. But I think it's a good move. Somebody would suggest interest in the house. I assume they would come and take a look at it and say, oh, my God, I love this place. Or this is cool. It's good for me. And they would give us an offer through the broker in US dollar and probably make reference to an equivalent amount in Bitcoin. And it would just be perfunctory after that. And as I said, as you get closer to the closing date, we will have already chosen a conversion entity and it will close. It's not that complicated, really. I mean, if somebody, as I said, comes in euros or yen, I mean, there's swings there with the dollar. It's the same thing. Yeah, it could be a blend. Part cash, part bit. Why not? Using Bitcoin is tricky, especially for large transactions, because the price jumps around so much. A single Bitcoin was worth $20 in February of 2013, but by the end of the year, it had jumped to over $1,200. The contract for the Summers house will have to account for any price swings during the 30 days it takes to close on the sale of a house. And they'll have to cash out most of the currency relatively quickly in order to avoid taking on too much risk. There are plenty of things that could go wrong. The US government could outlaw the currency or a technical flaw could be found. But with more people like the Summers using Bitcoin, the dream of a universal internet currency seems like it could maybe work. How much do you think you would keep in Bitcoin? Well, then I would be telling you what my speculation would be. Not much. I don't know, maybe 100 grand or something like that. Oh, I think more. If the coins are at that point, when they went down, I'd be grabbing everyone I could get. Left undisturbed by government, we'll say, I think Bitcoin is viable indefinitely. The volatility will probably slow down and will probably stabilize at levels where both owners and buyers of Bitcoin and more importantly, vendors and other commercial enterprises will feel more comfortable accepting Bitcoin as tender. That will stabilize the currency. The value of Bitcoin is not going to be changed by announcements of unemployment data or war or anything like that. So that's kind of one of the pluses of this concept. It's huge as our economy is and as all the dollars that are out there. You can see pretty significant fluctuations with a good jobs report or something like that or a good GDP number. But I don't look at it as a stunt or a very short term, you know, yeah, I'll do it. Ah, forget it. I'm not going to do it. As long as Bitcoin maintains the viability that it seems to be maintaining, we're there. It's a currency. It is a currency for our purposes at this time.

It's Tuesday, January 21st, 2014. This is 90 seconds on the Verge. Good evening. I'm Ross Miller. We begin tonight with breaking news. For that, we go live on the scene with Ross Miller. Ross. Thanks, Ross. Say hello to Beats Music. This week, the famous headphone maker launched its own music subscription service, which emphasizes editorial curation from notable artists and music journalists. Unlike Spotify and RDO, there will be no free ad-supported version of Beats Music. The cost of entry is $9.99 a month. Amazon has gained a new U.S. patent for quote, anticipatory shipping. The system would allow Amazon to send items to its shipping hubs preemptively, based on nearby customers' previous searches and purchases, wishlists, or even how long the user's cursor hovers over an online item. We're not sure when or if Amazon will implement such a system, so we asked a few locals what they thought about the new plans. I would say that this weather like this makes me appreciate the weather that's not like this. And finally, Ross, we are that much closer to a galaxy far, far away. Director J.J. Abrams has announced that the script to the upcoming Star Wars Episode VII is complete. Abrams also confirmed that breaking bad star Jesse Plymouth is being considered for a starring role in the sequel. Expect a midi-chlorian count somewhere in the range of December 2015. That's it for today's top stories. Back to you, Ross. Thanks, Ross. Coming up tomorrow, a panda gets trapped on a patch of ice. The results? Not so black and white. Goodnight and good luck.

Hi, welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. This is episode 76 for the week of January 20th, 2014. Dieter Bohne is actually, I think, at an airport right now, so he is not with us, but I'm Dan Siefert. I'm Vlad Sevo. I'm Chris Sigler. And the rest of us are here, and it feels like it's been forever since we've done a show, but it was only like a week and a half ago that we were at CES, wasn't it? Well I haven't done a show since 2013, I don't think. So there's that. By the way, I would just like to point out that Dieter, the reason Dieter is not here is not only is he trying to get on an airplane, but he's trying to get on an airplane specifically from Minneapolis to New York City, which is going into polar vortex 2.0 right now. Yeah, and he's going from like one tundra to another. Yeah, there's like no chance of this plane actually taking off. I don't know why he's even trying. But my understanding is that his flight as of right now is not canceled, so we'll see if he makes it. Yeah, well, we hope that Dieter gets in safe, but we're gonna carry on without him anyways. So I just had a really disturbing moment while Chris was detailing Dieter's travails. I had a window open with a Verge Mobile Show stream on it, and it started streaming randomly, and he was like, hi, this is episode 76. I'm Dan Seifert, and Chris is still talking about Dieter. He's like, what's going on? I've had that happen before. You know why? So yesterday I was saying on Twitter that... You guys don't use flash block. I don't understand this. You just have flash windows going randomly wild in your browsers. I don't like blocking anything. I want all media to be blasted at my face at all times. How is your computer not at a constant crawl? Has well, baby. That's how. Look, so I was saying on Twitter yesterday that Chrome's sound indicator in the tab bar is like the greatest innovation in the history of computing. That's what saved me just now. Yes, yeah, I knew it. See? It's a beautiful thing, man. That was it. But I would like to point out, I tweeted today complaining about Google's policies. Specifically the issue was that China is now introducing a new policy to say that if you are uploading a video on the Internet, you have to have an account with your real name associated with it. Which my immediate reaction, Thomas Ricker's immediate reaction, basically everybody's immediate reaction was, ah, this is exactly what Google did with YouTube. And it's just kind of ironic when you have Google trying to be the do-gooder in the world and China being the dictatorial controlling nation that are allowed to follow in the footsteps of the former. It wasn't supposed to be that way. So anyway, I had a little tweet about that and I think the Hangouts issues that led us to start today are kind of a reaction to it. You mean Google is actively targeting your account and? I'm pretty sure. We are having some inexplicable issues with Google Hangouts today that none of us can really figure out. So here's the thing with Google Hangouts is we seem to have inexplicable issues with Google Hangouts virtually every week, but they are different inexplicable issues every single week. There's no way to predict or prepare for them because it's always different. In that regard, it's actually a lot like Skype where literally every Skype call I have with Nilay Patel starts with me, one of us saying, God I hate Skype because something bizarre is happening. My current issue that is I basically can't have people call me on Skype now because the Skype app rings but then also something else rings on my machine. So like I'll answer the call but like the Skype ringing keeps playing. Even if I close the Skype app entirely, there's still the Skype ringing for about two minutes. It's the weirdest problem. If a Skype engineer is listening to this right now, please I'm begging you, help me figure out why this is happening. I literally can't take a Skype call now. You sure the Skype ringing carries on your computer or not inside your mind? It might be inside my mind. I can't rule that out. You should just really count your blessings, Chris. You can't take Skype calls. Yeah, that's true. I can make Skype calls but I can't take them. But I wish I could rule out that I'm going crazy but I can't. That's a strong possibility. So this is the Verge Mobile Show so I guess we should talk about mobile stuff, right? Look, Chrome is on phones, Skype is on phones. I would submit that we've been talking about nothing but mobile so far. Touché. But we do have actually stuff to talk about. So the Moto X is coming to Europe soon which is good news for Europe. I know a lot of people have been waiting a long time for it to be available outside of North America and I think it's available in South America but maybe in the Eastern Hemisphere. Well, the Moto G is a bigger deal for South America, right? But the question is in Europe, in Western Europe in particular, did they wait too long? And it seems like it's coming at a pretty high price, isn't that right Vlad? They're going to ask 430 Euro which is like more than it costs in dollars in the US? No, it's always more than it costs in dollars in the US but then also let's not forget that the US price is like the bare minimum that nobody actually pays. Ultimately, you guys have taxes that get tacked on. Yeah, but I mean the 430 Euro that Motorola is selling for is more in like sheer numbers of units of dollars, not talking about conversions, than the $399 that they're asking for in the US. If you convert that $399 to Euro, it's like what, 700 or 800 bucks or 750 bucks or something like that? It's not quite that bad, but yes, actually the Euro is more valuable than the dollar. But yeah, it's expensive. The Euro is more valuable than the dollar. I think the distinction here is that the X is certainly at a higher price point, let's put it that way, relative to where it is in the US. Even setting aside my pedantry about conversion rates in the US, misrepresentations with pricing. But to answer Chris' question, which I think is the important one, I got a hold of a Moto X about a week ago now. Now it is finally coming to Europe and I have to say my immediate reaction was it doesn't matter at all that this is coming six or however many months later than the US release. It doesn't matter at all. The way that this phone has been designed, the way it's been put together, it was never about the specs to begin with. So the fact that a few months have expired doesn't make it any less interesting or compelling to people. That being said, I am a little bit disappointed. It has lost a little bit of its sheen for me now that I've had time to spend with it. I still think industrial design and the screen and the screen bezel are just superb. I mean I don't even know how you can improve on them but the camera on the Moto X to me is like just don't bother with it. It's like you put a front facing camera on the back of the phone. It's embarrassing. Okay and that's a big issue for me and the battery isn't great. I'm not happy with it. So I've actually, I've owned a Moto X for over a month now I guess. I'm going on six weeks or something that I've owned it. Whenever they put it on sale I bought it. And I will totally agree with you, the camera is super disappointing. I've gotten some good usable shots out of it but most of the time the shots are pretty disappointing and it's very hit or miss still. And as far as the battery goes, I was getting really bad battery life for a long time. Like the phone just wouldn't idle or sleep. So this weekend I turned off the touchless control which is the thing that lets you shout commands at it and I turned off the assist function that detects when you're driving which it uses GPS for and things like that. And the battery life has like dramatically improved. Like night and day difference. So it sucks that like I have to turn off the special Moto X features to get the battery life where I need it to be. But that did make a difference for me at least. This represents a fundamental failure on the manufacturer's part. When some of your main selling points for your device need to be disabled in order to get acceptable battery life, you fundamentally failed in your mission to produce a viable commercial phone. Like that's not acceptable. The average consumer should not need to like research pro tips on how to improve the battery life. Like you should get the phone and it lasts a day and that's it. End of story. Yeah and the thing is like you know Motorola when they launched the Moto X made a big deal about how these features use these low power processors. They've got this X8 computing system and it's not going to affect your battery life. But I can't say that that really is true because my experience is that it definitely directly affects the battery life. And turning those features off made a huge difference for me. So Dan you described the difference when you nerfed the touchless controls as night and day. Does the phone actually last night and day? Because that would be the handy bit. So yesterday I got like 20 hours of battery life out of it with four hours of the screen on meaning that I'm interacting with it and things like that. Today I am at, sorry I'm at 52% after 11 hours. So I'm kind of tracking for the same type of battery life. Which is actually like for an Android phone that's really good in my experience. Well unless it's one of those really generous sized ones, the Galaxy Note 3 and the HTC One Max because those things are hilarious. Like their battery life just lasts and lasts. Yeah but that's because you can put like you know a generator inside the damn thing because you know they're so massive. But in a normal sized phone like this is the kind of battery life that I get on my iPhone 5S which is I always like way better than the battery life that I get on Android phones. So this I'm like happy with. I'm not happy that I had to nerf the features in order to get it. Right and you know to that point, actually ever since Apple came out with Siri and the whole talk to your phone thing, my big concern and reluctance has been it's just really socially awkward. Like it can be convenient but the Google searches that I want to do or the things that I want to activate, I generally want to keep to myself. And even if you're not on the train where it's obviously weird and it's too noisy for the phone to pick up what you're saying, even if you're at home but with somebody else nearby or the neighbors nearby and you just start talking to your phone randomly, it's still socially awkward. We can't get over that hump. But having said that, I've started using the OK Google Now command. Maybe Moto X will pick it up now. But yeah, I started using the command and it's freaking good. It's really, really handy actually. It's really great when you're driving. Like I have a little dock in my car that I can put my phone and I can just like shout at it to like respond to text messages or call people or set navigation and that's like really where that shines for me. But like outside of that I don't really use it a whole lot. But also for me it's surprising that the voice recognition is so accurate because I don't really input the most straightforward of things. It's not like find Justin Bieber videos, you know? I'm asking it for like nutritional information and random crap about video games. Of course you are. And it's picking these things up, you know? So I mean to me it's great but the social hurdle is still kind of another one. It's kind of like Google Glass. You can make it as awesome as you like but it's still going to be just kind of weird. Will have people ever considered, I mean it's one thing now when there are only a couple phones that support that command but at some point in the future you're going to be on a train and you're going to say, okay Google now and half of the phone in the car are going to light up. I wonder if this is... Well in the case of the Moto X like you train it with your voice and it's supposed to pretty much listen to you for your voice and your inflections and things like that. But unlike the Nexus 5, there's no training involved and it's supposed to learn as you go along but really you can just like turn it on and just hold the thing and say, okay Google now and it starts doing its thing. So yeah, that would be kind of interesting I guess. I think the trick is to disable it, well I was going to say disable it when the phone is locked but then that kind of defeats the purpose. Well like on the Nexus 5 it doesn't work unless the phone is unlocked and turned on and you're looking at the home screen. Wait really? There's no limited functionality mode when the phone is locked? Nope, nope. The Nexus 5, so with the Nexus 5's Google experience launcher, that function that lets you say, okay Google or okay Google now only works when you're looking at the home screen. It doesn't work if you're in an app, it doesn't work if the phone is locked or anything like that. Hmm, that feels lame to me. Yes. Yeah, I guess. You know what I've used it a lot is like when I'm arguing with my friends about like who's in a specific movie or how, I should say I'm arguing with my wife about like how old a particular actor is in a TV show that we're watching and I'll just be like, okay Google now, how old is Josh DeHamel? And then it just like tells me. And how old is he? I don't know. Cool story bro. Like did you forget or did you? I don't know, for some reason Josh DeHamel's name was the first one that popped into my mouth right now, or popped into my head right now when I was in a Google experience. How old is Josh DeHamel? Not Justin Hamel. Siri man, Siri doesn't work. See now I have to use Google now and try it. I refuse to be a home business by the way. How old is Josh DeHamel? I bet he's way older than you. It's asking for Justin Hamel too because I can't speak so. Anyways. I bet he's ancient. I bet he's like 55, hold on. Wow so this is the Virgin Mobile show and the conclusion is we're going to do a Google search with our keyboard. There we go. Thumbs up to everybody involved in this. He's like twice as old as Shia LaBeouf who is no longer in the spotlight. Anyway. So yeah, so it's coming to Europe right next month and then the wood editions finally are available at least here in the US if you're able to access Moto Maker which is the other thing that you don't get in Europe is no Moto Maker. The dark one looks tight. Whatever the darkest wood is. Is that ebony? Yeah, so it's like ebony, teak, walnut and then bamboo. Bamboo has been out for like a couple weeks already. And I got to say the teak and the walnut look really tight. But you seem to like the ebony one Chris. Well the teak, my instinct would be to go with the teak because teak is renowned for its like resilience. But if it's something that you're going to be handling a lot, it seems like you'd want a wood that can stand the test of time. So apparently the way that… The way that… Wait wait wait, we have breaking news. Kwami is telling us that we pronounced his name incorrectly. And that's why it's not working. Josh Duhamel. Josh Duhamel. Now I can try it. How old is Josh Duhamel? How old is Josh Duhamel? Oh that worked. Did it? Did you hear that? Yeah it worked for both of you. Wait wait wait, for me it came out how old is Josh Duhamel. I got it, he's 41 man. It worked. I knew he was 41 but that's because I looked up on Chrome. Anyway Kwami, thank you for the correction. What were we talking about? Oh we were. No guys, guys, seriously I need to say this. The whole distinction between types of wood that Chris is drawing and saying that teak is particularly hardy, come on now. Well what I was going to say was in the case of the Moto X it doesn't matter because apparently I think the only wood that they're using is bamboo and the other colors are treated to look that color. So to Street Line Production it's not actually teak and it's not actually ebony. That is so lame. Yeah it's… I think it is actually all bamboo and they're all treated. It might be a different material but the three that they just added are not walnut, teak, and ebony woods. They are just treated to look that way. They don't make that clear at all. It's like that furniture that you buy at an office supply store that's compressed fiberboard and it's got a laminate on top to look like real wood. I would buy a particle board Moto X. That's the point I was going to say, you're not buying a wooden back phone because of its endurance or its durability and other such qualities. If you want that you buy the plastic version. I mean it's not lovely to the touch, it's not awesome but that's the thing that's going to last you the longest. Wood has all of these heat sensitive properties, fire sensitive properties. You mean it can catch on fire? Yeah. No it's not just fire. It's humidity, it's expanding, it's shrinking, it's doing all sorts of weird things. This is why people stop making wooden houses. If you want to get that down into the properties of the thing, metal does the same thing. It will expand and contract in heat and things like that. We don't worry about our aluminum phones. I do. I fret a lot. It really bothers me when they code and I have to pick up the phone for any particular reason. That's why I'm not such a huge fan. You call Vlad up and he's like I can't talk right now, my phone is too cold to hold. And I refuse to wear a Bluetooth headset, right Chris? That is true. Yeah, so there we go. Yeah, so that's it. If I'm using an aluminum phone, don't try to call me. Send me a text message. I guess I will say this, even though it sucks that they're, this is basically false advertising because they're calling it teak, walnut, nebony, but bamboo is renewable. Those other woods are not. So I guess from an ecological perspective it's probably the right thing. When you think about the manufacturing and costs and they've got to tool this and they've got to make sure that it meets all the standards and things like that. And obviously it took them a long time to figure all this out because they initially showed off those things like six months ago and now we're finally able to buy them today. And it's only costing you 25 bucks more than a plastic bag, which is a no brainer to me. Chris I know the point you're trying to make, but I would just like to point out that all the other woods are also renewable. No they aren't. If they weren't they'd be extinct right now. No that's absolutely not true. I mean like ebony is not, ebony is like an endangered wood basically. Right, but it's still renewable. Hold on, let's do some serious Google searching. Wait hang on, I'm learning about ebony right now. What you mean is the use of the wood is more sustainable. As a result of unsustainable harvesting, many species yielding ebony are now considered threatened. Africa in particular has had most of its indigenous ebony cut down illegally and for this reason it has become common for street traders to blacken lighter woods with shoe polish in an effort to make a sale. Yeah. Boom. Boom. That doesn't make it non-renewable. I'll move with this along. The other big news that Motorola had in the past couple of weeks was that Google announced that it's carrying or selling a Play Edition Moto G for the same price, the same features and the same software that Motorola is selling the Moto G for. I can't understand for the life of me why the Google Play Edition exists, but it does. So you can buy it from Google and you can buy it from Motorola and I think you pretty much get the same phone either way. Yeah I think, I mean I guess that's just a branding thing right. Like it probably gives them some brownie points with certain members of the community that this version exists, but apart from that. I would just like to point out a couple of things. The Moto X, getting these wooden backs, that's improving the one part of the design that really didn't need improving and the one part of the phone that they don't really need improving. So that's a bit of a let down. It's cool. It's cool. Right, absolutely. Absolutely. And this is the whole reason people buy Vertifos and other things with luxurious finishes and textures that don't really serve any practical purpose. I get that. I understand that. I mean that's why you have sofas that cost you know from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. That's fine. I'm just saying if you're going to step up or improve the phone in some fashion, that wasn't the bit you wanted to improve on. I would much rather have had one of those epic software updates like the Nexus 5 got for its camera. Like that is still to be like a bit of software magic because the Nexus 5 camera before Google updated was garbage. If you used the Moto X on day one when it before its camera was updated, you'd realize that it already got that update. Like the camera was so bad before and now it's like sometimes it takes a good picture. That's where it's at now. Which is the same story as the Nexus 5. They might have been able to keep that going. Maybe Google has just set my expectations too high because again the Nexus 5 camera was borderline unusable at the beginning. You need to take like five shots to get one half decent one and then they updated it and they did a lot of really good things, made a lot of good decisions. I would just like to see that happen with the Moto X as well because that phone, all it's really missing is a decent camera and a decent battery. Those are still the two hardest things to nail down I know but they're the things that the phone needs. So I just had a viewer tweet at me saying that if you buy the Moto G from Google and you get the Google Play Edition, you don't get Motorola Assist, you don't get the trusted Bluetooth feature and you don't get the Motorola camera app and they're not available from the Play Store. Oh, woe is me, the Motorola camera app. It's better than the stock Android app if you've ever used that. The trusted Bluetooth feature is pretty cool if you're using a smart watch. It's totally cool if you've got a pebble and it just unlocks when your pebble is automatically connected to it, that's pretty cool. So I'd buy it from Motorola, oh, it's just me. Here's what you do if you want a better camera, you wait for Project Ara and then you just swap in a better camera module, boom. There you go. Okay well, so that means I'll be taking good pictures in about half a decade. Yeah, that sounds about right. No, well no, you can just get ZTE's modular phone which they just showed at CES. It was ZTE, right? I think it was. Yeah, and you can pair it with ZTE's pebble knockoff. Yeah. Or alternatively, and here comes a segue, you can get the Oppo M1 which has a massive camera which flips around to the front and the back, right Dan? Segue, boom, segue alert. So we reviewed the, I guess I reviewed the Oppo M1 which is the first phone to ship with Cyanogenmod if you want to buy it that way. You can buy it, Cyanogenmod's already installed, you don't need to root or hack or side-by-side load or unlock bootloaders or any of that fun stuff. It just comes with Cyanogenmod. And you know, Cyanogenmod is actually really good. It's a great interpretation of Android. It's really fast, it's really stable, has really great battery life. The Oppo M1, not that great of a device. And also huge, right? It's massive. It is like, like we were talking about the One Max and those other big phones with big batteries before, but like the Oppo and the One Max have the same size screen and the One Max, or the Oppo just feels like so much bigger for whatever reason. I think it's probably because of that twisting camera design on top and things like that. The One Max already, it feels unreasonably like offensively large. So something that feels bigger than it is just wrong. Yeah, I mean everybody that saw, that I showed the Oppo to were just like, their first reaction was like, oh my god it's so big and they laugh. And it's also really heavy, it's really dense. Well I think a really important point that Oppo and maybe even CyanogenMod are glossing over is that, you know, CyanogenMod is effectively, I mean it is its own Android skin at this point and with that distinction comes its own problems, right? So you know, you're not going to, this isn't stock, you're not going to get, when Google announces the next version of Android, you're not going to get an update on your M1 the next day. It takes time for CyanogenMod to come out with a new version. That's a good point. So actually the final version of CyanogenMod that is shipping on the M1 right now is 10.2 which is based off of Android 4.3. So it's not even on Android 4.4 yet. They have like beta versions and early access builds that you can get that are on Android 4.4 but the final build or the stable build or whatever you want to call it is still on Android 4.3 and it takes a few months for them to transfer to each version of Android as they come out. But what I think, the thing that CyanogenMod does and it's the same thing that Motorola does on the Moto X is that it takes what is largely a stock experience and just adds a few tweaks underneath and a few enhancements and makes it a better experience as opposed to the things that HTC and Samsung and LG and everyone else do where they completely modify the user interface. And you know, as someone who usually prefers stock Android, I like that because it's like stock but better. So it's cool. Do you guys remember a few years ago, I remember I wrote about it for Engadget, there was a knock off Oppo where they switched the P's nose, so it was the poop. Every time I see Oppo I think about that and I Google your article on Engadget. The poop phone, yeah. It's the poop flip phone. Yep, yep. So if the N1 gets big enough, we might see some more Oppo knock offs and I'm hoping that they're branded poop. The poop N1 running Cyanogenmod would be a pretty sweet phone. It would be the poop number two though. It would have to be like the poop N2. The poop N2, yes. So that's the Oppo, you can buy it if you want, 600 bucks, you don't get LTE, it's really big and the screen's not that great. So I wouldn't suggest buying it but it's a bit important move for Cyanogenmod and I think, to be honest with you, I think Cyanogenmod's end game here is to just be bought by another company that's larger and can put out good hardware and stuff like that. So we'll see. I mean that would be good. Particularly if it's somebody like Sony, for example, that would be really good. Just envision Cyanogenmod being tucked into Sony with Sony being great on physical design, pushing waterproof phones, pushing good attractive and consistent design and just lacking that bit of software polish now. The big issues were the displays, which they actually fixed with the Z1 Compact and the software which was always kind of eh on top of Android. That's a nice vision as opposed to freaking Oppo which I think it was last year CES where they brought their own skin to Android and it was like, I think it was Oppo Find 5, was that a phone? So Oppo's got its own skin, right, that you can buy the N1 with Cyanogenmod or you can buy it with Oppo software if you want. If you get Oppo software it's got this, what they call color OS and it's this heavily modified. It's an atrocity. Yeah, it's designed for the Chinese market and it's very different than stock Android. I think it's just cruel. It's an abuse of Android. And speaking of cruel, I'm taking my second Segway of the day dad. Do it. You're on a Segway roll. Speaking of cruel, there is this keyboard thing which we reviewed which turns your iPhone into an elongated weird Blackberry clone thing. So for starters, I think Chris made this point yesterday on Twitter. I mean they named it the typo and do they know what typo means? Source name ever. It's like, it reminds me of the Chevy Nova which they tried to sell in Spanish speaking markets which literally translates to no go. You don't name a product, I don't need to explain this. I just don't need to explain it. It's too obvious. Don't call this thing the typo. David reviewed it. It's our lowest review score ever, right? Yeah, it's really bad. I used it for a few minutes before David took it to do the review and it's like really bad. The thing is iOS doesn't support a keyboard in this fashion. It's a real pain in the butt to be jumping back and forth between you've got to keep like one finger up here on the touch screen to move your cursor around and then you've got your thumb down on the buttons below for typing and then the keyboard is like unreliable, the auto correct doesn't work. It's just a disaster. I mean it's like Coke coming out with a new soda called Poison. It's literally what this is like. It's not even new Coke. It's just straight poison. If you're not buying this product, press the press if you're watching. I apologize but we can't recommend your awful iPhone attachment. You probably lost whatever you invested but any press is a good press, right? I would just like to announce that while you guys were discussing that keyboard, I managed to get a kink into my cable of my headphones and just as you guys are finishing, I managed to unwind it so I feel triumphant right now. I feel triumphant for two reasons. First of all, we informed the public, we let them know to stay clear of this and secondly, I figured out how to sort out that kink. So thumbs up all around. Nicely done. Congratulations. Thank you. Even though I screwed up myself. So speaking of hardware keyboards, apparently Blackberry is going to, I guess all future devices that the company produces will mostly focus on actually having hardware keyboards as they realize that's the only differentiation for their hardware. And their now CEO, John Chen, who used to be their interim CEO and they're like forget it, we're giving up looking for anybody else and you're now our CEO, said that they're going to be all hardware from here on out. I don't know, because we don't know if they're going to sell consumers or if they're only going to sell the enterprise. It's still all way up in the air. Well what's going to happen is in roughly 12 to 18 months, Chen is going to be forced out and there will be this huge hullabaloo over the fact that he left with a $25 million package golden parachute and then they'll find another interim CEO and this is just going to continue ad nauseum until they're out of money. They have like $2 billion in the bank so this is going to go on for like five years. I just feel like this is one of those things where you're making a decision, you're making a stand just to perform the act. Just to say here I am, I'm now in charge, I'm now leading in some direction so let's take the direction of we're sticking with hardware keyboards. I just don't see that panning out in any sort of positive fashion. I don't care if they're selling to consumers or to businesses ultimately, if anybody is using that hardware keyboard, it's not a computer, it's a person. The thing that people seem to be increasingly recognizing is that the stuff that you like for your personal device is also the stuff you like to use in your business environment as well. People started bringing iPhones, tablets, etc. into the work environment and those things started off as consumer products. If a hardware keyboard is still appealing to people, it doesn't matter where you're going to try and sell it. But I don't think it is. Maybe in some markets where they're really very much prevalent, like let's guess Indonesia, those kinds of markets. I think it's a rapidly shrinking market. Right, exactly. The thing is you've got guys like Sean Hollister who wrote maybe a month or two ago a piece for us saying I come to bury the hardware keyboard and he on our staff was the last person who actually appreciated keyboards. Everybody has moved in transition to using touch screens, software is transitioning that way. I don't see how you're going to make that work with Android app compatibility if you want to maintain that because nobody is developing apps for hardware keyboards or taking account for hardware keyboards or capitalizing on their benefit, whatever it is anymore. It just doesn't make sense. We need to move on. It's like using a quill and ink when you have refillable pens. We just got to get with the times. So what you're saying is that in like three years all the hipsters in Brooklyn are going to be carrying around QWERTY smartphones? Why? Because they're going to be retro? Yeah. It will be like using a quill and ink pen. I guess. I mean I'm not that savvy with how weird Brooklynites get to be honest. I don't know how weird they'll get. But I'll tell you what, a little deviation here. Neil deGrasse Tyson, I was listening to his podcast recently and the man is a genius. He's my idol as far as podcasts go because you can listen to him for days. But he had a really interesting story about that sort of writing with a quill and ink the old way. And he was saying that if you do that, when you dip to get some ink, you can only rewrite something like six or eight words before you need to dip again. And he was saying that that gives you a good rhythm for how people understand and hear things. So you should try and make a point every six or eight words or a sentence six or eight words. So when he writes his speeches and things, he tends to do that. He likes to do or write in that rhythm. So there's like, I don't know how, I don't think it's very scientific but it's like a really odd little benefit to using the old school method. Which I would like to point out does not apply to hardware keyboards. They have no discernible benefit anymore. By the way, I'd like to point out that celebrity blackberry sightings are still online and going strong. You mean celebrities are still using blackberries? Yeah. There's like recent updates? Yeah, I mean the definition of celebrity is starting to work a little bit I think. But yes, there are still celebrities using them. I saw a guy in the street, that's a celebrity. So it's funny because our office in New York City is in Midtown Manhattan, which is like there's a lot of like businessmen there. And so I've seen quite a few dudes in suits using like blackberry Z10s. Like walking around in them and things like that. And it's like the only place that I've ever seen anybody using Z10s. But I've seen more than one. Wait, Z10s not Q10s? Yeah, Z10s. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. I stole Dieter's Z10 and I don't know what happened to it. He's probably going to ask for it at some point. Probably not. And the thing with those businessmen is all I can think is company issued hardware. Yeah, I mean that's probably why because like their company has a best server and they have to access their email and they drop their other phone or whatever. Or they like stumbled into the phone shop and accidentally paid for one. It was like Android phone, oh I slipped and picked something else up. Maybe I should buy a Z30. Yes, you should Chris. You can get one unlocked for like under 500 bucks. You can also get a lot of things unlocked for under 500 bucks including an Nexus 5, Moto X. Dude, 25 hours of battery life? I mean, come on. Dude I'm sure the battery life is actually longer because you're never going to be using the phone anyway so you will lose. Oh wait, never mind. You can only buy from Verizon. Never mind. Done. I don't even think Verizon is offering it in the stores. That's what I heard. Like you can only buy it online. Yeah, that sounds about right. Anyways, that's enough about Blackberry. So we've got Mobile World Congress coming up in about a month's time and so the annual rumor train is kind of starting to gain steam and there's been like a whole lot of crap rumored in the past couple of weeks. Because either whether it's going to supposedly happen at Mobile World Congress or just it's like that time of year when there's not much else news going on so rumors start bubbling up and people are anticipating the next thing. It seems like we're in the thick of it and the first one was this new HTC One is supposed to be coming soon in March according to a report from Bloomberg. It's going to have a bigger screen and a better camera which are two things that nobody could predict ever that a new phone would have. But apparently, I think the most interesting thing about this is that the Bloomberg report says it's going to use the HTC One name again. So maybe HTC is going to do the Apple iPad move and name like three successive years of phones HTC One or something like that. It makes sense. They kind of painted themselves into a corner with the name because obviously they can't call it HTC One 2. And HTC Two sounds weird. So I could see them doing that. They could just you know, yeah this has been Apple's move for years. They just have like product name and then parenthesis the year that it was released. So I could see it. Which Apple tends to get away with because it's products are more or less culturally iconic at this point. I think a company like HTC that is kind of stuck in a rut now for many, many months just needs to step away from. I mean it needs something novel. It needs to hit people with something new. I think they ran out of names. If you look back at HTC in like 2009 to 2012, they released so many phones with so many different names. They're just like, we're out of names. Right, but it's bad. It's bad right now because you have the Desire range which is supposed to be affordable, emerging markets, etc. etc. But all you're getting is like Desire 200, Desire 600, blah blah blah. And I can't keep them straight. I've seen those devices and they have nice designs but there's just no differentiation. There's no way for me to remember them because they're just tacked up with random numbers after them. It's just, I don't know. It's hard to excite people. And just repeating the name HTC One, this will be the third year with the One X being the initial flagship phone with that name. The two previous ones, even though they've had very good things about them and some not so good, particularly the camera, haven't sold. They haven't been successful. And the company reiterating the name and apparently looking at a post written by Adi reiterating the design just doesn't sound promising to me. You've got to come out with something new. To be honest with you, the design and the hardware of HTC's phones, especially in 2013, was not the problem. Like the design of the One is great, the hardware is phenomenal, it's really well put together, it still has like one of the best if not the best mobile displays on the market. It has a fault with the camera and the battery life is kind of mediocre. But the phone itself, as far as Android phones go, it's like the top of the heap as far as design is concerned. Why people aren't buying HTC phones, I mean you could come up with a million theories coming down to maybe the marketing isn't there, you never see an ad for an HTC One, at least not here in the US. I mean the other thing is, yeah the marketing is confused because the company has been pushing quietly brilliant as its tagline for a long time. But wow it stopped and then it reiterated it and at the same time it's pushing things like boom sound. And when it had the Beats Audio partnership going, it was kind of trying to be brash and hip and urban like Beats as well. And it just kind of lost its way. Honestly I think Beats Audio is like, there you go, we can just say that. That's not true. It is a fact, I don't know that anybody has something that they immediately identify with HTC phones anymore. It used to be together with Samsung, just pushing specs really really hard and just having the best specs. But then Samsung won that race. I think what it has come down to, at least in the US, I mean global markets might be a different story but in the US, smartphones have just become a big boys game and HTC is not a big boy. It's Apple, it's Samsung and frankly even Sony is starting to muscle its way into the market because they want to and because they are huge. HTC doesn't have that muscle and I don't think that they have the same level of bargaining power. I think that actually your example of Sony speaks to how difficult it is. Sony is a massive company, it's huge, it's making profits in other parts of the world that it can use to try and push into the US and it's still really really really difficult for Sony to get anywhere in the US. It's only able to get its phone on one carrier, it comes six months later than it comes to other parts of the world and frankly I don't think I've ever seen an American walking around with a Sony mobile phone and certainly not a Sony smartphone. So that just speaks to how difficult it is for HTC. HTC managed to get the one eventually on all four carriers here in the US. It's available in multiple colors, it struck deals with Best Buy to get exclusive colors and things like that and other promotional things and it's still not able to turn that into massive sales. So it's a really uphill game for it. And plus they spent god knows how much money on Robert Downey Jr. last year. Whatever happened with that? There was like one ad right? Yeah but it was, yeah I think there was just one ad but it was pretty long. Like the full uncut version of the ad I think was like two minutes. But there was one ad and there was a million puns on the letters HTC. I never saw the ad on TV. It wasn't run during like the Grammys or you know other big things where people are going to see it. There was no billboard ads for it that I recall seeing unless I'm just keep my eyes closed or something. So I don't know. Shall we discuss this twin sensor camera? Now this is intriguing, it's part of the new one rumor. Yeah I don't know what to say about it because it's like, is it another 3D camera? That's what made me think of like there's going to be another camera on there and then TC is going to buy it just because it's got more than one camera on the back. But if it's… Value for your money man. Twin sensor makes me think of a better autofocus system. I don't know. I really have no idea. I could just like hypothesize about it. Like the Canon 70D is an SLR camera that's got this dual pixel sensor that is like, it uses the sensor to autofocus and it's like really high tech and crazy but I'd be shocked if that came to a phone already. The 70D is a pretty new camera so. Well apparently Toshiba have these dual sensor chips which do appear to have two cameras in the back, yes. And it has to do with refocusing images. I guess if they're taking you know, one photo at a focus, this is from the camera and then another photo further away and then giving you a choice between where you want the focus to be, do you want it near, do you want it far and fluctuate between the two maybe with some fancy processing. I don't know. Well that's no different, I mean that's basically the same thing as what Nokia is doing, right? So Nokia and Sony are doing that trick kind of. Ah but the thing is they're not taking the photo at the same time. Right. Nokia is doing a series of photos at different distances. But man I mean like putting you know, I mean the camera sensor, especially a good camera sensor is probably one of the most expensive components in a good smartphone. So doubling that up just so you can get a gimmicky feature like that seems like a complete waste. It seems like a gimmicky, if that is indeed what it does, that seems like a novelty that'll be cool like to show off but what people want in their smartphone cameras, they want it to be fast, they want it to focus reliably and they want it to work well in really crappy lighting conditions and they want it to be able to use a fast enough shutter speed so that their kid isn't a blur when they're running around taking a picture. And it doesn't seem like that technology, if that's what it is, would resolve any of that. We'll see. Like I say, Barcelona is a month away. It is a month away, we're going to hear a whole heck of a lot more rumors I'm sure, it always seems to happen. For what it's worth, Bloomberg says that the One replacement will be released in March which is actually after Mobile World Congress. Do you think they'll keep going with the Ultra Pixel branding? Oh, should double pixel. Double Ultra Pixel? I think if they continue to do the thing with like using bigger pixels in lower resolution like they did with the One, then probably. I would just like to point out before we wrap up with the HTC and the One stories, that the One X is apparently not going to get an upgrade to Android 4.4 which given that we're less than two years away from its big massive release right around February, I guess say two years ago, is disappointing. It is. They're pulling a Galaxy Nexus. They're pulling a Galaxy Nexus and they're pulling an HTC One S because they kind of did the same thing with the One S. They marooned that on Android 4.1. I forgot the One S even existed until you just said it. So that's kind of like the problem, right? So they marooned that on Android 4.1, they were marooning the One X and the One X Plus on Android 4.2 or 4.3 but the thing is like if you look at their sales numbers, like HTC sold no One X's. Like how many do they have out there to support and at some point you've got to be like, yeah I kind of understand that the company is like we've got to just like cut our losses and move forward and put our efforts towards something new. You know why they're, I guarantee you the reason they're actually doing this is because for reasons only clear to HTC, they made One X's with both Qualcomm and Nvidia processors and they're like… I mean, the first One X that came out internationally had the Tegra 3 chip, the Nvidia chip and it did not have LTE because there was no LTE available for the Tegra 3 and then when they released in the US, they released it with a Qualcomm processor because it supported LTE. At first, but then they released a version on AT&T with the Tegra 3. Because it got LTE. Right, right, so I'm just saying like they're staring down the barrel of like this fragmented oh crap, we need to deliver every Android update for this phone on at least two different chips. Right. And instead they're just like, well screw it, we're just going to move on, we're going to cut our losses and move on. It's not good, I would just like to say it. It's certainly not good for consumer confidence, that's for sure. Exactly. I haven't forgotten about the One S, unlike you guys. I reviewed that phone and I still love it dearly. Again industrial design, screen quality, screen quality wasn't… Yeah the screen quality was bad on that one, it's a QHD display. Right, right, but I mean the industrial design was really nice. It was one of those phones where we saw leaked pictures of it and I was really brazen about it. I was saying, oh it just looks like another HTC. But when you felt it in your hands, it was really well designed, really well put together. So I mean this story needs to like just end. Where you say, HTC has great industrial design, may cameras, iffy software and unreliable software updates. The latter parts of this need to change if HTC wants to sort itself out. And then it needs to get people to buy them. Yes. But people will. That's the whole point. If you deliver on these things, people will buy your phones, but right now… No, they won't. That is why the smartphone industry is so fundamentally broken. That might be true in Europe Vlad, but in the US, the quality of the phone has very little to do with whether consumers will buy it. The power ultimately is in the hands of the carriers, which phones they are pushing, which phones they are marketing. And of course that has nothing to do with which phones are best. I mean for God's sake, we have two carriers now that have announced they are going to carry the G-Flex. Three carriers. Three carriers, excuse me. So that should tell you everything you need to know about how much they care about putting the right phone in consumers' hands. Okay, right, fine, fair enough. But would you not accept the countervailing theory that LG is only able to push the G-Flex on people because of the success of the G2 and of its participation in the Nexus program? Maybe they have confidence there. I think the G-Flex has its own novelty of being a stupid phone with a curve and that's easy to put on a poster and like market. That much is true. That much is true. So we don't, I mean like we also don't know how many people are actually going to buy the thing. I don't think there will be many. I don't think there will be many. As novel as it is weird as it looks. It's also expensive. AT&T is going to sell for $300 on contract. Yowch. Yeah, it's pricey. Yeah, well let's just mention that it's coming to Europe in February as well. So it's actually getting so much wider distribution. It's only been available in Asia so far. The whole world is getting blessed with the G-Flex. And initially we thought it would just be kind of a quirky one-off thing just for Korea. So it's getting… Well that's kind of what's happened so far with the Galaxy Round, right? That hasn't really left Korea. Yeah, and funnily enough when I played with both of them at CES I completely changed my mind. I messed up playing with the Round and I totally forgot. I thought the G-Flex was really fun as an idea and looking at it in pictures and video. But when you put it in your hand it's just weird and doesn't feel great at all. But the Galaxy Round in the other hand is just kind of nice. That's all I can really say about it. It's nothing that I would pay extra money for relative to the Galaxy Note 3 which this basically is. But it's just nice. Did you try putting it against your head? Yes, and in my pocket. And it was okay? I had both of them in my pockets, the Round and the Flex and it was better with the Round. The whole idea of the G-Flex being curved to the shape of your face is nonsense. It's a six inch phone, it's a slab. You have a slab next to your head. You might as well put a book right there. It's crazy. A bendy book. Did you do the little thing where you put it on the table and you tilt it? Of course, that was the first thing I did. Like flip it over and just flex it. No, I mean on the Round. The Round, you put it on the table and then you tilt one side and it's supposed to wake up and show you your notifications or some other nonsense. I believe Samsung has a trademark term for that. It's called Round Interaction, right? I'm not making this up. It's called Samsung Round Interaction. I gotta look this up. Make sure I'm not making this up. It's not S branded? What sort of an admission is that? S Round? S Round. Yes, Samsung Round Interaction. I knew it. Be proud of yourself for knowing that one, Chris. Speaking of Samsung, so we've seen some leaks and some rumors that the Galaxy S5 might have this like crazy new home screen that looks kind of like Google Now but almost better which is like really hard for me to say about a Samsung software product. With all these contextual cards and things like that that's supposed to show you your upcoming appointments. The only question I have is whether when you turn it on out of the box is it gonna say Life Companion. That's the only thing that matters. If it doesn't is it really a Samsung? Right. My issue with this is yeah, it looks promising but remember it's Samsung doing it. To me it boils down to something as simple as that. I have confidence with Google when they do things like Google Now and again the thing that I commented earlier, the voice recognition, that is not easy to do or to achieve. Particularly someone like me who has the weirdest amalgamation of Bulgarian, American and English accents. To get clear and consistent voice recognition is hard and Google are doing it. So aside from their decisions which are a bit iffy, Google do good software. But Samsung, when have we said that about them? You can make really pretty looking cards but the information that underpins them like all of my flight info, it's gonna want me to probably open up a Samsung account and feed it all that data. That's a big question. It's not gonna be using Google Now data and stuff like that. Where is it gonna get, obviously Google gets all that data from your searches and it scans your email inbox and things like that but where would Samsung get all that data? Look at things like the games hub or the music hub or the Samsung app store and all of those things. I mean let's be honest, they're just garbage. You can lose them from your phone one day and you will like, you won't know it. Somebody might tell you in a few weeks after that or a few months after that, hey your Samsung app store is not available on your phone anymore and you will be like, oh okay, my life has not changed. That's a really quite frustrating thing with new Samsung phones and it's gonna happen with the Galaxy S5. We're going to be hit with a freaking deluge of specs and features and added content and whatever, whatever, whatever. You and I, we're gonna spend our days, we're gonna spend a week trying to detail all of these S features. Well speaking of S features, apparently Samsung is going to bring things back to basics and add an iris scanner. Yeah, bringing things back to basics means not adding things, it's taking things away. And an iris scanner is just like, bonkers to me. But just to finish the point, I was saying we're gonna spend a week detailing all these features and then a couple of months after that, nobody's gonna be using them. That's a frustrating thing. The phones themselves are gonna have great specs, they're gonna be really good in some aspects and others. But it just frustrates me that Samsung just throws all this garbage at you. Why do you need an iris scanner? I mean, give me an answer to that. I mean, I don't know, but Samsung sells these by the boatload, so I mean, I don't know if people care about the Samsung features or if they care about an iris scanner or whatever, but people are going to buy whatever the new Samsung phone is when it comes out and they're gonna buy it by the truckload. If the iris scanner actually works well, I will actually celebrate that. I mean, I use Touch ID on the 5S, so it works okay. But I'm always looking for a better and faster and more secure way to get into the phone. And the iris scanner might be that, we'll see. That's what I like, that's why I like the trusted Bluetooth feature on the Moto X. If you've got any Bluetooth device on your person, if you're one of the people that use a Bluetooth headset or if you've got Bluetooth headphones or you've got a smartwatch, you know, your phone is unlocked and then if you get separated from your phone, it locks. Yeah, but that doesn't prevent the situation where you're at a bar and your phone is out and when your jerk friends takes your phone out of your hand and then starts going through your text messages, it doesn't help with that. I'm just gonna point that out. You gotta get new friends, Chris. The Bluetooth range is too small, so the phone still thinks that you're connected to it. But Chris, let's be honest, that's kind of a limited usage scenario. I think all of these biometric identification methods, they just kind of add a layer of awkwardness. Like, if you think about the ultra sensitive touch that people put, Nokia, Samsung, etc., everybody's putting it now, to let you use a phone with gloves on, that's a great way or a great example of adding technology to a phone where it immediately and materially improves your life, makes it more convenient. But on the flip side, if you have an iris scanner and you live in somewhere like Dubai where it's sunny 99% of the time, how are you gonna wear your sunglasses and unlock your phone? I think your point is moot because in Dubai you only buy Porsche designed Blackberries. Ah, that's a good point. That is a very good point. I actually saw one of those when I was in Las Vegas for CES. I was walking through one of the casinos and there was a Porsche designed store, so I ducked in to see the Pananana or whatever it is, the 9982, under its little case, and they had a gold one there. Did you buy it? It was like $25,000. Oh my god. Dude, I'm sorry, but I really want us to make this Pananana phone happen. It's happened twice. There's two of them. No, but literally a Pananana phone. We need to call our virtual and be like, how do you guys feel about making a phone called Pananana? No, there would have to be a Blackberry. It would have to be a Blackberry Pananana. Okay, you know what? Throw down the gauntlet to everybody. Sony, HTC, LG, make us a Pananana phone. I'm down. I'm down. I mean, we'll give it our first 10 rating. Okay, here's what you do, Vlad. You call Samsung and you say, hey, this is US cellular. We want to put a phone on our network next week. We want it to be called the Galaxy Pananana, and we'd like it to be a downmarket Galaxy S4. Samsung would be like, no problem. Next day you'd have 10,000 Galaxy Panananas on your doorstep. They're like, no problem. We're going to put 1,000 engineers on this. Yep, we'll have it tomorrow. Branded and everything, Galaxy Pananana, US cellular silkscreened across the bottom. We're going to launch a really awkward commercial for you. Starring Lionel Messi. Yeah, sadly, that is not that far out of the realm of possible. All right, I'm losing my voice, so we've got one last rumor to talk about. This Nokia Android phone won't go away. It's popped up in a prototype form now, so it's actually not a render, but a physical thing. It exists somewhere in the world. You know what it feels like to me? It feels like to me that there's this team at Nokia that was assigned to work on an Android phone, and then Microsoft came storming in, and they're just super bitter, so they are leaking things out left and right. This is like, there's that story a couple days ago about how that Japanese soldier during World War II, he held out in the jungle for 25 years after World War II ended. He just died recently, but that was his claim to fame, is that he kept fighting for the Japanese long after the war was over. This is exactly what's happening with Nokia. There's this team, and they're like, we don't care that Microsoft is buying us. We're committed. We're heads down. We're staying on this. But all kidding aside, so here's what I think. Tom and I have been talking a lot about this. I think what's going to happen, and I don't know if Tom necessarily agrees with me. Tom is about to chat me right now when I say this. I think what's going to happen is the Microsoft deal, my feeling is that this phone was originally intended to be announced at MWC, but the Microsoft deal will close before MWC, and Microsoft's very first move as Nokia's new owner is to kill this project. There's no way Microsoft is going to permit an Android device to be sold with the Microsoft name on it. The thing is, it's a forked version of Android, so it's not even like Android Android, because it's not going to have the Google Play Store, it's not going to have Google services. So Microsoft actually makes apps for Android phones, and it could just load these up with its Outlook app and its Bing app and its Bing Maps and all that other crap, and still get all the data that they would collect from those apps. So I see your point that there's this pride thing of not wanting to release an Android phone, but it's also like, in the same way that it doesn't feel, when I'm using a Kindle Fire, it doesn't feel like I'm using an Android device. It feels like I'm using a Kindle device. I think that's because it's like so separated from what Android actually is recognized as. I would just say my perspective on this was exactly the one that Chris expressed, the fact that whatever Nokia flirtations might have been with Android would have just been put to a dead end as soon as Microsoft decided to take over the company. But there's just been so much talk and so much information coming out about this, and like Dan says, it's in prototype form, it's floating around, and also let's not forget, this isn't supposed to be a flagship or in any way something that competes with the Windows phones of the company. This was essentially supposed to be the thing that goes in between the Asha range of low-end Series 40 or whatever the software is called now, devices and Windows phones. It's kind of supposed to be bridging the gap. Or even replacing those Asha phones eventually. Right. So it's like, yes, the obvious conclusion is this will never see the light of day other than these leaks, but then so much conversation is going on and people are taking it kind of seriously, so it's like odd to me. I don't know how to feel about it. And also, to Dan's point though, if you don't have the Google Play services, if you don't have Gmail, if you don't have Google Maps, if what you get on there is like some Android version of Outlook and Bing Maps and Bing Search. There's Android apps for Outlook, there's Android Bing apps, there's Android Bing Maps I think. Verizon actually tried to sell an Android phone that took out all the Google stuff and replaced it with Bing stuff and it's a horrible, horrible thing. Sam, what's your continuum? Well, the continuum was one of them, but it wasn't the first one. That's exactly what I was going to say. That's exactly what I was going to say. As much as everybody else might hate it, a big part of Andrew's appeal now is still the Google Play services. You want those apps on your phone. It's that simple. Well, I think if the value is important, sure, but in emerging markets, you don't get those on the national phone now and you don't have that option unless it's like a low end Huawei or ZTE phone that is being sold. Okay, that's fair. That's a fair point. I take it. But ultimately, we are still talking to more of an audience in the developed market and the fact of the matter is, as far as I'm concerned, the strength of Andrew's appeal is still in things like Gmail and Chrome and being able to sync it and Google Maps and all of those reliable things. Replacing them with Microsoft alternatives just doesn't fill me with any sort of confidence. So yes, we all had that beautiful dream of a Nokia Android phone, which kind of looks like the N9, but runs some quality apps and some software via the future. I don't think that's going to happen, even if this phone is released. So there are two scenarios that I see happening here and either one, I'm really excited about it. One is this phone is released with some garbage custom Android build on it and it's immediately torn apart by the CyanogenMod team and we get a sweet build of CyanogenMod for it. Two, the phone is never released and then the prototypes become collectors items and I hustle literally everyone I know to try and dredge up one for my collection. Either scenario I'm totally okay with. Okay. So that's pretty quickly covered, but the rest of us keep waiting. But I think that wraps up the Verge Mobile Show for this week, the week of January 20, 2014. This has been episode 76. Thanks for tuning in if you're watching this live or listening to it live or thanks for listening if you happen to catch the recording. I'm Dan Seifert. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm DC Seifert. Vlad is Vlad Savov. Chris is Zpower. Dieter, who will hopefully be back with us next week, assuming his plane ever makes it from Minnesota to New York, is back on. We're all at Verge. You can of course leave comments on the post and things like that or tweet at us and we'd love to hear from you. So until next time, thanks everyone.

Hey, this is Ben Popper from The Verge. Today Beats is launching a streaming music service making it the newest competitor in an increasingly competitive market. I'm talking today with Ian Rogers, CEO of Beats Music. We chat about how they plan to stand apart from the pack and why finding new songs to love is actually harder than ever. What is Beats Music? Beats Music is the first music service that's actually a service and not a server in the sense that it's of service to the listener. You open it up and you're five seconds and one hand from hearing something that makes you want to roll down the window and crank the volume to the right. So there is a lot of competition in this space. Obviously, there's established players like Spotify. There's big tech giants like Google and Apple jumping in. What do you think it is that's going to differentiate Beats? I think you were talking about it just a little bit now, but is it mostly going to be that angle of discovery and curation that's going to set it apart from the competition? Yeah. Well, I got to be honest, I don't really think there's a lot of competition for what we're doing. I mean, there are other streaming services out there, and I think the services that are out there have answered the question of what is the next format? So not to take anything away from them, I think establishing a big catalog and giving access to a big catalog of music is a great first step. The subscription services that are out there today are great if I have a copy of my favorite music magazine in my hand or if I'm also looking at pitchfork.com. The vision is really putting those two together, and you open up an app on your phone and you hit play, and you're like, oh man, that is incredible. So I'll push back on that a little bit. I mean, when I'm playing around on Spotify, a lot of times I check the Pitchfork app on there and they upload their favorite new music, so I discover new stuff through Spotify via Pitchfork. You guys will have the same kind of taste makers on there, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork and XXL. I guess one of the things that Beats was talking about with Seem Unique was having this group of 30 or 40 human curators who are going to be pushing out new playlists all the time. You know, that I might discover somebody who's really tuned into my taste or showing me new things. Who are these humans that you guys are getting in there and why do you think they work better than stuff that's algorithmically generated? Yeah, so we have a great editorial staff. There's a woman named Julie Pilot who leads our curation and music and relations staff, and then we have Scott Plagenhoff who was formerly the editor of Pitchfork who leads our editorial staff. And then to go through that whole staff, I mean, they're incredible. We have Carl Cherry, he used to be at XXL, Suzy Cole who was a program director at the last rock and roll station on the planet, the Riff in Detroit. We have Ariane Timmermans who's a pop music correspondent for CNN, Ken Tucker in Nashville, Fuzzy Fantabulous who was 17 years on Power 106 in LA. God, who am I forgetting? Mason Williams from Rhino. I mean, and I'm forgetting people, but there's more. So they lead each of their respective areas, but they have then, they reach out to the community and bring more people in. What do you think about how Beats will work in terms of the value for the label or the artist? You know, a lot of people have criticized the streaming services, Spotify in particular, but all of them, for not giving enough back to the artists who are being streamed. Are you going to have the same approach as everybody else or are you going to try something different? Well, it's different on a couple levels. First of all, because we don't have free, it's actually fundamentally different. So if you look at the services that have free streaming, the free streams pay a lot less. So since we don't have a free service, we actually pay more on a per stream basis. A lot of the services that we've been talking about who are competitors here in the States and also in Europe and maybe some of the ones from Europe who are coming here now like Deezer, have struggled to turn a profit. I guess long term, do you think that Beats, the streaming music company and Beats, the headphone are synergistic and you don't expect Beats Music to be a profitable company or do you think long term the streaming service will be able to be self-sustaining and profitable? The streaming service needs to be self-sustaining and profitable. We are a standalone company. We spun a company out of Beats Electronics last year. So we are a sister company of Beats, but it needs to have its own P&L and stand on its own two feet. It's really not a complicated business though. I think that others have made it complicated by spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year with this free feature that's really kind of a marketing feature. But the paid subscription model is pretty straightforward. There's margin in every subscriber and you've just got to scale your number of subscribers larger than your fixed cost base. It's really more about how do you scale it because if you can't scale it to millions of subscribers then the business doesn't work. But I really believe that between the product we have, the brand that we have, the partnerships we have and then what we are capable of internationally that we can invest in this business and grow to tens of millions of subscribers over the coming years. And I think that's all the question I had. One that came back to me, you said that you're planning to pay the indies and the majors the same which isn't like your competitors. Does that mean you're going to have more kind of obscure indie stuff? I find that a lot of times I'm not seeing the artists I like or the labels I like on the streaming services. It's a really great question. I think that I'm so excited about our catalog and our team for a couple of reasons. Come back to the curators that you asked me about earlier. Two things. First of all, we've actually removed millions of tracks from our catalog. I don't know if you've kept up on what's happening with the spammers in the catalog but it's a real problem. We have people that are uploading sound-alikes, cover versions, karaoke versions, trying to insert themselves and get plays and make a couple of pennies here and there. And it's just confusing for the consumer. I was doing this thing on my seven-year-old and wanted to hear Thrift Shop and here I am on Mog, our service, and it was difficult for me to tell which one was the real song. And we actually ended up listening to one that turned out not to be the right, not to actually be Macklemore. So we've gone to pains to get a lot of that bad content out. Truly it's spam. So that's one side of it. We actually care enough. We're not like, who has the most tracks? We want to have a great consumer experience. So we've gotten a lot of that spam out. On the other side of it, because we have these curators, what we're doing is that gives us a lot of direction in terms of what catalog are we missing. So we're not trying to say, oh, let's go get those guys because they've got a million tracks. When you have a curator like Decibel Magazine, which is core metal, what you find out is the metal labels you don't have really quickly. Because those guys come in and they go, these are the 40 metal records in 2013 that matter. And then you're like, okay. And then you find out, oh, we're actually missing that label, that label, that label. And they might be small labels that only have a couple of, that have a relatively small roster, but the roster's good because they're small selective labels that are to a core audience. So I think because of our curators, we actually go after catalog in a different way than our competitors do because we're not on a race to who can do a press release with the most tracks. It's who has the music that people care about. What else have you been listening to over the last year? I'll point you to my best of 2014, number 2013 list. You'll have a mix tape on there that I could probably find. Go to my profile at iancr on Beats Music. And I actually do sort of a weekly or maybe twice a monthly mix tape and you could hear what I'm into from Aretha Franklin and Sly and the Family Stone to Kurt Weill to Mastodon. Well thanks for coming and chatting with us today and I look forward to hearing it. Thanks for having me. Have a good day.

Today, President Obama formally introduced his plan to reform the American surveillance system, building on the recommendations made by a White House review panel. Despite some welcome proposals, the speech offered little real change, and what the president did propose will have to go through Congress and intelligence agencies first. The strongest proposed reform was an end to the government database that stores virtually all American phone records. Obama promised to, quote, end the program as it currently exists, but we don't know where those records will be going. Moving them back to phone companies or into a private database could present privacy problems. And the NSA complains it might not be able to look up individual records quickly enough. We'll hear more about the ideas in March, when intelligence agencies present their proposals for moving the database. Obama promised to create more oversight for surveillance, outlining a plan for more transparency and new posts that would advocate for civil liberties. He also reassured non-Americans that their privacy was being respected and that they wouldn't be targeted because of race or religion. It's going to be up to intelligence agencies to carry that out. In an extraordinarily difficult job, one in which actions are second-guessed, success is unreported, and failure can be catastrophic, the men and women of the intelligence community, including the NSA, consistently follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people. They're not abusing authorities in order to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails. When mistakes are made, which is inevitable in any large and complicated human enterprise, they correct those mistakes. The U.S. has been in hot water for spying on world leaders, and Obama promised that if you're his close friend, he'll just pick up the phone and call you. That didn't stop him from pointing the finger at other countries, though. No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs, or Russia to take privacy concerns of citizens in other places into account. But let's remember, we are held to a different standard precisely because we have been at the forefront of defending personal privacy and human dignity. At the same time, the NSA isn't going to stop spying anytime soon. The president described surveillance playing a crucial role throughout America's history, from Paul Revere spying on the British to more recent counterterrorism efforts launched after 9-11. In fact, 9-11 came up a lot. Many of the review panel's proposed reforms are dropped entirely. The president didn't mention the NSA's programs for collecting email in bulk or breaking into the private networks of companies like Google and Yahoo. It seems likely those programs will continue with only minimal changes in oversight. The new reforms offer some hope, but little change. The next test will come when the CIA, NSA, FBI, and Congress decide what to do with President Obama's proposals.

It's Friday, January 17th, 2014. I'm Adrienne Jeffries, collector of meta-meta data. It's data about talking about collecting data about data. This is 90 seconds on the verge. President Obama today announced major changes to America's massive government surveillance program. The proposed reforms focus largely on the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records and metadata, and woefully less time addressing the spying on internet communication. The speech and directive are only a first step. The next test will come via Congress. The holidays have come and gone again, and you know what that means. Checking in on how next-gen consoles have sold. Microsoft's Xbox One was the top-selling game console in the US over the holiday season, selling 908,000 units in the month of December. Worldwide, however, the PlayStation 4 has so far outsold the Xbox One, 4.2 million to 3 million. And let's not forget Nintendo, although the news there isn't quite so celebratory. The company today slashed its forecast for Wii U sales by nearly 70%. And finally, over in the top secret lair of Google X, the company is looking to make contact lenses that can see more than just 2020. The, quote, smart contact lens will measure a wearer's tears in order to monitor their glucose levels. Ideally, this sensor would be able to generate a reading once per second, and Google imagines putting a small LED in the lens that could indicate levels dropping above or below a set threshold. However, the biggest concern for a contact lens that measures tears is, what about an emotionless diabetic? That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, Papa John's announces its own wiretapping program that delivers a pie whenever someone says, hey, do you want to just get pizza tonight?

Hey everybody, welcome to The Verge Live. I'm Yael Abatel. I'm joined by Russell Brandon and Addie Robertson. You're watching us right after President Obama gave a speech on NSA reform that I would categorize as very, very strange in a variety of ways. At the dawn of a republic. Yeah, no, it's weird. He was like, you know, basically America was built on surveillance. The nature of our country is that we're always watching. That's what it's always been. We've been spying on the Queen since this whole thing began. If you don't like the NSA, what do you think about Paul Revere? Yeah, Paul Revere is the original bulk collection. Like it's amazing. I expected them to name check, you know, obviously 9-11, but I was not really expecting Paul Revere. I wasn't expecting like Martin Luther King. And yeah, Martin Luther King. This is what I say when I'm drunk and I'm yelling at people about why the NSA is bad. I'm like, look, you know, our greatest Americans were surveilled as state enemies. And like now the president's saying that as he's talking about, well, we're not going to change everything. I know you're mad, but remember that like, you know, some of the most important people of my lifetime were, you know, the state was trying to destroy them through these very tools. And so we're just going to make the tools a little bit weaker. But add more of that. Yeah, exactly. Like more weaker tools instead of fewer strong tools. Well, that's because we have to spy on states like the Soviet bloc so that they will not spy on their citizens. So let's start at the top here. So this speech has been, it's been over a week or so that, you know, it's been leaked that he's going to be giving the speech. There was a presidential directive about what the intelligence community can and can't do with signals intelligence that came out earlier today. And we were expecting a number of things to happen. Well, we were not expecting a number of things to happen. A number of things could have happened. A number of things could have happened. We were expecting maybe none of them to happen. It's true. I mean, like, and so Obama, he came out and he just started. He started with this history lesson. He was in total law professor mode. He referred to the people within the United States as US persons a number of times, which just thinking of candidate Obama just walking in the campaign trail, I love meeting US persons. Let me kiss this US person, baby. That is strange. He's full legal professor mode, talking about the justifications for spying, for surveillance, for intelligence, all of which I think are known. I don't think anybody really disputes the need for like the police and for intelligence in the world. The problem is the significant overreach that that intelligence community has been. But it's not just overreach. He actually did make a really good point that the problem is now everything we do is surveillable. Right. Well, he made that at the very end, but in like a stirring, a full throat defense of the internet. He's like, and the internet has provided us with so many ways to communicate, a way for people to reach to other people across the globe and for the police to watch that interaction. And it was like, you're conflating a lot of things here. It isn't that the policies have changed although they have, it's that everything else around them has changed. Yeah. So they fall under the policies. Like somebody made a really good sort of comparison to copyright on Twitter that we're just dealing with completely. No, like now we have to deal with it. Like things don't mean the same thing anymore. They're not the same anymore. Right. And so he started with this and he did start with, you know, Martin Luther King was surveilled caught, you know, during the, with a long twilight of the cold war, we learned. And it's like, yeah. You mean when McCarthy rounded up like American citizens for witch hunts, like, yes, we learned a lot of bad lessons. Like why are we learning them again? And then he began sort of his kind of, he got into the meat, the heart of the matter, which was there have been lots of leaks. He sounded very angry about the leaks. Well, and he was like, we were, you know, we were looking at it. Yeah. But then unfortunately, now everyone's mad because of the leaks. So we have to do it now. But like, I was on it. Trust me. Like it was fine. Yeah. Which he's been saying since the beginning. Well, he also was saying like, we're just now undoing the damage that was done. We're also graciously dealing with this. He said very directly, I'm not going to dwell on Mr. Snowden or his motivations. It's like his motivations were you giving the speech. Yeah. That's what he said it over and over again. Like we need to start talking about surveillance. That's why I'm leaving the documents. And I was like, I don't know what motivated him. I'm just giving this speech. Who knows? So he got into it. He made a lot of recommendations, some of which I think we anticipated some of which we didn't. So can you guys kind of just give the high level overview of. Yeah. Should I, I mean, so the, you have the super high level. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so the main thing was the bulk telephony metadata, call records, the basically who you're calling stuff that's on your phone bill, how long the call was. I will say that the fact that the president of the United States said metadata and major policy dress today is like one of those moments where it's like, where we took over the world. It's amazing that people know what metadata, everybody knows it. It's incredible. Anyway. So, but yeah, so I mean, that was the main thing. He says, look, the two 15 program that is, was the very first thing that came out is not going to exist in its current form. Maybe they're going to move all that huge quantity of data to some third party. If there's some third party that they trust or they're going to do more judicial oversight when the database is queried. There's like, there's what happens now and what happens later. He has two stages. We have to transition away from this program. No one likes it. But we need the capabilities it gives us, right? Like we need to be able to search metadata for patterns quickly, quickly. So well, in an emergency, in an emergency, right? The whole justification is that we have to be able to do it quickly because this will produce a terrible delay. And if you have a bomb, then you can't call up Verizon. Right. So he said, we're going to keep the existing database, but we're going to make it so that you need a judicial finding to go use it. So like, again, the president of the United States today said query a database. Like if you don't believe that like the internet, that like technology is like completely taken over the world, like this is what we're talking about. Like when the government can query a metadata database, like that's great. See, but that was also, I mean, not that he's like going to go full wonk in like the speech, but it was a little ambiguous because in some ways that's what was already happening, right? Like the official legal justification for the system before was it's not surveillance when we take it and put it into the database because, you know, we're not getting a warrant for that because we don't look at it. We just have it there. And then once we, once, you know, us sort of crossing the Rubicon is when we query the database, which is why we get a warrant for the query that we're doing from the FISA court. Don't think they actually, I'm not actually sure there was a process for it. Well, my understanding was they were like, you just had to have a higher bar, a higher standard of suspicion. Well, no, I think it was sort of like clearly if someone you would say to the judge, you know, clearly if someone's saying kill the president in or, I mean, if they're okay, we know this number is a terrorist. If someone's calling that terrorist, we have a reasonable suspicion too. And so that was. And they've also reduced the number of, so if a terrorist calls you and then you call somebody and they call somebody and then they call you, yeah, they've reduced it. So they're tightening up the way they can use this program. I think the essential part there was that they were always saying metadata wasn't really surveillable information, right? It was just records, business records that were being generated. Which we believe is still not. Right. But they were saying it's business records being generated by Verizon AT&T so they can just collect them and they don't need any warrants. And then to go and then track you specifically, that's when they needed to stop. And now they're saying they're going to tighten that process. And then phase two is we're going to stop collecting this stuff entirely and either we'll figure out how to get the providers to harmonize their systems so we can query them or we'll have somebody else do it. And I would say rightfully, he said, there are challenges with both approaches. Like you don't want, I mean, I don't trust Verizon anymore than I trust the United States government. And I certainly don't trust Blackwater. Right. And who are they going to hire? You're going to hire the healthcare.gov guys to build you a database of phone records? That's awesome. If there is a terrorist attack, you'll be like, well, I can't get through. So yeah, whatever. Have a good time. So that's 215. And that's kind of a big one, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the one that came out first. That's the one where I think he announced the Moswell prison came out. It's the most specific thing. There's a lot of stuff that's sort of high level. We're going to reform everything and generate reports on everything. I mean, I also think it's the one that Obama is focusing on. I think he said in the speech, you know, this is the bulk phone records is the program that has generated the most controversy. I don't think that's true. I think there's lots of other stuff that wasn't really touched on, but that's the centerpiece of his NSA reform. Whether it's the centerpiece of the stuff that we should be reforming is kind of a question that- See, the thing is, it's not just it has generated the most controversy, just not among, you know, people who are talking. It is the thing that Congress has been debating. It's the thing that hearings are on. It's also the program that we actually can do something about. The metadata program. Right. We actually kind of know what it is. Like if we're talking about something like Prism or the giant email database, we don't even know what's in that. We don't know how it's collected. Let's quickly go through the rest of the reforms, then we have some clips from the speech. So national security letters, it seems like they're getting the gag orders that people were really mad about. Yeah. So briefly, okay, national security letters are things that mostly the FBI uses. If you need a specific piece of information, generally from an internet company, you don't have to get a court order. You just send the subpoena and say, you have to give us this data, and you can't tell the person, you can't tell anybody, you can't say that you received it. Right. And this is, you know, Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter have been nonstop complaining about this, right? That they want to release these transparency reports, they want to tell customers what they're doing, and they can't. And now it sounds like- They're getting the transparency. They're going to get a little- They're getting- There are no specifics offered. That's the only thing they're getting, though. The panel was proposing these reforms that were saying you have to tailor the scope of it, make sure you can't just repeat, you know, section 215. You have to create some kind of judicial oversight for actually granting them. They didn't say any of that. Obama pretty much clearly said he's not going to do it. You know, he'll work with Congress. But you have some kind of situation where you will have to, at some point, prove that the thing needs to be secret. And after he's going to talk to the attorney general, and after some point, it's going to expire automatically unless a court renews it. The panel recommended 180 days. It's not necessarily clear that that's what it's going to be. And then they're also going to give them, quote, more information than ever before that they can publish. Google got- That's a low bar. It is, because now that currently Google got permission, I think it might be the only company, maybe there are more now. It can publish in ranges of one through 1000. Yeah. But the transparency reports that you see, there had been like, well, we had seen transparency reports with big black bars over the how many national security letters. And it seems like that at least, they'll have something to put in that column. And then the other stuff is there's the FISA court, which is actually, you know, the institution that's granting the warrants to say, you know, go to Verizon and get all their information. That court is going to see some reform. So we're going to see a new public interest advocate that is going to be the one specifically sort of pleading the public's case and saying, do you really need this information? Is this really important? We're going to see that. And we're also going to see annual declassification reviews on all of these programs. So- Which has already been promised more or less. Yeah. That was the first thing he promised. So I want to go to a clip here. We have it. So what's really interesting is he proposed these reforms, but after what I would describe as a pretty full throated defense of the NSA, right? So this is, there's outrage over the NSA spying. There's outrage over overreach, looking at American citizen stuff. And Obama began, like we were saying, with this stirring defense of surveillance. So we have a little bit here. If we can just go to that. To the contrary, in an extraordinarily difficult job, one in which actions are second guessed, success is unreported, and failure can be catastrophic, the men and women of the intelligence community, including the NSA, consistently follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people. They're not abusing authorities in order to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails. When mistakes are made, which is inevitable in any large and complicated human enterprise, they correct those mistakes. Yeah. So here's the thing about that quote. There's been all kinds of revelations that NSA people are like spying on their girlfriends. No, no, that's the thing is that we haven't actually had, we haven't had revelations that have been a lot of people intentionally abusing it. And that Love Int, it was, their thing that they released was for about 10 years. And there were maybe 20 violations, which is bad in like objective terms. In subjective terms, that is very few people. The problem is that they seem, that we have all of these weird unintentional breaches, and that they probably aren't telling us about lots of other stuff. Right. Because we can't point to anything. So our ability to understand what the NSA is doing, and this is the balance. I think this is the, this is the problem that I think we face as we try to figure out what the balance, and Obama very directly called it the balance between security and liberty, which it is, right? Yeah. We do need the NSA to look at things. We do need the CIA to look at things and try to maintain our security. There needs to be a limit on that. And there's no ability for us to have a conversation about that limit, because every time we examine everything that they do, they immediately claim that we're hampering their ability to keep us secure. It's not just that. It's that fundamentally, the fact that they have proven that they cannot be trusted with this means that we can't have a debate, because they can't ever release everything. Like we wouldn't want them to, but that that means that we're always going to have to take them on faith. And now they've proven that they're totally incapable of like accepting that trust. Although, I mean, the way I read that part of the speech was partially that you imagine you're an NSA employee and you're watching this speech. I mean, really like, you know, he's managing this group of people who have just gotten their ass kicked, like every week for the last six months. Everyone hates them. And like, it's just morale. And you see this occasionally, like people come forward and just like, it's rough out there working for the NSA right now. They're just going to work in like a shitty office building every day. It's terrible. I actually looked at jobs at the NSA when I was a college student. And I feel so bad. There was a time, I think, when like, working for these large government, government police institutions was cool. Like James Bond. I just call this that stuff. Yeah, I did languages. You could be the guys in the van in Enemy of State. But I mean, and so I think part of that was, okay, he's going to do these reforms. But he also, you know, a lot of the audience- He's the manager. I mean, that's like real, right? Yeah. A lot of the audience for this was public employees who want to make, you know, who want to feel like they're reassured and he's not mad at them personally. And they're not about to like- It's not just that. You know, be burned with a pitfall. It's also anybody who doesn't agree with him. This is his sort of classic move that he's like, I understand your point of view, Republicans, not purely Republicans. Yeah, the Republicans are like, they're in the back, like they're holding like knives. It's not like, let's do it. It's not spy on everything. It's as you know, we understand- Dick Cheney's like petting a cat in the back of the room. But this other thing. Yes, say my words. No, but it's like, you know, it's like Chuck Schumer petting a cat. It's not even like, it's not even Dick Cheney at this point. It's sort of everyone. Right. And that, I think over and over and over again, especially at the end, he came back to this theme that we're being held to a higher standard. And you get the sense that, you know, he's in the West Wing with like the leadership, or he's in a Situation Room, or he's meeting with the Joint Chiefs. And he's like, and everyone's like, dude, like, why do we have to justify what we're doing? Like Ireland, they just do whatever the hell they want. And he's like, yes. And so we have it. I don't know if we have it quite yet. The Russia-China. He directly called out China and Russia. Do we have it yet? I wrote it down at one point. I think we're going to have it in just a moment. So we'll come back to it. I think part of it is also that it's weird because I think we see this as basically a policy thing. That, you know, if he wants to sort of, if he wants to make some change at the EPA, he can just sign a thing and then it's changed. Whereas, you know, the NSA is to a large extent, not just this abstract entity, it's this group of people. And whoever they choose to run the NSA is going to have to come from a fairly small group of people. And part of what you want is to change the culture of that group of people. And just constantly kicking their ass is of a limited value. You have to sort of say, well, yes, we like you. It's okay. We want to motivate you. We want to raise morale. But we also want to change it in this slow way that's going to gradually change the culture of it. So we have a text. I'll just read this off. Ready? It may seem sometimes in America as being held to a different standard. And that the readiness of some to assume that the worst motives by our government can be frustrating. Now, this hat, who is that frustrating? Right? Like, if you just read that sentence, he's talking to government employees. Like, that is designed to reassure. Like, I know you're frustrated, NSA dudes. No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs or Russia to take the privacy concerns of citizens into account. We're better than China. We can go on the Vergecast and say proudly that America is more open and democratic than China. We do not like to kill people with Colonium 210. This is such a strange burn. It's like, right before this, he was talking about how we need to work better with our partners, reassure them. He's like, I won't just spy on the queen. I'll pick up the phone and call her and ask her what she thinks instead of reading her email. And then he's like, but China, we're better than you. And it's just, it's such a strange, the audience for the speech, I can't tell if it was citizens, I can't tell if it was government employees, I can't tell if it was like other spies. Well, I mean, and to a large extent. At one point he said, we're not going to apologize because our systems are better than everybody else's. That was the best quote. USA. I mean, well, which is actually the problem. Another thing that was interesting that we, I was surprised by, and I was surprised by in a positive way, was to a large extent, there was a big section of the speech where he, the audience seemed to be people in foreign countries, like the citizens of other countries that are not otherwise, you know, are we going to just spy on everyone in Norway? And how do the citizens of Norway feel about the American surveillance program? And those, that has not been a big part of the conversation up until now, at least in America. It's been touched on, but it's, yeah, it's been a thing that, especially because all of their justification has been, this only happens to foreign people. Yeah, well, and I mean, exactly. So, so much of it has been shifting the, oh my God, are we surveilling American citizens when we're surveilling some random dude who runs a coffee shop in Norway? But I mean, actually he did, and I thought it was a very positive thing. He said, look, we want buy-in from the citizens of other countries. That like, we, and part of it was America, world police stuff, but he really wanted to make a moral case for America as the surveillance entity of the entire world, that the entire world should feel good about. Right. The problem is that this happened right the day after, was it called Dish Fire? Dish Fire, yeah. Which is... What an incredible, incredible day. You know, you take like 200 million cell phone texts, or yes, texts, and you take out the American stuff and then you store everything else. And then you let the GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency, look for patterns on their citizens' data. Yeah. I mean, what's struck me about this whole speech is that it's premised on the notion that some amount of spying must occur. Right? And you can buy that notion, you cannot buy that notion. I accept like, fine, some amount of spying must occur. I don't know, I accept it both pragmatically and that it probably does have to occur. Yeah, and I think that's interesting, but important. But what I think is actually interesting is that there was a lot of reference to 9-11. We're going to highlight that soon. There was a lot of reference to 9-11. He opened with, you know, after 9-11, we had to change the way we did things. And it was like, or are you sure? Because President Bush was definitely handed a piece of paper called, been modern determined to strike in US. And he was like, yeah, whatever. They're not going to do anything. Right, the entire premise of the Section 215 collection is that you have to identify patterns, that you have to have all this data. And then he references a specific number and a specific case that they already knew about and could have just queried. Right, and a lot of what his justifications for these programs existing came back, I think, to 9-11 over and over and over again, which is crazy because I think he also said, we went too far and we begin walking it back. He said the previous administration began walking it back. And to think of George Bush and Dick Cheney actually ever walking back their Patriot Act proposals and their surveillance proposals, would that mean like if he truly believes that they've been walking back and he's cared for that process, then we are nowhere near close. Because, yeah, I was thinking about this, that we have come pretty much full circle on the Bush administration, which we would like, they did this and we were totally outraged and felt awful about it. And Obama and everyone ran on the premise that this will never, ever happen again. And now we're here, you know, some years later. So that was the other interesting element of it because ostensibly the NSA is not a counter-terrorism organization, right? Like supposedly, and these things are constantly shifting like the border of who's in charge of what, but like ostensibly they investigate, they get signals intelligence when they find something useful, they give it to the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security or the CIA or sort of any, I mean, and part of the post 9-11 reforms is that there wasn't primarily a counter-terrorism organization. But the idea that the NSA is primarily concerned with counter-terrorism is, this is the first time we've heard a president make that case. And that it's wildly, like a huge expansion of powers if it's true. And then there were all of these primarily domestic things that he was saying, look, people are trying to bring down our stock exchange with malware. We don't want hackers in your bank account. Well, yeah, but I mean, okay, if someone robs a bank, is that the NSA's problem? I thought we had a whole domestic law enforcement framework for this. I mean, it's very common. Well, he is the head of Cyber Command. Which they're not splitting off. Yeah. I mean, let's just never use that phrase again. I mean, like, the language that we use to describe these, here's what I'm saying. Cyber packet coming to destroy Wall Street. Yeah. I mean, he's like hackers in your bank accounts. Like, I'm the head of cyber, it's like, you know what? It's time for us to just open up and admit that the internet is part of our real lives. And it's not like some other place where other weird behaviors exist. And you can't be like, well, the internet's different, so we have to give it to the NSA, because they understand how information travels on wire. That's what's so strange. We just heard a speech where he was basically saying, look, someone needs to keep the internet safe. That's why we need an NSA. Yeah. Which is insane. That was never, ever. It signals intelligence. They're listening and trying to figure out, I mean, what would securing the internet even mean? And also, by the way, to the extent that the NSA is in charge of defending anything in cyber terms, it's just government infrastructure. Right. Like, there's no, and I mean, we can say that various things are like infrastructure that is important to national security, so the power grid or something. But the idea that they're going to keep Chinese hackers off of my laptop, because they've suddenly decided that, as a Verge reporter, I'm a target of interest, the NSA is not going to do anything for me. And we saw this with The New York Times. We see this any time a third party is attacked. Like, the NSA does not keep the internet safe. That's just insane. OK. Although they've argued this, the cyber packet Wall Street thing is a Keith Alexander, I believe, interview in which he essentially compared it to a missile, saying that it doesn't matter where the missile lands. It is the job of the Department of Defense to stop it. Right. Yeah, but I mean, what if it's like a hosting server, like Facebook's Icelandic hosting server? I don't know. It's just odd. It is odd. I don't think they have the capabilities for that. We had the CISPA fight last year, and that's what this was all about. This is what this is, is CISPA. Yeah, like that's the meeting between these two. OK, so we actually have it. It's only a little bit. We actually have a super cut of all of his 9-11 references. Oh, god. It's only 10 seconds long. But I mean, it was. He didn't actually mention it as much as I expected him to. I didn't expect him to mention it at all. Because I was in college. I just have a distinct memory of where I was on 9-11. It is a meaningful memory to me. But it is so disconnected from the NSA reading my email that I. I'm not disconnected enough for it to be the opening line of the decision that struck down. And that's where we're at. Anyway, so let's take a look at this. There is September 11 after 9-11 in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 after 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11. Yeah, I mean, it's ridiculous. It's eight references in like over an hour or just under an hour. And to me, that is I'm not ready to just. I went through that, right? Like I voted against George Bush and like I didn't want there to be a war in Iraq. And I remember very clearly what my politics were because I knew that saying 9-11 would let people get away with bad things over and over and over again. And it's to me, that's like it. I've landed at every time our government says 9-11 and we have to do something crazy because of 9-11. It's like, well, the terrorists won. And that's like the legacy of 9-11 to me. So to ignore what I think are really, really clear civil liberties issues and really, really clear like the NSA was never designed to police the entire internet issues because something bad happened a decade ago is crazy to me. I think part of it is just, I mean, it was a very historical speech, right? He was from the Paul Revere stuff on. And I think, for better or worse, this defined our public policy for this whole decade. And I mean, it's impossible to talk about the changing nature of our national security infrastructure without saying, we were kind of just doing whatever we wanted for a while there and like all of the- Well, these rules were all put in place because of it. Yeah. And now we have to, we can't just time machine back. We have to somehow, it's going to be a revision of the Patriot Act. It's going to be a revision of the FISA Act. It has to, you just have to keep going. And this stuff is permanently written in history now. As it should be. But to justify its existence or to justify not walking it back to where it should be or could be because something bad happened, because there's this looming specter of terror has all, I mean, for me anyway, for a decade has been the mistake. Yeah. That we, yeah, there are bad guys out there. We should stop them. Obama killed bin Laden. Good job, Barry. Well, I think that's very relevant to this whole thing. I mean, I think because we saw when he came in, I mean, he was, and this was a while ago that everyone was disillusioned by this, but I mean, he was much more hawkish on all of this stuff than anyone expected. And I think a lot of it has to do with he just really wanted to kill bin Laden. It was clearly like going to be a political win and something that- But also like the national security went like, great, that's all there. But this continued reference, particularly in this speech where it's, we're worried that you're sweeping up American citizens' emails and text messages and you do have love where NSA guys are like, what's my girlfriend doing? And like pushing a button and they can just get it without any oversight, without anyone looking over their shoulder and being like, that's illegal. That's like, you don't need that to stop bin Laden again. You just don't. We have to stop pretending that that's the necessary evil of keeping us safe. So we have some slides, I believe, of the four particular, he ended with, I'm making very, you know- Oh yeah, he's got specific changes. Very specific changes. Let him be clear. He made precisely two specific changes during that. Well, he said four, so we've got slides of the first. This is crazy. First, this is first, the same technological advances that allow US intelligence agencies to pinpoint an Al Qaeda cell in Yemen or an email between two terrorists in the Sahel also mean that many routine communications around the world are within our reach. At a time when more and more of our lives are digital, that prospect is disquieting for all of us. So he said, that there is he was changing how we collect the information. Right? So you guys, I gave you the task of grading his initiatives. Where does that one fall? How do you, I think that was, yeah, I mean- The metadata base? That's the presidential directive for signals intelligence. The email stuff, we had a big section on email collection and there wasn't really a lot, like, you can see it on the site right now. I mean, we have locked down the NSA email database and we have two Bs and a D. And those Bs are because, honestly, because a lot of what we were grading is how does this match up to the proposals? Like not to even our ideal version of this, because that would be ridiculous and they would all be Fs. Oh yeah. But they didn't, they basically just said, reassure them that we're using this for good. I mean, that's- Which is kind of- I feel reassured. I mean, so we have the presidential directive. If you're watching this on our site right now, there's a big link to it right above the live stream. You can go look at it. It's, I would say, tremendously boring, but you can go look at it. It's a lot of like principle. And the first one is like, I'm issuing an order that signals intelligence must be conducted in accordance with the constitution. It's like, yeah, what was happening before? Like, do you have to occasionally remind the NSA that the constitution applies to them? So that was one. Do we have the second slide? So the second one, and we'll get this one, is we're going to reform the programs for more transparency and increase safeguards for US persons, which was my favorite phrase. So this is all preamble here. But the actual one was we need more transparency. And this is where Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft can all tell people about what's happening to them. It is going to be very interesting to see what they're allowed to say. They were basically, all of their transparency reports thus far have been like, and there are a number of things we cannot say. Well, Apple did an interesting dead man's switch in which it said we have not received any 215 orders. But the problem with all of these is that they've consistently denied that any of the huge amount of stuff that is supposedly in databases is from them. So it may well be moot because we're also hearing about the NSA tapping into data links. So it doesn't matter how many orders they've received if they're also just getting everything from links. Well, and the other thing, I mean, one of the interesting elements of it is how the we were talking in the beginning about the focus on phone records, right? And I think part of it is you don't really see anything in this speech that addresses stuff like breaking into the Yahoo and Google networks, prism. A lot of that stuff is just, it's focusing on the phones. And so my pet little paranoid theory is if you have to give something up, you give up the least useful tool. And it seems plausible. And they have many times said that section of 702 is infinitely more useful. They didn't say infinite, but much more useful than section 215, which they, I think, can only pinpoint one case that it helped, and it was a terrorist funding case. And they've said that most of the things that they said initially, the 54 plots, were stopped by 702. Well, I mean, if you remember when the prism first broke, the controversy was not about metadata or phone collection. It was about direct access to networks, right? Direct access to Google, Yahoo, Apple. It was about whether they're hacking into the backbone connection and getting it that way, or the companies are helping them. As far as you can tell, none of that was addressed during the speech. Yeah. No, I don't think. At all. That's the thing that makes me wonder how much we actually feasibly can do, because this is basically how much should the NSA try to break everything, which is their explicit directive. Slightly less breaking. I mean, I think part of the weird thing, to me, it's interesting as a media story that people are, broadly speaking, calling each other on the phone less and texting, sending email, right? So now if we need to roll back this massive surveillance apparatus, we're going to do the sort of thing that's tailing off. We're going to say, okay, less phone records, less phone calls. We'll just keep a huge, we're going to keep our surveillance tools on email. Texting maybe falls into the metadata. It's sort of unclear. I think digital communications of the kind, if the most shocking revelation to you was that the NSA can read your email, which for me it was, then this doesn't really do a lot. I mean, it's funny because when you describe it like that, it's like this is exactly how the phone companies are treating you. They're like, well, we're just going to cap you at unlimited voice because you're not using it anymore. So you definitely have to pay 10 bucks a month for that because you're not using that anymore and we'll just meter you for all the other stuff. And it's the same thing. We're not using the phones. We're not making. So if you're a bad guy, what you've learned today is don't make a phone call. Which they already knew. Right. It's like do something else. We've also already known use Tor because they have not cracked that yet. Right. Okay, so we have one last clip we should wrap up. I think you guys have, I want to see the last clip here and then I want to, you guys have been grading it so I want to get some overall grades from you. So let's run this last clip here. This is Obama talking about the internet and how it's both wonderful and a reason for the government to watch every movie. When you cut through the noise, what's really at stake is how we remain true to who we are in a world that is remaking itself at dizzying speed. Whether it's the ability of individuals to communicate ideas, to access information that would have once filled every great library in every country in the world, or to forge bonds with people on the other sides of the globe, technology is remaking what is possible for individuals and for institutions and for the international order. So while the reforms that I've announced will point us in a new direction, I am mindful that more work will be needed in the future. One thing I'm certain of, this debate will make us stronger. And I also know that in this time of change, the United States of America will have to lead. It may seem sometimes that America is being held to a different standard. And I'll admit, the readiness of some to assume the worst motives by our government can be frustrating. No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs, or Russia to take privacy concerns of citizens in other places into account. But let's remember, we are held to a different standard precisely because we have been at the forefront of defending personal privacy and human dignity. As the nation that developed the Internet, the world expects us to ensure that the digital revolution works as a tool for individual empowerment, not government control. Having faced down the dangers of totalitarianism and fascism and communism, the world expects us to stand up for the principle that every person has the right to think and write and form relationships freely. Because individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress. When you cut through the noise. So that line, individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress, I think that is, to me, it's the key. You know, he said every person has the, every person has the right to think and write and form relationships. And that's great. And, you know, in real life, the government can't really watch you do that, right? I mean, they're not here with us right now. I mean, presumably some of the NSA is watching this. Well, presumably they can also hijack your laptop and then activate the mic. Right. But saying like, what's interesting is that when you start doing that stuff online, the government can immediately in real time monitor every single thing that you do. And they have the ability to do that. And that's what all of the Snowden leaks have been pointing at, is that we're only constrained by where we say with our words and like our laws, you have to stop there. And what we haven't done a good job of saying is what are you doing? Like, what is it that you're doing and where should you stop? And this is like, I think a first step. It's please stop looking at our phones, which is great. It is not the first step towards please stop, you know, scouring our email. Please stop, you know, jacking directly in the backbone to look at encrypted iMessage or whatever the hell you're trying to do. Yeah. Because we don't know. We don't actually know the full extent of what they're doing and why they're doing it. Then all these justifications for we have to do it because of terrorists. And these are actually good people at the NSA who are doing a good job. And they're patriots too. And we're frustrated. Break your laptop. This laptop is already so broken. I mean, the NSA has been so deep in this laptop already and not even worried about it. And that to me, that's the whole issue is we don't, I still don't know enough about what the government is doing. I still don't know enough about where they think the real limits should be. And I haven't heard enough of that debate. And I think, you know, I've got my issues with Greenwald and with Snowden. And I think they made it a lot about themselves and said a lot about what's happening. And that's fine. But he's a hero now. I think that's great. He's a symbol. But he's accomplished only half of what he set out to do. He got the president to make a speech about one thing. We haven't yet had a real conversation about the whole totality of what's out there. And you were saying right before we started, there are undoubtedly more leaks to come. Oh yeah. And that, how we react to the next set of leaks. You know, if Greenwald's smart, I think he's smart. I think he's very savvy. He's holding on to something big just to respond to a speech like this. And so I'm very curious to see what that next step is like. But so let's end real quick. You guys were grading the speech in terms of proposed reforms, real reforms, what he said. Let's do some overalls. Where do you think Obama landed? I'm going to go C. I think he gets a C. And he started talking about it. That's like a good strong point. I think the phone stuff is a good first step. But I haven't heard enough. So that's a C for me. Yeah, I think it's weird. So the big story of this to me was we're putting a lot more power in the judiciary. Like there's a lot more court based oversight. There's not a lot of congressional oversight. There's not a lot of other parts of the executive oversight, which is potentially interesting, but also there was already judicial oversight. And so in many ways there's a lot of stuff that hasn't... We're using a lot of tools that have already not really worked. So I think C minus, yeah, I'm a little bit lower. Okay. Addie? To some extent it feels a little bit pointless to grade this because what we are doing is grading rhetoric. And that so much of the rhetoric is essentially we will create more oversight. It is we will reaffirm our principles. It's things that they should be doing anyways and that they have been promising since I suppose it's almost going on eight months now. Maybe more, maybe less. But the problem is that every time we do this we talk about, okay, this is the thing that we've changed and we did a report card, which is useful. And I would maybe also go with CC minus, but it's that is this going to actually lead to anything meaningful? And we'll never know if it does. Right. Well, unless you work for the NSA. Yes. It's time to get that job. Yeah. They're still talking. I would ask. I'm sure they will hire you. I would ask all of our readers to immediately begin applying for jobs at the NSA and then leaking that information to us, which I believe is treason. And I will be talking to an agent of the government soon. And that was The Verge Live, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. We're going to have lots more, I'll say this, we're going to have lots more NSA coverage coming up. These two are maniacs. You should hear them argue when the cameras are off. It's terrifying, to be honest with you. So we'll have lots more on the NSA coming up probably later today. There's some news just from the speech we need to do some more analysis of. And obviously as the story is ongoing, we'll have more. So thanks for tuning in. We'll see you here on The Verge Live.

Hey there, and welcome to the Vergecast, the week of January 13th. What is it? What do we decide? It's January. Whatever. It's January. It's 2014. It's mid-January. I'm Josh. I'm Josh Topolsky. I'm Nilay Patel. Hi, I'm Addie Robertson. Yes, it's Addie. She's with us today. And I got to say, Addie and I are very cash today. We're casual. I'm trying to... We're like maybe we're having some cocoa. Having some cocoa. I feel like this is like cold weather gear. This thing is really thick, this shirt. Yeah, yeah. It's got the patches. What is happening with my hair? It's like there's a weight on the side of it that's pushing it downward. I feel a little like surfing safari curl. A little surfing. This is a natural. That's all natural right there. It's good. It looks a lot better. Much better. So much better. It looks perfect. Yeah, no, it looks great. Just don't ever show it from the side again or I will rip off this mic and kill you in the control room. It's kind of like Brie Pettis hair. Brie Pettis hair? Brie Pettis hair. Also known as prayer. Netflix is bringing Lily Hammer back for a third season. Lily Hammer? That's the show I've never watched. No, I watched the first episode of Lily Hammer and I did not like it. I don't think anyone has ever liked it. Well, it's done. They're doing three seasons of it. Just goes to show you how much you can do being unsuccessful. It's pretty crazy. I don't know. Have you ever met a person who's like, oh, Lily Hammer, that's my show. Have you ever seen it get an award? Have you ever heard anybody talk about it? I think TC mentioned he didn't hate it once. TC, man, what does he know? You can't trust him. That's like an alien who just came to the earth for the first time and is like, you know, I think Lily Hammer is a pretty good show. Yeah, no, the first part of that story was- Is this a trailer for Lily Hammer? TC was like, I was blazed and playing magic and it was on in the background and then I didn't hate it. It was an adequate background show. The plot of the show is that this mobster who's like, this guy, what's his name? Steven Van Zant? Yeah. Steven Van Zant who's in the E Street Band, by the way. Guitar player for the E Street Band. And also has a great show on- I feel like the E Street Band, in terms of members who have gone on to great things, he's the best. Because Max Weinberg is- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's the boss. They're all like, we're all basically the boss. We're close to the boss. Yeah, do you need a guy? Call the E Street Band. You need an actor for Lily Hammer? Call somebody from the E Street Band. So he plays a mobster who is relocated in witness protection or something to Sweden? Norway. Norway. Yeah. But Lily Hammer. A Lily Hammer, right. Yes. And then obviously hilarity ensues. Yeah. Hilarity that no one has ever seen. He's an Italian American mobster living in a very foreign- I know the show actually looks pretty good to me watching this trailer. I gotta say. Sure it does. I mean, the thing is if it weren't Netflix, we'd probably be like, oh, this is probably a pretty good show because it would be just in the middle of whatever terrible offerings the channel would have. You think? It would be like on AMC after The Walking Dead. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. This looks pretty good. I'm going to start watching Lily Hammer. You heard it here first. I'm going to start watching it within a week. Anyhow, is that on our topics list, Neil? No, I just saw it blazing by as I was scrolling through. I'm excited about that. It's actually been kind of a wild week of news. Very wild, very intense week of news. Everything has been intense this week. It's like after CS, people wanted to like, after skimming over the surface of everything at CS- Time to get deep. It's like, I saw a robot. I saw some glasses. Here's a laptop. I saw a robot eating glasses. Yeah. Yeah. He was like, he had bad vision. Wearing a bicycle. And I asked the guy, I was like, why didn't you just give him perfect vision? He said, I saw a robot. Yeah. You didn't have an answer. No. I made that up. That's not real. That didn't happen. Oh, I'm juice cleansing this week. I'm juice cleansing right now. How does that make you feel, America and the world? You feel good. I feel great. You're sprightly. I feel great. You're on your game. I'm never going to stop juicing. No, I feel fantastic and I recommend it. I'm still fed up. It's an extremely expensive habit though. I might as well just get addicted to drugs or something. I'd be out less money. Juice? Yeah. You'd be cheaper to just do coke, honestly. But you know what? It's not as healthy probably. It's probably that. And in terms of people who have said the phrase, I'm broke because I bought all this juice. Yeah. You probably have the saddest story. They really do. It's like the worst. No, I actually meant juice. My body is a temple. My pocketbook is empty. Well, Vegas is still within me. Yeah. Oh, that's not good. I'm waiting desperately for it to leave. How are you feeling post Vegas? I mean, I came home. I actually felt okay. I just can't wake up anymore. Yeah. My body thinks it's 3 a.m. Yeah. But didn't you feel... I felt like it just didn't... I mean, we were up... Our hours were so weird and intense that I feel like my body just doesn't care anymore. I thought that too. I was like, this is gonna be fine. I was waking up at 5 a.m. half the time there anyways. I haven't been going to bed really. It was not fun. I'm later than normal. And actually, I had one night this week where I went to bed at the normal hour and I woke up in the morning. I was like, oh my God, I feel great. And then completely blew it the next day. Like it just didn't stick. It was like a joke. My body was playing on me. Like imagine if you were a normal person. There's been a lot of people waking up at like 4 a.m. and not knowing what to do anymore and just like sending emails. That's what they should do. We've done a lot of work at 4 a.m. this week. I feel like I'm doing everything at half speed. Hit post. Like I'm trying to play Dishonored and I'm just like slowly looking at this guy. Slowly? Have you not finished Dishonored? I got the DLC, the second one. Whoa, there's multiple DLCs for Dishonored? And it's great. Oh my God. I really came around. Is there a Dead Rising 3 DLC out yet? Can someone tell me? Can someone tweet it Neilai? Are you on Twitter? Yeah. Tweet it Neilai. Yeah, you'll get a notification here on your iPhone. My giant creature. By the way, later in the show, big iPhone conversation from Josh Topolsky. Get ready. Let's talk about actual topics though. All right. So the biggest one, the week started with kind of huge news, which is a Google purchase nest. Huge news. That's kind of a big deal. Huge news for $3 billion. $3.2 billion. And big news if you're like, if you skew nerdy. Yeah. Like I think normal people. No, I mean, I called my parents, I was like, hey, they're like, what's going on? I'm like, hey, you know, the thermostats you have in your wall. And they were, they like got, I was talking to them for like regular reasons. No, no, no, no, no, no. But like Neilai Patel's parents, I don't think really count. Like my parents read the comments on the verge. Okay. They're like, these guys are saying very nasty things about you. I'm like, yeah, you need to not be reading that. I think anytime Google does anything. I'm just saying our parents don't count. Yeah. Well, this is also Google doing anything with a company that people who liked Apple really liked. Yeah. They just like put you in their nests and get really angry. Really? Oh yeah. I mean, there's like four guys. Oh yeah. I'm sure it's like four people. Well, it's like 100 Apple employees. They just bought it. It's also interesting. The guy who invented the iPod, like the guy used to run the iPhone. That's true. Like that's true. It's a big acquisition for them. Google should do is get Rubenstein in the mix. That'd be incredible. That would be so amazing. Yeah. Google hire Rubenstein for something. I don't care what it is. I just want to see him out there again doing something. What is he doing? Is he still on the beach in Mexico? He's been chilling for several years and his life is awesome. Do you think he's going to buy a webOS TV? Only if it's really small. I'll take your smallest TV. Only LG makes like a 13 inch TV. In terms of all of the trends he failed to predict or capitalize on, big phones is right up there. That was one that he was like, no, no, tiny phones. I mean, he really was psyched about the Pixie. I'm sorry. We're out of tangent here, but that's what we do. It's weird. I bought this company. I'm obviously a big fan of Nest. I wish I could have one. I love Tony. I did an interview with Nest. You don't have a Nest? No, I can. I live in New York City. Who has a thermostat? You can put it in your... What am I going to hook it up to? Just have it on the wall. Don't you have a thermostat? No, we have like big wall units. I can't even control the heat in that. I have to open the windows to cool it down. I have three thermostats in my house. You should let Google into your home. Dude, I have no problem with that. They know a lot more about me than like the temperature of my living room. I'm not worried. Google could, believe me, the stuff that Google's seen fly through their servers, they can ruin me several times over. So this is the thing. So Tony was like... Tony was instrumental. That's Tony Fidel for those of you who aren't good friends with the founder of Nest, the creator of the iPod, and now Google employee number 500,000. Yeah, right. Well, there's a lot to... It's weird. Tony Fidel and Andy Rubin working together is kind of nuts. And Andy stole the bunch of ideas and made them into Android after the iPhone came out. They're very open about it. I'm sure they're buddies though. They used to work together at General Magic. They have cubicles next to each other. What about Matthias? Do you know his feelings on Matthias? I don't know his feelings on Matthias. I see those guys in a room together. How weird is that room? Think about that room though. Their room's getting pretty awesome. It's the guy who did the iPhone, a guy who did WebOS, and the guy who made Android. They can all get in a room and do some crazy stuff. Here's our... Product marketing guy. That's not Tony Fidel. We had a Tony Fidel interview when the Nest launched. That's the same. We also have a great... You did a Q&A with him right after the Google acquisition. And everybody should read that because it's... Well, so here's the thing. So it's crazy to me because it's crazy how disappointed I felt like everybody was when this announcement was made. And I frankly felt the same way. I thought Tony was building a company that could stand by itself and be a big crazy company outside of the platform wars. So they made products that worked well with iOS and with Android. They were independent of this crazy noise and everything wasn't leveraged to make you use Android or force you to use iOS. Well, but Google hasn't done much of that. Let's be clear. Google has not done a lot of lock-in. You look at what they've done with their iOS apps, they have a robust suite of iOS apps that tap into all of their services. They seem to be sometimes better than their Android counterparts. They're not ignoring iOS and they're not ignoring Mac users. A lot of people... I know pretty much everybody at Google uses a Mac. Right. I don't think it's a Mac. I think it's more... They're gonna start to integrate the Nest stuff into the Google ecosystem. It's going to happen. The big question was, are you gonna use our privacy policy? And they're like, not right now. And then their answer is, our privacy policy is clear. We can only use your data to improve Nest products and services. So do you think... I can list off 10 ways right now that if you integrated with Google's data, you can improve your services. Addy, when you think of the Google Nest purchase, does it make you scare you? No, I mean, well, it doesn't scare me because, yeah, Google knows everything about me. That scares me more than it should. What kind of stuff do they know? Can you tell me? I mean... Give me an example of some of the things you wouldn't like to share. Well, Google can tell where you go. And it can tell if you come there with somewhere and you leave without them. And then you go to a store. She went to an abandoned building with a friend. Now the friend did not leave the abandoned building. Although they did shut down Latitude. So at least won't broadcast it to everyone now. The reactions fell into three buckets. It was consumers were like, Google ruins everything and they shut things down in the end. And I saw a lot of that. It was tech investor dudes who... Ben helped me with this part of the report, who were like, Google Ventures invests in companies and then they buy them. And so we're at a disadvantage. That's rough. And then it was privacy people who were like, we don't want to give Google any more data. What is there to be excited about? That's the thing. Is there anything cool? Well, I think the thing to be excited... You mean about the purchase? Yeah. Just... Well, I would say the thing to be excited about is that Google easily has the money and time and people required to supercharge what NASA is doing. To say, okay, your technology is great and you've made two connected devices. That's really good. But let's start making more connected devices. Let's get them into more stores. Let's sell them for less money. Let's get some of the Motorola hardware guys. They could just do whatever it is with that firewall they have and bring them over. Well, the Motorola guys don't even have bad... These guys now work for Google in a way that the Motorola guys don't. And I... Are they going to shatter it? You don't think they're going to shatter it. I don't think they're going to. I think it's a great brand. I think people like it. Right. They're in the Apple store. So do you think they'll remove from the Apple store there's been an ad? Do you think that they would... No. I think the comments is like, see you later. That's going to leave the Apple store. But I don't think Apple's like that. They make money selling the Nest. Yeah. I don't think they care. It's still going to be compatible. They're not going to change the compatibility with platforms. It's going to continue to be compatible with iOS devices. Right. No, I think that the story really is like, here was this company that everybody was rooting for. It was an underdog and people wanted the underdog to turn into a behemoth. And instead they just sold it. They wanted Nest to be like Google. Yeah. But I'll tell you, man, if Tony can influence... Stop scrolling wild. I didn't realize that. If Tony can influence Google into making awesome products, awesome consumer products, if Tony's the one guy who's going to pick up a Nexus 5 and be like, this camera is a very good guy. Make it better. No, but Tony is the guy that they need to do that. We were just talking about cameras, smartphone cameras before we started. Of course we were. But he's the guy, he's the kind of guy who would say like, yo, this camera sucks and we're not going to release this. If Google can, if Google's going to put him in that role. I mean, if Tony was like head of hardware at Google, I would be, if I were Apple, I'd be scared to death. Yep. And if I were Google, I'd be like really excited. And as a consumer, I'd be really excited. Yeah. I mean, I hope they do that. I hope that they continue to do Nest as a business and grow that. But I would love to see some of these guys. I mean, they have really smart people. I mean, amazing. Yeah, no, that would be really exciting. Tony's co-founder Matt is like an original iPhone engineer. These guys are the real deal. I mean, they've hired some of the best people in the industry. And so like for Google to get them is a big deal. I think that the fears are, I wrote a whole piece on it. Like people are freaking out. It's weird. Yeah. And it should be a slam dunk. So that was the big news. Hey, is there any way you could turn down this ear quaking volume of my earpiece there, you guys in the control room? Because I'm suffering, suffering here and you don't seem to care at all. It's not coming down in any, in any attempting to turn it. That's the kind of high level technology we're dealing with here on the Vergecast. They can maybe turn down the volume. There it goes. They've done it. That's a little quiet actually right now. You messing with me? All right. So that's the, that's the big, like. That was the big product news. That's the big product news. But there's a much actually bigger, more important story this week. Yeah. Maybe, maybe you guys. Addie's been covering the news more. Why don't you intro the news of the week. And I'll just react angrily to the news. Okay. So in a court case earlier this week. The open internet rules, which were the FCC's net neutrality rules went on trial finally because Verizon sued them years and years ago. And Verizon won dramatically. Yeah. I mean they beat the FCC. They beat them on basically like 95% of counts. There was one thing they didn't get. What was that one thing? So there were three things that they were more or less trying to take down. There was a rule against blocking content. There's a rule against discriminating against or for content. And there's a rule saying, okay, look, you have to be transparent. If you're doing a thing, you have to tell them. Those first two are gone. Right. Yeah. But if you are screwing with your data, they're going to let you know. Yeah. That's great. So, so Neelai, put it in perspective for us. What does this mean for the future of the internet? I think it's real bad for the future of the internet. I think. Go on. I do. I've been saying it for years and years. This is like with that behind you, this looks like the Kanye performance. It's like the start, like the start graphic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Scroll down. Get me, get the skull above. Can we get the skull near? Yes. It's terrible. No, look, I think it's awful. And I think the FCC has done a terrible job of advocating for what should be a super simple idea, which is that the internet connection should just be neutral. Like it should be equal for all comers to do things on just like your phone line. Just give me the dumb, give us the dumb version of what this means. Like the. Sure. Like, like I'm a dummy. I don't know anything about the internet. I don't know anything about the internet. Sure. Up until now, here's my experience. I can make this super personal. Just here's my experience with the internet up until now. I pay for a Time Warner. I pay for their internet. I get it. I pay a hundred bucks a month because I have Docsis or whatever, and I get 50 down five up and I can just do whatever I want on. I could stream whatever I want. I can watch whatever videos I want. So right at this second, this means that internet operators, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, there are now all free to start monkeying with that connection in ways that you might not anticipate. You might say, well, we don't have a good deal with Netflix, so we're going to throttle their traffic. So you're more inclined to use Verizon's video. They'd probably give a better excuse though, right? Like Netflix uses an enormous amount of bandwidth and our networks are, you know, are ill equipped to handle that particular type of bandwidth. However, you know, Verizon video streaming is, or Time Warner's video streaming services. Notably these rules never really applied on mobile, which is why I say FaceTime could be blocked forever. That's right. And Hangouts, remember when Hangouts first came out at IO? 18th, they wouldn't let it run. Oh right. And iMessage was, I think, was there? Oh no, iMessage was fine because it's Apple. But so all this stuff, if you look at the way that mobile carriers shape your data or restrict the apps you can use or say you can't have it. Or let people sponsor your data. Or let people sponsor your data now. All this stuff can now come to the majority of the consumer net, which is the broadband you plug, you get from the wall. Which means hypothetically, any carrier could say, sorry, any provider could say, you know, Skype is a bandwidth hog and you'll have to pay an additional fee in order to use a service like Skype on our, $5 extra a month to use Skype. Yep. There's a great, do you have that graph that everybody pulls up? Oh yeah, the chart, the fake chart. Can you pull that up? It's the best chart. Somebody pull that up. But here's the interesting thing about it. I feel like in mobile, we've just started to get to a point where the conversation is happening where it's like, hey, the way we handle mobile data, which has increasingly become a utility for people, increasingly is a thing you must have in the 21st century, is we're now starting to, we were just starting to get to the point where we're like, hey, we need to reevaluate how we're handling this. The FCC has said to AT&T, you can't block FaceTime over LTE or whatever, whatever their weird. They didn't really actually say that much today. I mean, the FCC makes, here's the thing about the FCC. What are we looking at here? This is the fake chart. So you pay your company $30 a month, and if you want to use Google, you pay another five. If you want to get CNN, that's another five. If you want to get Hulu, that's another 10. You can tell how old this fight is by the fact that MySpace is on here? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this has been going on in one form or another since basically 2000. This is our serious future if we don't change this right now. Here's the deal. Basically, we need to stop playing this game, right? It is a language game. That was a big thrust of your article. I think what makes the whole thing so weird is that if you actually just read through the court order, it sounds like they love the FCC and are like, the thing you're doing is really important and you make a great argument. The court came right out and said, the FCC has adequately convinced us that broadband providers are a threat to broadband deployment, which is insane. Broadband providers, their business is deploying broadband, but their real business is extracting more and more revenue from the wires they already have in the ground. The best way for them to do that is to start restricting what you can do with those wires, creating scarcity and charging more. They said that. They say it out loud all the time. They want that. No, no, no. I'm saying the court said, essentially said- The court said broadband providers are a threat to broadband deployment. If they can start- Because their job, because their business isn't broadband deployment, it's- It's extracting revenue from their already sunk costs. Exactly. And increasing the cost. Which, by the way, is fair. They own other companies, like they own content companies. They own- Right. And increasing subscribers, when increasing subscribers happens through deployment of broadband, it's only by accident. Right, because they're like, well, we need to be here. Right, exactly. So what Comcast should do is say, we can't artificially discriminate what you do on our wires, so we should go out and create new uses for the wires we have in the ground. Right. But if you don't constrain them from charging you more for the wires you have, they're never gonna go that next step. Right. They're never gonna find new creative ways for you to use the bandwidth. So the court is saying over and over again, the FCC has proven its case, they need these rules, these rules are acquired for this kind of innovation. They've proven that innovation doesn't happen on the backbone, it happens at the edges. That's what they call it. So we're an edge provider in the court's language, right? You mean the verge. The verge is an edge provider. Yeah. So we sit at the edge of one network, there's a big backbone in between, and the user sits at the end of another edge. Right. So the edges are where the innovation happens, right? Damn right, they are. They're at the edge of the platform. The verge is technically the edge. Yeah, so it's almost, you know it means penis in French. It does mean penis in French also. So they say over and over again, we believe you, the FCC should have the authority to do this, but in 2002 you made the wrong decision. And instead of classifying broadband the same way that you classify landline phones, you said we're gonna take a light touch and you're an information service like AOL. Like original dial AOL was an information service, because you would call their server and their server would do a bunch of stuff. Right. It was a direct. It was very different. It processed, AOL processed information, they gave it to you and they said, well we can't regulate those guys. And brought cable internet. Because it's like a glorified ABS. Cable broadband, you know, maybe everyone's gonna have a server and your ISP will give you an email address. That's an information service and they didn't classify them like the phone companies. And immediately everything went to hell, like basically. And that's it, like that decision in 2002. Well we couldn't, I mean they just didn't see what was obviously going to happen, which is broadband is a utility. Yeah. It is, it is. I mean it's so obvious to everybody who's paying attention. I get that, I get, there may be some like confusion at the moment because we've just crossed over very recently into the necessity for broadband as like in the way that utilities are necessary. But and people are like, what are you talking about? It's a luxury. I don't need it. You know, but you do, but you do need it. And everybody needs it. And for America to be, I'm just, we're talking about America here because other countries have very different laws about how this works. But for America to be America, this thing needs to be freely and openly available. Like that's just a fact. Like I guess there can be gatekeepers who make you pay for access to the thing. That I get. Well I mean just think about the. I understand like the idea of saying, hey we're the phone company and we are going to provide this service to you and you're going to pay us X. But it cannot be a compartmentalized, you know, die of stuff. And this is a ridiculous historical analogy. This is going to be great. Like dawn of the internet historical analogy. So a long time ago when AT&T built the entire network, their argument was we built the entire network, right? We got the lease from the government. We're going to put wires where we built the whole network. It's ours. You can't do anything with it. Like we're going to sell you the phone. We're going to send it to the receiver. If your phone breaks, we got to sell you a new one. Our installer has to come. This is landline phones. Like, you know, not that long ago by the way, not that long ago. There are amazing seventies advertisements about why they should continue to be a monopoly. Right. And I'm referring to every argument that you hear from wireless carriers or Comcast or whatever to maintain the integrity of the phone network. You have to let us own it from end to end. And they actually had an argument where like they did have the entire thing built like it was theirs. It's so different from how it is now because we have many, many competing networks in different areas all over the country. We have, yeah. Anyway, I don't mean landlines. I mean, I mean for broadband, there are. You mean like wireless, but that's still pretty rough, right? They're not one to one competitors. Like you're never going to throw away your Comcast cable connection for a Verizon wireless connection. I disagree. Not anytime soon. You don't think so? Verizon's got that capped. It's got it locked. It's got it. But I'm saying like the potential is there for a Verizon, a wireless Verizon connection to be faster and more efficient than a. Well, you're living in a world where. You're definitely making like the cable company argument right now. How would you even watch it? Like you run up against your data cap so quickly. I'm not trying to make the argument. I'm just saying that. I'm not too good at having this data. I'm saying technically speaking, that is a possibility, but anyhow, go on. Yeah. I mean, our build out of. That technicality is very far away. Anyway, so there was a company that literally made a plastic attachment that went on the end of your AT&T receiver. It wasn't electronic. It was mechanical. It was a big plastic horn. It was called the Carter phone and it let you hear the phone better. It was like a big, it was just a piece of plastic. It was an accessory. And AT&T sued them to block it, to block them from sales of it. And the Supreme Court, this Carter phone decision, you know, look it up. It's ancient. They said, no, no, no, AT&T can't do this. You have to be able to attach anything you want to the network. And that resulted in an explosion of innovation because suddenly this network was available for people to use. It's what resulted directly in modems being allowed to be connected to the internet, connected to the phone system. It's why the internet fundamentally exists. And all that happened was the government said, good job AT&T. You built this network. Now you have to let people use it any way they want. And what our court is saying today is that's a great policy goal. People should be able to use the internet any way they want. We understand it. But to do that, FCC, you have to tell people it's a utility. You have to tell people it's the same as the landline phone system. And until the FCC makes that decision, which we talked to a bunch of people yesterday, that's the way to go. That's the thing they have to do. We're kind of screwed. Because we're back to that era of Comcast saying, well, to connect anything to our network, you want to use a laptop, you need to buy our laptop. That's a possibility. My argument for the way mobile networks are their business is. You can compare them directly. Think about what you can, Wi-Fi is a great example. How good is the router that Comcast gives you? It's usually terrible. Very bad. Very bad. Anybody listening to this show, I think, probably turns off their provider's crappy router that you're given and buys a much nicer router. Because you can iterate. You can get a better one. There's competition. You can't do that with your cell phone. You're locked into contracts. You can't connect anything. But they charge you to tether. There's all this stuff that mobile carriers can do. The charge to tether is bullshit. Let's analyze. Let's just for a second step back and think about this in the world of the internet, in your broadband at home, and think about what tethering is. Here's the deal. You have a contract. I pay for eight gigs from AT&T. They're like, okay, cool. You bought this eight gigs of data from us that you're going to use on your LTE device, which is often faster than my home broadband, which is why I made that point. Often faster than my home broadband. But you have Time Warner Cable. Yes. And it's very bad. You know why Time Warner Cable sucks? It's because they have zero competition. No competition. So here's the thing. They're like, okay, cool. You're spending X amount of dollars on your eight gigs. I'm like, oh, good. I want to use my phone as a conduit to get some data onto my laptop because sometimes I need to use a larger device to type some things. Oh, you want to use your laptop to get your data? Through your phone as a connector? Sorry, that's going to be an additional... No, it's like... Is it 20 or 25? No, we're going to charge you an additional fee, which by the way, there's nothing that you can do because this phone, this is a computer. This does everything a computer does. I can BitTorrent on it. I can stream music on it. I can watch Netflix on it. It does every single thing a computer does. That's your list of things computer. No, I'm just saying those are the things that people get that the carriers will tell you like, well, on a computer you may start BitTorrents or whatever. It's like, yeah, no, that's like maybe last decade. That was the situation. So how crazy is it that they can literally impose a random fee for zero reason on data you already pay for because of the thing you will connect to it? The fact that we even accept that for a moment is insane. The reason they can do it is because they're not regulated in the way that a utility would be regulated where they... Well, but there's this big difference. So on mobile, they've always said, and it's believable to a point, our networks aren't... We don't have enough spectrum. The networks that we have are too congested already. They can throttle data. There's also a much bigger argument I think for competition on mobile though because you can actually literally... They have a very strong incentive to build big networks. You're watching T-Mobile and Sprint do this challenger thing. You can't get Comcast in New York. Right. If you want to live... If I was in Washington Heights, I could only get Time Warner Cable. Right. No, that's how it is in my neighborhood. But with mobile, there are actually competing national networks. There's at least four of them. Then you're watching this stuff kind of cap in, right? Like T-Mobile is unlimited data. They're pushing on AT&T's reacting. Fine. Mobile, we didn't regulate it as hard. Well, it needs to be regulated harder. I agree. But on landmine, we did try to regulate it hard. And we said, you can't block devices and services from a cable internet connection. You can't discriminate on what kind of content. You can't speed things up and slow them down. You can't... And when you do it, you have to be transparent about it, right? And the court agreed, that's all great. Because you don't want Comcast to say, to use your own Wi-Fi router, you have to pay me an extra 20 bucks. Which they can do now. The rule is gone. Comcast is more than able now to say, to use your own networking equipment at the end of our connection. There's an additional fee. And they already have the plans. They'll deploy them next month. They're ready to go. I'm not joking. Here's the thing. This makes SOPA look like child's play. SOPA is like, I would love to have SOPA in place of this. I mean, SOPA is obviously awful and I don't want it. But if you had to pick, right? What would you pick? What would you pick? Like 99% of the consumer internet is like the same as it is and you're not allowed to go to piracy sites. Or Comcast gets to... And there's the occasional... Or Comcast just gets to bone you whenever they want. I mean, like the people who are up in arms about SOPA should be... I mean, this is like such a threat to, without being dramatic, like this is not, we're not sending people off to war for no reason, but like this is such a threat to... It's a threat to like free speech. Freedom of speech. I mean, freedom of speech is the first thing that I think about. Like the idea that they could impose a rule that discriminates against anything, any one server service or server or site. I mean, they literally... Verizon could literally be like, the Verge's content is not appropriate for our network. Like we need to, we're going to limit the amount of Verge content you can see. What's really ironic is that Verizon tried to say that net neutrality was violating their First Amendment rights. Which never actually came up in court because they were like, what the fuck? Is this like, are they doing that because of corporate personhood or? Their argument is that they're, it's like if a newspaper were being forced to carry certain content, they... That's so wildly out of, that's so wildly wrong about like... Comparisons. What you would consider the network to be. It's a net, you're not a newspaper, you're a network. A newspaper is not a network. A newspaper is a newspaper. They're very, it's a specific thing. No, no, but this is Verizon will tell you over and over again that they're an integrated information service that when you, that every customer signs up for Fios and they use their Fios email address and their homepage is fios.com with the personal... Yeah, sure. Dude, I have Fios, all of your shit sucks. Like I want you to turn all of it off and give me the money back. But that's beside the point. But it's like this charade, it's like they're insecure. That's like saying that like, you know, that's like just because you go to a hotel, you don't watch the hotel network when you turn your TV on there. You change the channel. Right. You know? It's not a great comparison. Well, Verizon and all these companies are used to being TV providers too, where you are the content network. You are the thing. And I mean, they're just, this is just a lie that they've told and it's a lie that our government accepted. Oh, by the way, the TV thing, that's a great example. You know, you have these companies like Comcast that own... NBC. Networks. And then you started to look at like, Hey, you know what's a real threat to NBC? Netflix. Right. You know what's a threat to NBC? Hulu, even though they're, you know, they partner on stuff. But like all they have to do is say, you know what, this is bad for our business. They won't say it out loud. They'll say Netflix streaming is... Well, they're already doing that. They're doing, they will not count, shoot, what's the company that will not count X TV service against Xfinity? Xfinity. Yeah, Xfinity. You stream Xfinity TV through Comcast. To your Xbox. Doesn't count against your data cap. They got all kinds of trouble for it. Which is basically like the thing that AT&T is trying to do. Yeah, sponsor data. Right. Except it would only be like AT&T data. But I think AT&T actually does that too. Right. If you use AT&T's music service, it doesn't count. So I will say, we have an interview. Addy and I talked to Michael Powell, who is a former FCC chairman. He was the guy who, he wrote the first no blocking rule when he was Republican FCC chairman. Now he's the head of the National Cable and Telecom Association, which is a big cable group. And we, you know, he's very convincing. He's a very charming man. And I will say he made some... Most politicians are. He made good points when he talked to us yesterday. He's like, look, the market, if you're a cable guy with wires in the ground, you're never going to block services because you want all of that infrastructure to be used at max capacity all the time. It's not enough. It doesn't matter to say never. And I just don't... It's like I got off the phone, I looked at Addy and I was like, man, I kind of believe him. And then like five minutes later, I was like, I don't think so. No, here's the thing. It's fine. That's great. Then make, put it in fucking writing. Make it real. Like you're never going to block service. Say you're never going to block service. Let it be a thing. Like you can't block service. You're not going to put it in writing because you need to be able to block service. Because at some point you're going to decide there's something that is a threat to your business or your needs and you're going to block service. This is the thing about regulation. This is why regulation exists. This is why our government is important and we need them. We need somebody else whose interests are not financial. And yes, often the government and financial interests from private companies align in bad ways. But there are also instances where, I mean, the telephone network example is a great one, where you need someone to say you can't just like, I promise I won't do it. You need to actually do it. Like this is why laws exist. You know what? Guess what? We can all say we won't murder anybody. But the fact that murder is illegal and that you'll go to jail or be put in the electric chair for it is definitely a larger deterrent. It's important that we say, you know what? Yeah, we all know murder is wrong and you all swear you won't murder. But also if you do murder someone, there will be a punishment for you. There will be repercussions. Like you can't just do it and then go like, well, I didn't mean to. Well, the arguments, yeah, one of the arguments is that even when these rules aren't in place, the uncertainty, the fact that maybe the FCC could put them in place is keeping people in check. Right. Well, but I mean, which is, yeah, which means that if you turn them, if you overturn them and you definitively say, look, these don't work, then that's totally gone. I mean, I guess I understand like, I guess Verizon, they lost a ton of money last year, didn't they? Yeah. I mean, Oh, I was joking. I think they had record profits. I think Verizon had record profits. Well, it's actually, well, the difference between wireless and the landline business. No, I think the landline, I mean, well landline. But this is right. But like Verizon wire, Verizon in the ground and Verizon wireless are vastly different and their Verizon, I think is playing a game where they're making their wire line business look worse than it is. Right. In order to say we don't, we no longer have the regulatory, you can't tell us that we have to run this business anymore. Well, it's also, that's like my theory. It's like a pet theory. My other theory is that it's like how the NRA, even though, you know, they don't care about like people murdering people with plastic guns are still going to like oppose them because that will open the door to any other regulation. Right. Like I've had, I've talked to people at various sort of libertarian think tanks and they basically do say just, yeah, this is a Trojan horse. Like net neutrality is a Trojan horse. Well what, a Trojan horse for further regulation? Basically yes. Yeah. That's not actually true. I mean, yes, there will. There will be a precedent set if there's net neutrality regulation that's real. But you know, we all, we have other, we have other regulatory precedents in this country and like they're really important. Like you know, freedom of speech is a thing that we have in this country. Like it has to be, first off it has to be like regulated around, like people have to come up with the way that we actually, the way we make free speech happen. But it's also a thing that we said we're going to do because we think it's important. And it's like that happens all the time in this country and it doesn't like, it's on a snowball of like, like, oh, well now murder, like again, like now murder is legal because speech is legal. There are no market forces that like make free speech happen. Right? Right. And what I think is interesting is that, I wrote this at the end of my piece yesterday. It's what you're going to hear and you're going to hear, I mean again, Comcast owns NBC. So MSNBC, which I think is the most overtly liberal of the cable networks, even they're going to say, I guarantee it, there are headlines of this are going to be like the Democrats want to regulate the internet, which is not true. You know what we want to do? We want to regulate the internet providers. Like and that's real because Verizon and Time Warner and Comcast and AT&T are not the internet. They're the conduit by which the internet is great. And the internet's great because we're all able to connect to each other without them getting in the way. And they're not good at getting out of the way because when they stand in the way, they can charge you to get past them. I mean, there's no denying this simple fact, which is everything that we have that is the internet would not exist in a scenario where Verizon, Comcast or any other provider could like stop somebody from getting to you or stop somebody from getting through on their network and like, or change the way it gets to you. Or say, this is one of those things. Netflix would not exist the way it does now. The verge would not exist the way it does now. Um, the, the, I mean every single Reddit would not exist, like would not exist. Well, I mean, and this is, I think, uh, maybe this is a much more melodramatic, uh, story to tell, but like just think about the fact that we left AOL when we all worked for Angadget. Sorry. Addy. Addy, you thankfully did. Addy, Addy came to us fully formed. Uh, she was like, I have arrived. And we're like, thank God. Um, no, we, so we, we left AOL. AOL is a huge internet service provider. It still is. It may runs dial up, runs broadband. It's actually, it's actually, I'm pretty sure still how they're making most of their money. They make a lot of money that way. It's dial up. Imagine if AOL was still a dominant internet service provider and they were mad at us and they said to all of their customers, well, these guys are jerks. They quit our business and we're not going to let you go to their business. Yeah. And that would be terrible. And it would be capricious and awful. And maybe, you know, I certainly people at AOL wouldn't have thought that way, but maybe they would have. Right. And there would have been nothing. And right now there's nothing standing in the way. I mean, it's, it's somebody at Comcast saying, I don't like that guy is a jerk. MSNBC is a great example of like, you know, it's a Comcast owned business that it's in their best interest to have more eyes on MSNBC than it is on CNN. So they might say like, Hey, you know what? We're going to have to meter the amount of data that CNN puts through our network because they have a lot of video. Yeah. And if we're going to have MSNBC, we're going to provide free of charge as a, as a, as a, to make up for the limiting of CNN. And this rule that they have to be transparent is a great rule, but I mean, it doesn't matter how transparent you are when there's no regulation to stop you. If you've ever rented a car, the car companies, they're regulated. Hertz is regulated to the point where they, the law specifies the font and font size of the contracts so that consumers read them. And they still get around. I mean, if you look at a rental car contract, it's not like a pleasant transparent documentary read. I just get all the insurance. I get every insurance. I'm like, do you have any extra insurance offers? Great. Somewhere on Verizon's homepage, there'll be a link buried to like how they're throttling MSNBC or whatever, and they'll be over. Disclosure is not important. What's important is that like you either can do it or can't do it. Like to admitting, admitting to doing the crime is not like an issue. I murdered a guy. Yeah, no, again, I mean the murder thing is a great, I think it's a great argument. It's like, it's like, it doesn't, it doesn't matter if you admit to it. All that matters is that there are repercussions. All that matters is that you were stopped from doing it. Yeah. I mean, murder is kind of a bad example because you can't really regulate, you can't regulate murdering. I mean, you can, you can regulate the laws around murdering. Yeah. We regulate murder all the time. Well, we don't, but it's not like you can't, this is a thing where if it's regulated properly, it will stop the thing we don't want from happening. Murder's not like you can't regulate it. So it's like he's physically incapable of murdering now. Like, well, you can't fit. I mean, you can't stop. I mean, Comcast got caught throttling BitTorrent. It's not like they went and installed filters on their equipment. They just told them to stop doing it. Well, the other thing though is that Comcast genuinely did after the order got overturned, keep up their, like they didn't start blocking BitTorrent again. Although they argued and stuff. Yeah. Every ISP yesterday put out very statements that were like either inspiring or terrifying, right? Like Verizon's, the court's decision will allow room for more innovation. And it's like, these are like a gleeful, like innovative accountant somewhere at Verizon is like, finally. Yeah. What does that mean? It's just weird. It's like Verizon remains committed to the open internet that provides consumers with competitive choices and unblock. It's like great jerk ass. Like why did you file a loss? I like this. As the FCC assesses AT&T, as the FCC assesses the impact of today's court decision, AT&T can assure all of our customers and stakeholders that our commitment to protect and maintain an open internet will not change. It's like that in a quarter will get you a newspaper because here's the thing. That is the, this is like the dictionary definition of lip service. Yeah. Meanwhile, there's a guy behind them like counting stacks of money going like, you know, you know, if we throttle Netflix, we can actually make like 10 cents more on the dollar. Like here's the thing. These companies, not a single one of them has your best interest in mind, not Verizon on AT&T. No private for-profit company has your best interest in mind as a consumer. Now it may do nice things for you. It may provide wonderful things for you as a, as an accident in making money. They may also give you something you want. But there is no single, I mean, I shouldn't say there may be some company that's for-profit that also wants the best for its customers, but a company like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, they do not. What they want is profit. Like what they need is profit in order to continue being the company they are in the having the monopoly they have, they need to grow profits. So your best interest is secondary, quite secondary to their needs. And like whatever they have to say, unless someone can physically stop them, unless the government and that's the only entity that can, unless like suddenly, they just get really organized and do a lockout. Or maybe Google, except then Google will do the same thing. You can make a super, the literal. I mean if Google builds its own new open internet. That's not going to happen. And then they will lock you into Gmail. Well then they'll be like, oh, I got to see Google ads everywhere. No, I mean they. Or whatever the argument is. You know, Google is in trouble, right? They rolled out Fiber and they had a weird terms of service that prevented you from running a server on it. And we all like yelled and screamed and they changed their terms of service, right? Like ISPs are ISPs. They have the same incentives. And even if you're Google and you are in Kansas City and you hook up every single person in Kansas City, how do you make more money in Kansas City? But also like the answers. No, but the answers are simple. It's either you find ways to charge those people more. I mean that's it, right? That's like you've run out of people in Kansas City. You got to charge them more somehow. Right. There's only two choices. One, you can make them use more internet, which is hard. That's difficult. Like find new ways for them to use more capacity. So you can charge them more for additional capacity. Or you can say, we're leaving the capacity the same, but we're just going to charge you more for it. And you invent reasons to charge people more for it. And those reasons are stupid. We're going to charge you to hook up your Wi-Fi. We're going to throttle Netflix and you have to pay a little bit more for it. You like YouTube and you don't like Vimeo, well too bad. More people use YouTube. So Vimeo will go at the same speed and YouTube will be a little bit slower unless you pay. And those are the things that you're going to see. And you're seeing the comparison one to one is with phone companies. Because the phone companies do this stuff all day and all night. And because we've never regulated them out of doing it, it seems normal to us. What's crazy is we lost protection of an open internet. And AT&T's statement that they're committed to it. If you were really committed to the open internet, you would have said don't. If Verizon was committed to the open internet, they wouldn't have filed the lawsuit. Exactly. If Comcast was committed to the open internet, they wouldn't have filed the lawsuit the first time in 2007. What's interesting about the Kansas City analogy is that what good is great broadband in Kansas City when everything that has to get there has been blocked or throttled? You know what I mean? Because here's the thing, that's the internet. The internet isn't about the place where you are, it's about the stuff that comes in and goes out obviously. If you consider the network effect of all of this, it is so scary and awful. This is a real threat to our freedom in my opinion. It's a threat to our economy. It's a threat to businesses in this country. It's a threat to free speech in this country. It's a threat to healthy competition. It has to be stopped. This has to be changed. It has to be overturned. It has to be overturned and there has to be real new proper language. I'm collecting some people who aren't me to help me write stories. It can't just be me yelling all the time. No, it can be. As entertaining as that is, we're talking to a lot of people out there who are going to help us write some stuff, do some what to do next kind of stuff. So just look for it. There are really two things that they can do. They can appeal or they can try to reclassify. That's what the FCC can do. Our readers, I don't think they're going to do it. You can march on the Supreme Court right now. I mean honestly, if this were, I think civil unrest is a great idea. I mean I think calling. I think violent civil unrest. I've talked to some people about why SOPA, PIPA protests were effective and the answer that I've gotten, which is really interesting, it wasn't the blackout. It wasn't what happened online. It wasn't emails. It was people picking up the phone and calling the representatives and basically phone line de-dossing Capitol Hill and just being like, you have to talk to us about this. And that was super effective. I think this needs to be stronger though because I think they learned from SOPA. I think they are now more ready for it. There needs to be a stronger message sent. It's also easier to stop something than to get something started, which is this. And getting something started is difficult. Tom Wheeler, he seems like he says the wrong thing a lot. He's the new chairman of the FCC. Sometimes in the second time around, he says the right thing. Well, that's because he heard the first thing he said. He was like, wait a second, that was right. Everyone has a lot of frowns in this room actually. What I meant was I love the open internet. He used to be the president of the NCTA. He used to be Michael Powell. He was the head lobbyist for the cable company. The amount of cronyism there is a little out of control. The cronyism is a great way to put it. The cronyism is out of control. We'll see. He's been on the job for three months. He's brand new. I'm sure the first thing he wants, his first thing on the job, his fancy new job, is to preside over the total gutting of the FCC. I don't think he's too interested in that. Fix the broken internet. We'll see. We'll see how he does. That's depressing. We're going to have a lot more on that on The Verge in the coming days and weeks. I don't really want to talk about this. You know what this phone is? It's running CyanogenMod. I don't really care. I love this camera. It's ridiculous. Do we have to talk about this? No DLC for Dead Rising 3S. I was the one who asked, just so you know. Thank you, Kevin. You told the people who tweeted me. Did I tell them to tweet at you? Yeah. Because you have a computer open. Oh, I did. You're right. That's upsetting. When does that happen? I need something to do in my downtime. Because I'd sit and stare at a wall. The only reason I think this phone is interesting is because it's running like... It's running in Android. CyanogenMod is a company that makes Android skin. Well, it's not a skin. It goes much deeper than that. It's a completely different build of Android. It's essentially like a Linux distro. But Google will tell you that TouchWiz is a different build of Android. Do you really want to talk about this? This is the Oppo N1. I just like this camera. Yeah, so Time Warner. You know, I think Comcast is a great service. The money for dollar proposition with Comcast. I think what we were saying before was really misguided, actually. And we should give Time Warner and all of these providers, Verizon, Comcast, just give them a chance to see... I think we should just let them see... Especially because the verge will not count against your data caps now. That was very nice of them. Yes, that was a great text message I got from the heads of... Look, whenever I see that Verizon red color, my heart swells with pride. Yeah, I think that we need to just trust that they do have our best interest in mind. They are committed to the open internet. They are so committed. And let's not worry so much about this neutrality. You know what? Why would you care about that? What's being neutral? Who ever got anywhere by being neutral? Yeah. Right? Let's have an opinion. Let's take a side. Let's pick a side. Anyhow, yes, our... That might be the first Switzerland... Our internet just crashed. Actually, our TriCaster had some sort of hardware failure is what we're being told. But I believe it probably has to do with Comcast. Comcast sends a charge. Comcast sent a... There's a button that takes down the verge cast. What's the thing called? An EMP? Yeah, an EMP. Thank you. Okay, so we were talking about the Oppo N1, which I don't really care to talk about. But it's a great... Addy said the same exact thing. I said when I picked it up. This rotating camera thing is the ultimate creep shot. But then she started doing this and we were like, yeah, but maybe not because this looks super duper obvious. Way more obvious than like, I'm like, oh, I'm typing something, then I'm creep shotting you. That's it. You just do it very slowly. No, look here. Look, I'm sending you an email. I'm sending an email. But look, I'm also taking a picture of you. You wouldn't know. I'm just telling you. I mean, being in the middle of a creep shot off is... I like how I'm also the person who's creep shot is like, oh, yeah. All right, you wanna talk... Speaking of cameras, you wanna get into this? I wanna talk about... Josh did something... And then we're gonna talk about the Academy Awards, then we're gonna talk about... Case two. Yes. 1984. 1984. Really quickly, speaking of closed systems... Oh, my God. Hello, I'm contemplating returning to the iPhone, and here's why. Now, a few weeks ago, I got the Z1, which I love. I think it's a great phone. And I was like, I think this camera is better than the iPhone's camera. And it is a very, very, very good camera. Excellent camera. JPEG compression is out of control. No, I don't think so. I think you need to... They updated the software. I think you need to look at some of my full res photos. I might use some of my free time when we zoom in deep. I think in the version that we tested, which was 4.2 something, that they were doing harsher compression. I don't think at 4.3, it's nearly the same deal. Z1, excellent camera, excellent phone, tremendous battery life. But the camera is really good, right? So good, I was like, this is one of the best cameras I've ever used. I think it's better than the iPhone camera, the iPhone 5S camera, honestly. And we've done... We had spent CS, like head-to-head shooting things. And there were some great shots, like some really good shots on this. But then I started doing some, just some in-home experimentation this week, just going shot for shot with an iPhone 5S and the Z1, because I really wanted to know, what are the real differences? Where does it really break down? And it's just crazy how much better the iPhone camera actually is than every other camera, including the Z1, unfortunately. It's sad for me to say. But I took a picture of my duvet, I have this white duvet on our bed, and I took a close-up macro shot of some of the wrinkles on it. And this did a beautiful job, took a really nice photo of the duvet, looked totally like a great photo. Then the iPhone one was like great photo, and I could see the fibers of the duvet fabric. I mean, it's so much more detailed. And I'll tell you, this is the only number one reason I still have an iPhone. Okay, right. I'm jealous of the screen size. I'm getting to the point where this looks kind of like normal to me. Yeah, I mean, this to me, well, I went from, you know, I can't remember what it was, but there was like Moto X and Nexus 5. They're both relatively small. And then I had the S4, and I was messing around with the one is relatively a decent size. And then I got into this, I was like, oh, this is big, but it's not that big, but it's almost as big as a Note, actually. And then I looked at the Note. It's almost as big as a Note? Yeah, it's pretty close in size. This looks like, this is what I'm saying, this is the new normal for me. This is how big I think the phone should be. But it's good, it's fine, it's a great, uh oh. What was that? That was... Are we still on the air? Comcast. Comcast. This phone is unlocked, isn't it? Yes, it is, actually. That's what's happening. But, so here's the thing. So I started doing these tests with the iPhone that I have at home, and it's just like wildly better. And I really need, I need the best camera that I can get that is in a phone for a variety of reasons. And I'm tired of playing games. I've looked at every phone. And don't say Lumia 1020. I'm not using a Windows phone for several reasons. There's so many reasons, but I'm just, don't even, I know you're tweeting me right now, dude, you gotta get a Lumia. It's not gonna happen. There's a lot of reasons, but I can tell you the main one is a Windows phone, and it just doesn't do what I need it to do. But so, I was like, okay, let's get real. If I'm gonna use an iPhone, I need to really, if I'm gonna go back to one in iOS 7, I need to make some, I need to make this work for me. So Google Apps in iOS 7 are actually pretty good. We were just talking about this. Chrome is great. Gmail, Gmail has gotten better. It is not as good as it needs to be, but it's a lot better. Drive, a bunch of apps. Drive is great. A bunch of apps that work well. Google Plus works well, all that stuff. You can do auto backup with Google Plus, like of your photos. I mean, it's interesting that what we're really talking about is how well the iPhone integrates with Google services. Yes. I think for most people is the most important thing. Well, so my thing was like, okay, there's some real problems here. So jailbreaking has recently gotten good again for iOS 7. So I jail broke and I added a bunch of, I tweaked a bunch of things. There's an app that lets you, all Safari links will open in Chrome, for instance. There's an app that will make it so that, it's not an app, it's a tweak, it's an extension, if you will. There's one that will make it so that all mail to links open in the Gmail app. I gotta jailbreak my phone. Yeah, yeah. So it took me literally five minutes. You plug it in, you hit jailbreak. The next thing you know, you're jailbroken and you're all good. There is an application called Activator that will let you set all kinds of things you can do with the buttons. You can say, when I shake my phone, it opens the camera. Or if I triple tap my button, it goes to this app. Or if you tap on the status bar, it does this thing. I think Billy read a forum post about this a while ago. So there's that. There's a speed, reduce all animation speed app that will completely speeds up the phone and becomes as fast as a Galaxy Nexus with all the, not a Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 5 with all the animations turned off. And yeah, there's all these little tweaks. And then there's also skinning, there's Winterboard, which is funny, is a skinning app. And this is actually the point that I'm getting to. So after doing all this stuff, I'm like, okay, I can see how I can use this day to day and it's not gonna be the enormous pain that I expected. So live icon for weather. That's an extension you can get. It changes the icon to the temperature and the weather conditions of the day. So is this it right here? It's amazing. Wait, what is that? What is that app that you're using? Is that animated? Am I just seeing things or is that an, is it weather icon? Oh, live weather icon. Yeah, that's what I have. Oh, so I guess it animates when there's like stuff happening. That's cool. Now, by the way, makes the phone way better. Like crazy better. These little tweaks make it faster. It means that I can use the apps that I wanna use to do the things I wanna do. There are still some hugely annoying things. Like I can't save things to pocket from apps. It's really hard. I can do it from Feedly. I can do it from other apps that have a specific call out to pocket. Can't do it from the browser. Chrome doesn't give you an option to save to pocket. Really annoying stuff. Can't send a picture to Instagram from the camera roll. It's insane to me. Like it's so insane. I'm so used to doing it from Android. Like yeah, whatever app you want, put this picture in it. With the iPhone, it's like, yeah, I can put it on Flickr. Great. Thanks a lot. So I haven't used Flickr in like 14 years. Like that's really awesome. But here's the thing. So with all of these tweaks, the phone becomes like enormously better. And it does show you how, like the mistakes that Apple's made in my opinion are, I mean, yes, like iOS 7 is still ugly to me and I'll be skinning it as soon as I get home. But the mistakes they actually, the things that to me are like the most annoying are the ones where it just, it's like I just need a little bit of choice. Like I just need to be able to not, I need to be able to say like, yeah, I don't want to, I just don't want to use Safari. I don't like the way it works. There's another browser that I prefer. Oh, there's also an extension you can get that removes the restrictions that Apple puts on its third party. Oh really? So it's faster? Yeah, that gives the fast JavaScript stuff to like the Chrome app and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, dude, it's super easy. I've been using it for a long time because I just don't want things to break. So have I, so have I. And it is admittedly like really janky. Like it's, it's like the jailbreaking process is easy, but then getting all that stuff, it's like a little bit, you know, like, is this going to like completely break my phone? But I have to say, so here's the thing. So after doing that, it's like become almost acceptable. But it is striking to me. Here's two things that are striking. One how tiny the phone is, how just like it's, it's too small. Like web pages as they've gotten visually more complex, the iPhone has not risen to the occasion. I mean, looking at a website on my Z1 or any other slight, even slightly larger Android phone, even like the Moto X by comparison to the iPhone is like, I'm squinting at text on that screen. I mean, it's truly bizarre. And so like they really need to, I was thinking a lot about this last night too. It's weird to me that Apple who was like, we got a, here's an 11 inch, a 13 inch, a 15 inch, a 17 inch. Like they've done, like they're really good at going like, we get that there are, you know, here's a small iPad and a big iPad. It's so weird that they have iterated on this phone. What is it now? We're five times? No, it's six times. Well, if you count the iPhone five C. Wait, iPhone three G, three Gs. So you have like original iPhone three G, three Gs, three Gs and a seven. So like seven iterations of this phone. Plus the five C. And like they did add, they did add admittedly, they made the screen a little taller. Does that count? Which, which I feel like is a complete whatever move. It's crazy to me that they have, obviously they're going to do this. Like let me, let me put it this way. I'm going to say this right now. There is no way Apple releases a, whatever the next version of the iPhone is and does not release a larger version of the phone. Like there's no way. And if they do like you're done. Like you're done at knowing how to make phones. Like you blew it because the phones of today, even the ones that are a little bit larger are so much easier to hold and read on than before. Like the iPhone is really small. Maybe if you're like a little, you know, tiny person. I'm ambivalent about this because no, these are genuinely are getting too big for my hands. There are no, that thing is ridiculous. And even this thing is like really big. Like this is a very big phone, but, but like the Moto X or the Nexus, the Nexus five, I actually find the Nexus five to be incredibly, they are very similar. And like the GS four doesn't feel that big. I mean, honestly, I see the GS four everywhere. Yeah. So do I. I mean, honestly, if the G I really, really, really wish the GS four had a better camera. I really, really wish the GS four was a good phone. To me the stock, but I gotta say, if the stock, I don't think it's that ugly. You get cool backs for it. Get some cool graffiti backs for it. If the stock GS four, if the stock, no comment. If the stock GS four, well, I got it out because I was like, I want to really put this camera through its paces. But actually the GS four camera can be good. The four point, the performing four kick out update helps the camera a little bit on the stock version, but it's still garbage compared to the iPhone. So anyhow, I'm reaching a point. So my two observations were it's incredible to me that they have made the same size phone for six years now. I mean, they haven't made the same size phone for six years. They upped it from four point or three point five to four, right? Whatever it's been like two years. It's actually not the height. That's the problem. Yeah. That's the problem. Like they need to give it a half an inch on the side as well. The next one, they added a row of icons this time. They're going to add one on the other side. They're going to be like, look, we've added a whole column. So, but then the, the, my other observation is just, um, shame on every single Android phone maker. Like, I don't know. You're blowing it. This is software. The camera, the sensor in this is bigger than the iPhone sensor. It's a Sony lens. Like they can make a good camera. I mean, Sony is dominant in the camera business. This thing takes great photos where it falls short is like it's processing and like I just don't understand it. But seriously, shame on all Android phone makers. Like it's so lame of you that you can't get this. You can't beat the iPhone or get equal to the iPhone. Like, well, Sony in particular, I mean, Sony, you made that, you made it. They, their cameras are great. Like the next cameras are fantastic. It's insane. There's some of the best, their broadcast cameras are like, they're dominant in the industry. Like, just call those guys. It's not like, don't you have a bunch of point and shoot guys don't have anything to do right now? Give them a call. See what's up. It's totally nuts. Yeah. Anyhow, that's my rant. And I just had to say, um, that's hilarious. That's my, uh, that's my rant. And I may actually have to be honest with you. Like I may write something on this cause there are very specific reasons why, where I, why I'm considering going back to the iPhone. But I will also say that without the jailbreaking stuff that I just did, I don't think, even though I have very good reasons, I'm not sure that I could make the switch because I find it just aggravating and annoying to use the stock iPhone is. And like, you know, you talk about now that like, I mean, Apple's market share has shrunk so much that like when you look at the realm of smartphones that they can net, no one will ever be able to make the argument that like they should open the app store up or allow people to be able to select this app or that because it's like, they're right as a citizen, like they just don't have enough market share. But what a, what a bummer. Yeah. Like I use, you know, Google's keyboard has evolved because of things like swipe and all these new technologies that have made it like way easier to do one handed typing. Like one handed typing on the iPhone is great because like you can reach all the keys. It's terrible and slower because like it doesn't have something like swipe and like you'll never be able to experience that stuff on an iPhone. And it sucks and it does, it does retard innovation in the truest sense of the word retard in the musical sense. Not, not retarded. Anyhow, finally, Oh, Academy Awards. Yep. There's a big, and then Obama's doing his speech tomorrow. Going long, going long on this one. In which we will talk about how we need things to regulate the government because the government does not have the best interests. So we have a, we have a, we have a, a post on the site right now. Yeah, Addy and Russell and Carl. Just went up. And Dylan, our designer. Dylan did a, Dylan did a. It's a scorecard. It's a scorecard for how Obama has done. No, it's a scorecard for how Obama will do when he's done it. Oh, right. So tomorrow Obama has big speech NSA reform. I think no one is particularly hopeful, but he is to address a number of recommendations that a panel has given him on how to change all this stuff. And so we just made a scorecard for him. Here's my prediction. Can I make some predictions? Are you going to do any of it, Barry? He's going to get up there and he's going to talk about how important it is that we have, that American citizens have privacy and that, that, you know, we, we don't let our unregulated spying get out of control. He's going to go on and that's going to be like, he's going to front load that thing. It's going to be a solid 15 minutes of how important it is. Lots of anecdotes. There's transparent, there's transparency and that, that American citizens feel safe and, and that their privacy is not invaded. And then he'll say, but national security. We have a real threat. Terrorism is everywhere. Nonstop terrorism, all 24 seven terrorism. And as a result, we have to, you know, balance these two things. And then he'll announce some like extremely minor stuff like I'm going to have some more oversight committees and that'll be the last. And by the way, Americans of all stripes, you just sign up for TSA pre-check so we can monitor you. You can go through the airport with dignity. Exactly. Well, but his thing is though, he never, he doesn't actually do the sort of scaremongering talk about terrorism the way that I guess you would have, I don't know, five, 10 years ago. I don't think it's scaremongering. He doesn't care about it. He's just like, yeah, we'll make everything transparent here. I don't think black box transparent. No, I don't think Obama is this is, it would be scaremongering. I think it's like, but here are the facts. Like we're living in a world that's filled with nonstop terrorism and we have to be able to defend against it. And like, that's it. That's all you have to say is like invisible enemies all around us who we never see, but like I can assure you like we're being protected from like that rhetoric has not changed. It just like toned down a little bit. Yeah. I mean, everybody besides Obama does that. Like that was the decision that shut down the ACLU's claim was the guy opened with 9-11 changed everything. It was a bold judo move. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what that means. Okay. So the Academy Awards are happening. Speaking of threats all around us. Speaking of threats to American security, the Academy Awards are happening. I was going to say Kristen Stewart starring in a 1984 remake. We're going to get to that. That is truly. We're going to get through these. We're going to be doing some. Live vlogging. We're going to do is like everybody sits, everybody sits and watches the things like the Academy Awards. We did with the Golden Globes and there's actually some news, especially like, you know, particularly in our little sphere, right? You know, there's like a lot of the net Netflix won a bunch of stuff. Netflix got nominated. Yeah. There's gravity is going to as long as I find movies that are in the running and just like movies that we're interested in generally. And so so, you know, it's, we're going to be doing this thing. We did something at CES where we basically collected tweets and Instagrams and just random stuff from our team and put it into a live stream. So we're going to enjoy a live blog. So we're going to do that during the Academy Awards. I think we're going to pull in, you know, tweets from other people, tweets from our team. Yeah. This is no filter. That's just a gigantic picture of Michael Shane. This is just a huge picture of I don't know what is amazing tweets from when he was delirious. Yeah. This is TC was like quarantine. It is. Yeah. Anyhow. So this is going to do this for the Academy Awards. Yeah, we do it. Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to get on, I'm drinking, I'm tweeting. Like those are just going to get sucked into a live blog on the verge and you'll have an easy place to find my drunk tweets about like the dress that somebody was wearing. Ultimately, and that's what the verge is all about. And that's what an easy place to find Josh's drunk tweets. Yeah. And I think we'll pull in some other people to other, other respected critics and, and Twitter personalities. Um, Chris and Stuart is starting the remake of 19 of 1956, 1984. This morning I saw this headline on our site. I thought to myself, we've been hacked. Yeah. Like that's like an onion headline. Kristen Stewart is starting in the remake of a 1956 is 1984. This is actually a great movie. It's 1984 from 1984. John screwed up. Oh, John Hurt is in the movie. Yeah, actually. But I'm very depressing. I mean, if you've read the book, that shouldn't be a surprise. But, uh, I mean, I'm actually wondering if it's, this is being billed as like a romantic take on it. Is the 1956 version actually like a romantic 1984? I don't even understand. Like, well, there is some, there's a weird, all you have to do is change the ending and then suddenly it's these two people who are rebelling against a regime and they love each other very much. All you have to do is change the meaningful ending. Yes, there is. The extremely meaningful ending that like tells the, hey, for people who may not have read, by the way, if you haven't read 1984, like what are you doing? Why, what's wrong with your life that you have it? Although it is like a huge downer. It would almost be more subversive now. Everyone expects that of 1984. I mean, actually, if you read 1984, you'll be like, if you haven't read it and you read it now, you'll be like, wait a second. This is just normal. This isn't just normal, the normal life that we live right now. We live in brave new world. No, that's that combination. I have never described a woman as pneumatic. I do. I think we're, I think we're, it's a hybrid of, it's a hybridized brave new world, 1984 society that we're living in. We have the disposable clothing. We have the awesome, the drugs, the drugs, the nonstop so virtual reality. There's a club in Vegas called Soma, I assume. There's an actual drug called Soma. You know, there's a, you know, there's a sequel to brave new world or like a beginning of a sequel. No, that he started called, it's called like, no, seriously, can you look this up? I think there is, because he had a lot of regrets about the ending of brave new world. Can you just look this up? Brave new world sequel, please. I think it has an amazing name too. Brave new world revisited. No, that's not a good name. Maybe. That's a terrible name. Yes. Is it? No, I'm looking, I'm trying. I did not, I did not make this up unless I had an amazing dream. It's like, yeah. Brave new world revisited. Brave new world revisited. Okay. Well, it's a boring name, but it's kind of funny that like, I remember, well, the sequel did not revisit the story or the characters, but it was the ideas. Oh wait. So is it a full book? I thought it was just the beginning. I thought he'd never finished. It's 12 essays. Maybe he didn't finish. Oh, I see. Okay. I think I've read one of the essays. I once, I once gave a copy of brave new world to a friend. There was an episode of boy meets world called brave new world. Well, I know it's from Shakespeare. It's a real book. Hold on a second. Can you imagine that episode of boy meets world? I used to do this thing when I was younger. We picked your profession for you. I used to do this thing where I was occasionally, when I was younger, I would occasionally give, I would give somebody a book, like a famous book as a gift, and then I would sign it from the author. And I remember that one I signed to my friend. It was may all your world be brave and new. Yeah. All of this Huxley signed, all this Huxley. Which I thought at the time was extremely clever. It doesn't now out loud, doesn't sound as clever. I think Kristen Stewart would actually be perfect for um, Lenina crown in brave new world. Yeah. She's kind of bored and like bangable. Yeah, she's bored and she's yeah. Wow. Really? We went there. Okay. Maybe not that, but. Did you say bangable? I mean, honestly. Because that's how all the women are. Honestly. I mean, we're going to get so many complaints about sexism now. I hope you're happy. I mean, if I had to pick. By the way, the verge cast should be not, should not be used as a judge of any of what happens at the verge. I was pliable. I mean, that's how the women in brave new world are. She's forward. No, she's forward. And like, that's sort of bored about it. Blase. Yeah, that's, well, you know, I mean, we've seen that in Kristen Stewart. She had this torrid, but boring affair. Toring, but relatively bored. You could tell like the whole time she was like, yeah, okay, I'll kiss, I guess. See, that is entirely what brave new world is about. Yeah. I guess we can kiss. Um, all right. And I think with, on that note, on that dark, weird sexual note, we should wrap this up. I mean, truly. Any final thoughts, Addie? I'm really excited for this movie. Wow. Neal, any final thoughts? I have not. I'm disappointed. Did you see, uh, what was the movie? The Host? Wait, which one? That's like, that's like written by Stephanie Meyer. No, the one, the Stephanie Meyer one, not the Korean. I read the book. No, the host, the Korean host is actually really good. No, it's a very good movie. No, the book actually, if it had been cut by about 300 pages, it would have been great. The host movie was like, it was, it was, they said like, oh, it's, I mean, I read some movies and they're like, it's unintentionally funny. I'm like, yeah, come on. I mean, but yes it is. It's like kind of crazy. It's great because it's like romantic animorphs. On that note, by the way though, I will say this about the host killer trailer, killer. One of my favorite trailers from last year. Yeah. What? It's got a great trailer. What are you doing? What is this? Oh yeah. Are we watching? Can we get the volume up? It's got, uh, it's got some great songs in it. Also its protagonist is like a brain slug. That's great. Yeah, it is. It's a brain slug. It's a natural, it's, it's, you gotta see it. It's like aliens that are brain slugs. I mean, it's all on Netflix. You just watch it. Like it require only, it only required two hours of your life to be sucked away by the host. And that's the Vergecast for this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you could find us on Twitter. Oh, you can email us. I'm sorry. You can email us. Vergecast at the verge.com. Uh, you can find us on, oh, you can, uh, yes, you can find us on Twitter, uh, at Verge. I'm Joshua Topolski. Nylai is reckless. Addie is just the dextrarchy, the dextrarchy, which is not. Easy to say, not easy to spell, not easy to type. That's okay. Thank God for auto predict. Yeah. Can you spell it for us? It's the, and then it's like patriarchy. No space. No space. Yeah, no space. And then dex. Okay. Forget it. Yeah. Okay. Um, and what? Oh, it's on the screen right now. Totally legible. Just copy that, copy and paste that. Um, and of course, uh, you could, of course you can leave. Uh, of course you can leave a comment when this post goes up. You can, uh, you can start a thread in our forums and tell us how wonderful we are or how horrible we are. It's your choice. I know which way it's going to go. I think I know also. Um, oh, by the way, somebody, I just kind of just, I just mentioned this. I saw there was a forum post. It was like, did the verge violate its own ethics policy? It was, it was, did we eat the 3d printed candy? Just so you know, it would not be a violation of our ethics policy to try out the 3d candy from the 3d printer. Number one. Number two, I did not eat the 3d candy. And I regret not. Somebody said that you didn't and they spoke highly. I don't think they spoke highly of you, but they implied it. Apparently drunkenly on the verge cast. I might've said it's yes, that I did not eat it because it was within our, it's not an ethics policy thing. I think somebody just got it out from under me before I had the chance. Anyhow. Okay. That's the verge cast. Uh, and, uh, we'll be back next week. And as always, uh, you know, you and your family tough, tough situation. Timecast forever.

This is Chris from The Verge and we are in the driver's seat of a BMW i3 today. This is the company's first mass-produced practical all-electric sedan. It's part of BMW's new iRanger vehicles, the other being the i8, which is a hybrid supercar. So you have the full spectrum. On one end you have the exotic supercar, on this end you have the practical family car. Let's see what this thing can do. So the i3 doesn't really have the pickup of a $100,000 Tesla Model S, but then again this car starts around $40,000. So all things considered, it's pretty quick, as a lot of EVs are. The interior is really unique. If you've ever been in a BMW, don't expect this to feel familiar. They have this really cool natural-looking bamboo in the dash, and then you have these sort of exposed fiber accents that kind of indicate that the car is very ecologically friendly. When you open the door, the frame of the car itself is all carbon fiber. BMW has been working for a long time on sort of figuring out how to mass-produce carbon fiber, which is typically a really expensive material. They've done it, and this car is all carbon fiber, which reduces the weight of it quite a bit, and so that extends the range. The car is equipped with iDrive, as most BMWs are these days, and it works pretty well here. You have the knob in the center console with a touchpad on top of it that you can use to spell letters. The car has a few different modes, depending on how much range you want to try to squeeze out of it. There's a comfort mode, an Eco Pro mode, and Eco Pro Plus, in order of least efficient to most efficient. The car is available in two different versions. There's an all-electric, which is what we're driving, and then there's also an electric with a range-extender engine in it, and it's just a little tiny two-cylinder engine, and its only job is to keep the battery charged enough to allow the electric motors to run. Any time that you need to go, you can just put gas in the tank and you have about 100 miles, even if you have nothing in the battery. Whereas with the all-electric version, it's just like any other EV, you've got to charge it up. With this particular charger, you can get up to 80% in about 45 minutes to an hour, which is not bad, all things considered. If you remember back to our Tesla shoot from last year, where we almost got stuck out on the road, we plugged into a standard charger, EV charger that we found in Morro Bay, California, and it took all night to get to about the same level of charge, so really not bad at all. This car is not on sale yet. It's going on presale this week. This is actually the launch, the grand launch here at CES, will be available in spring.

It's Thursday, January 16, 2014. I'm Michael Shane, and thanks to a daily regimen of yoga and meditation, I'm in a constant state of relaxation. Excuse me, I- PFFT! Don't interrupt me or startle me during 90 seconds on The Verge! Another day, another NSA leak. A new report details how a secret NSA program called Dishfire collects nearly 200 million quote, untargeted text messages every day, including names, phone numbers, and images. One key factor is that while Dishfire collects both data within the US and abroad, the data from other countries is stored for far longer. The saddest part about all this? New revelations about the NSA don't even really surprise us anymore. Netflix continued its award season run this morning with its first Oscar nomination. The Square, a Netflix-backed documentary about the 2011 Egyptian revolution, picked up a nomination for best documentary. So who's going to take home all those awards? You can find out when the Oscars air on March 2nd. And finally, what are two things a film adaptation of 1984 needs? Romance and Kristen Stewart. The new film is titled Equals and will star both Stewart and Warm Bodies actor Nicholas Holt. The Associated Press paraphrases Stewart as calling it a slightly updated version of the 1956 film about love in a world where love really doesn't exist anymore. The good news is that the script will be written by Nathan Parker, who previously wrote the award-winning sci-fi drama Moon. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I star in the romantic remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It's Wednesday, January 15, 2014. I'm Nathan Seikert, and I've been using travel versions of products to make me feel taller. Hey, man, you got any toothpaste? This is 90 seconds on the verge. After a lengthy legal battle, Apple has settled with the FTC over in-app purchases. As a result of insufficient parental controls, the company is required to refund customers who have been billed for faulty charges, paying out a total of $32.5 million to 37,000 different customers. The settlement requires Apple to modify its billing practices to allow for more explicit consent. Out of all the Steam machines soon to be available, Alienware's is perhaps the most exciting. And now we finally know when it will arrive. Today at Valve's Steam Dev Days conference, the company announced that Alienware's Steam machine will launch in September. Valve also announced it'll be making some changes to its Steam controller by ditching the touch screen and simply making it a touch pad. The touch pad will utilize ghost mode, which shows an image of your finger on the screen when touching the pad, allowing you to press virtual buttons. And finally, some old friends are returning to Pandora. Avatar director James Cameron has signed Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana to return for the next two sequels in the trilogy. Stephen Lang, who played the brutish military commander, will also return. But it's still unknown how, considering spoiler alert, he died in the first film. The first Avatar sequel is scheduled for release in December of 2016. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, the porn industry reverts back to 240p because 4K is, ugh. No, no, thank you. Ugh, ugh, yucky. Ugh.

This is Dan Seifert with The Verge and this is the Oppo N1 with Cyanogenmod. If you've ever looked into the vast world of Android modification, chances are you've heard of Cyanogenmod. The most popular custom operating system for the platform, Cyanogenmod has been installed on tens of millions of devices and has a very loyal and dedicated following. People like it for its speed, stability, and enhancements to Android that don't take away from the core user experience. It's also a great way to breathe new life into an older or abandoned Android phone. But now, Cyanogen is a real company and you can actually buy a phone with Cyanogenmod already installed, no modification or elbow work necessary. That phone is the N1, a $600 5.9 inch device from Chinese manufacturer Oppo. It has everything you might expect from a high end Android phone today, a 1080p HD display, quad core processor, 13 megapixel camera, and impressively solid build quality. It also has some unique hardware features such as a swiveling camera unit, rear touchpad, and Bluetooth keychain accessory that beeps when you walk too far away from your phone. But its display looks pretty washed out and has poor viewing angles, the camera isn't very good despite its high specs, and the N1 doesn't have support for LTE, which is a huge bummer. In addition, those extra hardware features don't really work that well and do little to add to the experience. The N1 is also really, really big. Virtually everyone that I showed the N1 to remarked at just how big it is. It's a well built phone with nice materials. But have I mentioned how big it is? But the story here isn't the hardware, it's the Cyanogenmod software. The N1 comes with Cyanogenmod 10.2, which is based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. It looks very similar to stock Android, but includes enhancements to the lock screen, messaging app, notification bar, and more. I much prefer it over Samsung HTC or LG's custom interfaces, and in many ways it's actually better than the stock Android that ships on the Nexus 5. It's really fast and responsive on the N1, and in the multiple weeks that I used the device, I didn't once see an app crash or have the device freeze up. Cyanogenmod is similar to the software Motorola installs on the Moto X. It's like the stock Android that you might find on a Nexus phone, but better. The overall experience hasn't really changed, but I appreciate the smart enhancements to the platform, especially the lock screen shortcuts. It's also quite customizable under the surface. You can modify the notification bar, apply various themes, and even tweak the processor's performance to your own liking. Themes can change the appearance, icons, toggles, and more, and can be downloaded from the Play Store and applied with just a few taps. There's a reason why Cyanogen claims that software has been installed on over 11 million devices. It offers an improved experience over standard Android without ruining the clean interface that Google designed. But as much as Cyanogenmod is a niche operating system for the advanced user, the Oppo N1 is a niche phone for the dedicated Cyanogen fan. At $599, it's a hard sell against the best from Samsung, LG, HTC, and others. It doesn't have LTE, can't be bought at a discount, and can't even be purchased in a retail store. Chances are, the people that would be interested in paying the price for the N1 and ordering one are the same type of person that wouldn't mind doing some command line work to get Cyanogenmod installed on any other device. Cyanogen has some really great software and would likely be a compelling option for many prospective Android users. It's like stock Android, but better in many ways. But in order to go mainstream, it's going to have to come on more mainstream smartphones, something that you can buy from a carrier in a store. Fortunately, the N1 is just a start, a way to get Cyanogen's foot in the door. Now it needs to blow that door wide open.

Hey, and welcome to The Verge Live at CES. I'm Josh Stapolsky, of course. I'm here with Dieter Bohn. Hello, hello. Say hello. How's it going? And we've just finished LG's exciting, sexually exciting press event. Actually, not that exciting. It depends on how much you want to know about washers and refrigerators. Yeah. A lot of smart... It's going to be exciting, honestly. A lot of smart stuff, but we did... I think most importantly, what just happened is WebOS, the ill-fated palm operating system... Ill-fated is a very nice way to put that. Yeah, ill. I mean, it's sick. Ill. It's dying. Yeah. But now it's alive again. It's ill. That's what we're here to talk about. The rebirth of WebOS. All right, so Dieter, should we talk about the announcements? You just want to talk about WebOS for a second. Should we just get into it? So LG announced a bunch of WebOS TVs at varying sizes. They say that... 56% of their TVs next year will be running WebOS. 56? Yeah, it's a very exact number. I thought the number was 70. No, they expect that 70% of their total sales will consist of WebOS, and 56% is of the number of TVs they offer. Right. So more than half the televisions that LG ships in this calendar year will be WebOS. Yeah, that means that they sell at least 50 different models, probably 100, probably more. Because to get to 56 in that round number, never mind. I don't know the numbers, but you do know. They're running as a native operating system, WebOS, which has gone through a lot of permutations. And you have kind of the inside story on the design of this new version of WebOS. Yeah. Yeah, just run through the story that you put up just like an hour ago. Yeah, so yesterday we went and we spoke to Itay Von Schack and Colin Zhao, I'm murdering Colin's last name, who are the design guys behind WebOS on the TV. They came over from HP after LG bought the company. And we walked through what the thinking was behind why WebOS looks the way it does, why it doesn't look exactly like WebOS on a tablet, because trying to manage cards, the old school cards on a tablet, would be a nightmare. Right. And they redid everything and they're using this metaphor of a line. Right. And so what are the benefits here? Why not just use an off-the-shelf, why not just build their own, grab Linux, do their own distro or whatever, like everybody else, or just use Android as the base? I don't know if I fully understand why it wouldn't have been easier to just use Android as opposed to WebOS, aside from the fact that they bought it. Well, Web apps don't perform very well on Android at all. And they perform pretty good on WebOS if you're optimizing it. And a lot of smart TV apps are just built in HTML. Right. Because one, they're already building it for the Web, they're building it because it's cross-platform so they can get it to run on all these other smart TV platforms and all these insane set-top boxes and Blu-ray players and everything else that's out there. So if everybody's already making HTML Web apps for their content stuff, why not build a platform that's really good at displaying that stuff and running that stuff? I guess that makes sense. We were actually, last time we were talking about the TV issue, the situation, the fact that everything is different, every app is different. And my impression is that this might actually lead to some more consistency, at least on LG television. It's supposed to. They're going to have an SDK and they're going to release it and they've got UI guidelines for how it's supposed to work. And the UI guidelines basically are don't ever leave TV. TV is like the thing you're watching and when you go do something like hit the home button or go to the menu on an app or whatever, that pops up as an overlay over what you're looking at so you don't lose your place. The Netflix app they show is not an overlay. It's like a full-screen experience. It's a full-screen thing. Well, forget all that. So that whole design guideline thing is just thrown out. I think part of the problem is are individual companies still developing these apps or are they being developed in-house at LG? I think it's a problem with individual companies. I almost said HP, by the way. Yeah, well. Should we talk a little bit about the webOS story? I feel like everybody knows. It's not really that necessary. But yesterday I said I was reading my palm pre-review that I did on Engadget, which was a 10,000 word review. How long was your... You did the pre-review, right? I was close to 10,000. Although, I wasn't... So back then, whenever there was a phone embargo, there was the real embargo, and then there was the embargo whenever everybody actually went because a publication would go really because they were a newspaper and they thought that was okay. Let's just say it was the Wall Street Journal. In the older days of when blogs got really no respect whatsoever, you would be given a review embargo that wasn't real, and then you'd be scrambling and finishing it for the next morning and Walt's review would go up and people would be like, what's happening? Why is this happening to me? We had very different reviews, by the way. You needed to be experiential to talk to a bunch of people, and I needed to be comprehensive to satisfy the insatiable need for every last freaking detail possible. You don't think my 10,000 words covered every last detail? I think you spent more time on the classic. I had a giant bullet list of how every single gesture worked and the thinking behind it. I had to go through all that. Are we competing now? I'm saying yours was better. No, I don't think it was better. They were different. It's funny. I mean qualitatively better, yes, but of course also very different. In this story behind the WebOS TV post, there's a narrative arc because WebOS launched here at CES and it was five years ago. In my first draft, it went live. Five years, almost to the day. Yeah, my first one I had four, it was January. Wait, it was to the day. Was it to the day? I think it was January 6th. Am I crazy? This is some eerie stuff, people. If you're a huge nerd, this is really eerie. Super huge nerd. Right now, January 8th. Oh, it was the 8th. I forgot it. Not that eerie. Never mind. Yep, not so cool. Anyhow, it was a huge deal, CES. I remember They launched, they couldn't get on Verizon, they had to go sprint, they'd launched late. Which by the way, LG just did a sprint exclusive launch. Well, sort of. They're going to be on T-Mobile in 18T2 for the G Flex. Yeah. But it's pretty well established in my opinion that if you launch with Sprint, goodbye. The product is dead. Yeah. Like you're screwed. It's not happening. I mean, it's the smallest. Is it smaller than T-Mobile? No. Subscriber base? Close. Can we get a fact check on subscriber base? Ross, let me know. Anyhow, they launched WebOS on the pre. Palm launched WebOS on the pre. This was like their, this was the if they don't do this, they're screwed. They're gone. They were already kind of late and like we were waiting and waiting and waiting and nobody expected what they did. Nobody expected it to be changed. It was incredible. In my opinion, it's still, first off, one of the greatest, first off, one of the greatest CES demos of all time in my opinion. Yeah. But in terms of, I mean, in really skillfully put together and really thoughtfully done, a real moment for me, that sounds so insane. A real moment for me like having been a Palm fan boy and really wanting to see them succeed, seeing them pull off what they pulled off at CES. Of course, it was all smoke and mirrors because the product was not done at all. They were six months away from shipping. Yeah. And what they showed to this day I think is still incredibly advanced. Yeah. The best part about it, I was talking about this last night, the syncing was a huge deal. They showed, by the way, remember when syncing was a thing and everybody was like, how am I going to sync this with iTunes? They showed how you can sync the pre, you could sync the pre with, I think how we're, we're supposed to be talking about WebOS on television and we're just being nostalgic about WebOS on phones, but how you could sync with iTunes was a huge deal and then Apple killed it basically. But anyhow, it was five years ago, almost to the day. Yeah. They did that at CES and since then WebOS has just been on a, it's just been nose diving. Well, I mean, yeah, they had a little moment and then it was, they couldn't, they couldn't get support from carriers in the US and they needed it. They kept on launching stuff late, the performance wasn't very good. They ran out of money basically and a bunch of companies were like, we're going to buy them, we're going to buy them for IP, we're going to buy them for this. HP bought them and then HP CEO got caught in a sex scandal and they got a new CEO who didn't believe in them. That's right. And he set the thing on fire. The Leo Apotheker, better known as the Apothecarylipse, Apothicalypse. Is that what it does? It's known as the Apothicalypse. Really? People within both the WebOS division, Palm division and within HP at large had no idea it was coming. He was like a spreadsheet. Everybody was just like, boom. He was a businessman. Yeah. He didn't have the passion. Yeah. He was a passionless bastard from hell. Yeah. Is that cool to say? That's probably liable. That's probably liable. He got sued by his people. That's all right. Does he have people? He got a golden parachute and got out. Yeah. Now Meg Whitman is trying to pick up the pieces. Meg Whitman I love. She's great, wonderful, wonderful lady. Anyhow- They open Sarset and then LG buys the rest of it. This was February last year LG bought like a bunch of WebOS, HP kept some. It was weird. They bought them and we were like, well, guys, why do you need WebOS to make smart TVs? They had no answer for us then. We have the answer now and the answer is HTML apps run really well on it. Two, and I think this is the more important thing, they managed to pick up some really good designers. I think the design of this is probably my favorite smart TV interface that I've seen. That's not really saying much, but it's pretty good with one major exception. What? Beanbird. What? Beanbird. You love Beanbird. I kind of like Beanbird. Can you explain Beanbird? Beanbird is a cartoon bird that's shaped like a bee bean and it helps you get through the setup process. There he is. He's protesting that you didn't set up your Wi-Fi right there. He's like, you should really do it. Beanbird's pretty cute. Yeah, I know, right? Come on. It's an easy target though is the thing. People are going to be making fun of it, but he's just there to help you set up your TV. Why don't they just call him like the WebOS bird or something or like birdie? Because he looks like a bean. Yeah, but they actually referred him as Beanbird. I just like being elicit lots of things that you don't want to hug. Is the bean non-hugging items associated with beans? Yeah. That's all I'm saying. The problem I'm trying to solve is nobody ever sets up their smart TVs and then your smart TV sucks if you don't set it up. This is great. Look at that shot. Beanbird doesn't have wings or arms. Yeah, he's magical. I feel like it's a sad situation for him. Oh, you think that he's... Well, I feel like it would be better to have wings or arms. First off, if you're a bird, hard to fly without wings. No arms, hard to log on to your WebOS TV and check out the new House of Cards season two. That's right. By the way, the trailer for season two is available on The Verge right now. You can check it out. Reed Hastings was on the stage. Reed Hastings. This is really interesting. Reed Hastings got on stage at the LG event and was basically like, LG's awesome. This is the problem, by the way. You have to buy an LG television. Yeah. LG's not really known for having the greatest television. They make fine televisions. Everybody makes okay televisions. When you think about the best television, you're like, oh, that's Panasonic or Sony or Pioneer. The fundamental problem is when you go to buy a television, are you going to get the best television in terms of picture quality for the money that you're going to spend or do you want to get the WebOS interface? I'm thinking you want to get the best picture quality for the money because you know what? I'll just go buy a Roku. I'll just go buy an Xbox one. I'll just go buy a whatever. Their interface is really awesome, but I just bought a Roku. I don't replace my TVs that often. The Roku does what they're doing in the sense that it's a cohesive, sort of a co... Actually, I will say this. If they could get the UI completely in sync, completely following guidelines, I think that would be a really big deal. Do they have an IR blaster solution with these guys? The LG Motion Remote can work as a universal remote. They're not trying to be super comprehensive and cover everything, but they say that they're going to... They'll support the big stuff that you care about. They'll support your DVD player, Blu-ray player, your Xbox, your cable box. The cable support is just... Yeah, I don't think it integrates with the guide, but I don't know the full details. We were talking mainly about the design, so it's possible. What's interesting is everything that you want to watch is just these little cards, these little vertical slashes of things. When you plug a new box into it, if you plug an Xbox One into it, it'll switch to it, and then it'll add a card, and it'll label it Xbox One because it can detect that it's an Xbox One that you've got. Right. So instead of toggling through your input button over and over and over again, you just go down to your card for that input. I will say that sounds kind of great, but one of the things that I liked about speaking of the Xbox One, and they don't have it quite right because there's things that you can't do, but it almost ingests the cable input into the interface of the Xbox One. Well, almost. Almost. But I'm saying that even if they offered that amount of functionality with this, it would be an improvement because it would take, again, that cohesive interface and make your cable box part of that interface. And it's still like you're bouncing between those things. I mean, it's less of a problem now, I think, for most people. Cable interfaces have gotten slightly better. I mean, I'll say this, Time Warner just refreshed their interface. Is it okay? I mean, comparatively to the previous Time Warner interface, it's like a heaven. It's like the most advanced- Instead of a punch in the face with a slap in the face. Yeah. It's like the most advanced UI ever compared to the last version of it. But I do think for most consumers, that's not that big of a concern, but I also think for most consumers, they're not aware of the options and how to access them on their televisions. And I don't know if having, making a better smart TV with a better interface necessarily helps them get there. Well, so here's the thing with what was possible for them is when you're dealing with TV and doing stuff, it's not a glass ceiling. It's like a steel reinforced concrete ceiling of what's possible and Microsoft hit it and couldn't break through. LG is not going to be able to break through that. LG can get where Microsoft could do that. There's no way that they could do that. You cannot get cable to give up their stuff and play all of their systems. And there's a phantom belief that Apple will get there, but thus far, they haven't been able to get there. They've been sitting there upside down strapped with a jackhammer for the past five years and we're still waiting to see. Right. Well, I mean, I think that's why we haven't seen any big... I mean, everybody claims this year is going to be the year of the Apple TV. I hope so. I think that actually explains a lot about why we haven't seen more action there and more motion. Yeah. So let's... We should talk about some of the other LG announcements which are... Why don't you go through the list? So they had the Lifeband Touch, which is LG's fitness tracker. It's a water... Of water resistance, whatever. It's got an OLED display. It does smartphone notifications, exercise goals. Proprietary LG tracking. Yeah, I think so. And then it hooks up with a little MP3 player that the earphones will monitor your heart rate through the earphones and it also checks your pulse and checks blood flow apparently. Right. So that's kind of cool and weird. But I mean, honestly, it's like they built it because they could. It's another... I think that's cool, but I think the biggest problem with these devices, particularly for an LG is it's proprietary. It's their... You got to buy into their software, their whole ecosystem and who is buying into LG's proprietary health ecosystem. I mean, that doesn't sound like... I mean, what we really need... No, I mean, I don't think most people are thinking about... I mean, you and I care a lot about a proprietary health ecosystem and eventually people will get to caring about that. But you walk into Best Buy, you're like, I want a fitness tracker. You're just gonna get one and so... Nobody walks into Best Buy and says, I want a fitness tracker. Really? I don't think so. Really? First off, Best Buy... I think... You mean Best Buy in America? Sure. In America, nobody walks into Best Buy and says, I want a fitness tracker. They're like, I want the biggest television you have for as cheap as humanly possible. A big gulp on the way out. And they leave with that and they've been upsold a $150 HDMI monster HDMI cable. That's the best buy experience, I think, for the vast majority of Americans at least. I don't think people go in and they're like, I need a fitness tracker. Which one should I get? What I do think they do is they go in and they say... I've heard about some people going in and saying, I've heard about this Fitbit thing. Right. Or then FuelBand. Yeah. Again, two proprietary closed systems where you can't get your data out. Right. It would just be nice if LG had gone, hey, we wanna partner with Fitbit or with Nike or someone... Not that Nike wants to partner with LG, but it does something where it's like, this is going to work with the rest of the stuff that you do. Right. I feel like they just made it because they could. It does smartphone notifications, so it's cool. It's a Samsung move. We can build this thing. It's not that hard. It's not gonna kill us. We might as well just do it. We'll sell a few and that'll be fine. That's called the... That is the Lifeband Touch. Lifeband Touch. Fitness tracker. You gotta put touch or something in it. You have to have a lowercase I or a touch in it. Well, I think it's camel cased. Oh, good. No, no, it's not. It's Lifeband and capital T Touch. What else? It's safe. What else? You know, from LG, the Flex is coming to the US. Bigger TV. Oh, yeah, the Flex. We talked about this already. The Flex is coming, starting with Sprint. So, great. We reviewed the Flex. Yes. We didn't like it that much. Not a big fan of the Flex. I've used the Flex. First off, it's gigantic. It is massive. There are enormous phones. Here it is. And then there are enormous phones that remind you that they're enormous all the time and this is the latter. And the curve, I don't get... I mean, the curve to me seems like the most superfluous, gimmicky thing. Yeah. I mean, it is not even... I was gonna say not even... Remember when there were a couple phones that had a 3D screen or a 3D camera? The curve is akin to that. And LG is like all over the gimmicks. They have the button on the back. Oh, they were... They've got this curved screen, which is meant to compete with Samsung's curved screen. And when I used it, I could not see the... I mean, I heard... There was this argument like, oh, it'll reduce glare. No, so they were defending it. They're talking about it in the keynote today. And it improves sound quality because the speaker's off the table. It allows you to hear better, hold better and view better. It improves grip because you can... I don't know. You don't have to hold it. Whatever. That's what they're saying, man. Yeah. Sorry, I was just watching that person step on the phone. Oh, right. I mean, we're sure it's made to do that. I mean, do we know for a fact that the phone is made to do that or are we just doing that? It's got the Wolverine plastic on the back. Yeah, I don't know. It's got a flexible battery. It's a flexible battery. It was a mistake. But I think... It's coming to Sprint, AT&T. But I don't know why you need a phone... It's like, hey, you know what? If you had not... If you had made the phone flat, it wouldn't have to flex when somebody stepped on it. What are they saying? It won't break? Is that why it's curved? They're saying... I mean, their selling point was, from what I understood, their selling point was it feels really great to hold. It curves your face. No. To me, it's like it curves away. I guess a phone... But a phone, you had to hold onto the curved part. That was the reason for the curve. Or this. Your face is... I mean, well, your face might be perfectly flat. My face is perfectly flat. It's like a two-dimensional object. Like a... You sprung out a max head. Can you even see my face right now? No. If you were to... If I... You can see it now. Oh, there you are. Right. And now you're back. And you're just nothing. Okay. Hey. Just like flat. Right. Oh, you know what we should mention? Yes. No. Well, actually, two things. One of them is going way back to the beginning. Lay it on me. Put it down. Throw it down. Visio said, we're not making 3D TVs anymore. 3D is... We said last year 3D is dead. And now they've admitted it. 3D is dead. Yeah. I mean, consumers don't care about 3D. They don't want to watch 3D in their homes. If you showed them a TV that had immaculate, perfect 3D... Something just happened behind us. Did... We don't know what it is. Did we get hit by... It may have been... Were we hit by something? Does anybody know what that was? Someone may have thrown a brick. Maybe someone threw a G Flex at us. It's possible. LG is retaliating for the comments we made about the G Flex. Seriously, what was that? We should find out. We'll figure it out. If this could... Last night I was like, I really want a backhoe to just come driving through the tent. And now you're going to get your wish. And now the backhoe is actually going to drive through the tent. It's going to be great. So this could be our last broadcast. Thanks for watching. We had a great time. We had a great time with you guys. Okay. Anyhow, where were we? Just talking about? Oh, just thank God that companies are beginning to give up on 3D. Oh yeah. Well, 3D, I mean, 3D is... I was going to say, if you were like, here's the TV. It looks beautiful, perfect, exactly normal, but you can switch it into 3D mode without glasses and it'll show you 3D and it will be perfect. There's no weird tearing or blurring or interlacing or whatever. Maybe, maybe somebody would use it. But you have to give them that experience. Yeah. I mean, what's the deal with ticket sales for 3D movies? How are they doing? Well, they do better, but it's because there's no other option. But I don't think they're doing as well as they were a couple of years ago. And they also cost more. So figuring out the numbers is really complicated. 3D was always a gimmick in my opinion. I mean, James Cameron will tell you that it's a life-changing experience. I have not seen Gravity in 3D and everybody says Gravity is the movie that he was made for. So I could be wrong. I didn't get a chance to see it. I'm very unhappy. I haven't seen it either. It's been ruined. We're the two people... I know. Hey, hey, hey. Spoiler alert. Ron dies. No, come on. Ron Weasley from Harry Potter. Ron Weasley from Harry Potter died because he has a Gravity. He's like, hey guys, did she get shot by an alien? Yeah. That's what would happen, right? Ron... Okay. I think we're nearly done talking about LG. Is there anything else to talk about with LG? No, I think that's fine. There's really nothing else? I mean, we have no idea if they're going to make a phone. And if you make a phone or tablet LG, please go back and use that Mochi UI that we wrote about last week. Because that's pretty sick. That's it. That's my open request. I haven't heard what you thought of it. The web OS stuff that you did? The lost web OS design. I think it's awesome. Yeah. Wait, can you use that UI somewhere? No. There are web OS fans currently theming the touchpad with it. They're like re-skinning the touchpad to look like it. It won't do all the crazy card stuff. Right. No, I mean the version of web OS... By the way, if you haven't seen this, go see it. Dieter did kind of like expose on the old... God, we're such losers. It's out of control. I know. I promised myself I'd stop talking about web OS. Home phones that were never made and web OS versions that never came to be. Well, the phones are whatever. The phones and tablets are completely whatever. The X convertible is okay. I blame HP for those designs. I think they're pretty bad. But the interface looks really awesome. And I wish it had existed. It's like the perfect middle ground between flat and skeuomorphic. And it's just really beautiful, very elegant. I mean, here's a look at it. Really elegant and some extremely thoughtful design ideas. It just makes me so bummed that it never came to be. Like, look at that. You want to use that calendar. You want to touch those blobs of information. Blobs of information of the future. Oh, one last thing and then we can go out. Nvidia's new 192 core K1. They demoed it in an extremely long keynote. Not really LG related. No. It happened yesterday. I wanted to just bring it up and say it looked great. If you didn't see it last night, Nvidia is one of the most boring keynotes of all time. Truly mind-numbing in areas. And anyhow, they announced 192 core mobile. It's basically the new Tegra. Yeah. They say it's a console grade processor. No, no. It's capable of some really... They showed off Unreal 4 engine on it. And if they can get that into phones and get games using it, it's definitely a game changer. Tegra's kind of not in the best spot right now. It's just a quick recap of stuff you might have missed last night though. Though I will say this is a good time to actually say it. We're going to be doing Verge Live all day after Samsung's event today at 3 o'clock at 3 p.m. Pacific, right? 3 p.m. Pacific. Yes, that's right. 6 p.m. ET. We will be back doing Verge Live. I don't know who's going to be on that. I'll be here. It will not be me. Not you. We don't know. Who knows? It might just be the person who drove the backhoe into the tent. And then tonight at what time? 6. No. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, at 6, 9 o'clock on the East Coast, 6 p.m. Pacific, Verge Cast after dark, after hours. Both. What do we call it? It'll be after hours. It'll be both. After dark. And shit's going to get real nasty. And there I've sworn on our live recap. There should be only Verge Cast behavior, but you know what? We're on the internet. We can do whatever we want. We're going to have some honchos, some head honchos breathing down our neck. Some sensors. They're going to throw bird beans at us. Nobody's going to throw bird beans at us. Okay. It's time for me to get some coffee. All right. So that's the Verge Live post-LG. We'll be back again at 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. East Coast to talk about Samsung's event. And all day long we're going to be streaming live events. We're going to have lots of new, I mean we're going to have a crazy amount of news today. Tons of reports. Tons of hands-ons and first looks. And it's going to get very hot. Very hot and heavy. Very sexy. So stay tuned to The Verge. Stay tuned here. And we'll see you guys after the Samsung event.

Oh, yeah. Welcome to the verge live. Cs 2014. The post Samsung post Samsung wrap up. I'm Josh to Polsky. I'm Ross Ross. Ross Miller is here. And I'm I'm sorry. I just know it's happening. I'm still thinking about we're still recoiling really from thing that just happened. A moment that will the will all never forget live in infamy. Yeah, in infamy. Michael Bay had a meltdown on stage during his he had a little appearance at the Samsung event. He apparently the teleprompter was broken. He had no idea what he was actually supposed to talk about. And instead of winging it, which he said he would do. He just bailed. That was that was winging it extremely uncomfortable. As you know, Michael Bay is a minimalist. That was as little as he wanted to do. Yeah, sorry. I don't want to block my That's fine. What is happening? Okay. Oh, yeah, that's not important. What is important is Michael Bay. Yes. We hope he's okay. But we wish him well. Very uncomfortable. Why don't we just watch it? Let's just watch it. We watch it. Let's just take a look at the clip. If you haven't seen it. Here's Michael Bay. Having a very uncomfortable time on stage of Samsung and just bailing. Yeah. Take a look. Michael Bay. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Michael. How is everyone today? My job as a director is I get to dream for a living. Michael, you know, you're known for such unbelievable action. What inspires you? How do you come up with these unbelievable ideas? I create visual worlds that are so beyond everyone's normal life experiences. And Hollywood is a place that creates a viewer escape. And what I try to do is I as a director, I try to the type is all off. Sorry, but I'll just wing this. Tell us what you think. Yeah, we will just we'll wing it right now. I take I try to take people on an emotional ride. And the curve. How does it how do you think it's going to impact how viewers experience your movies? Excuse me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. Oh, God. Oh, I mean, part of me is laughing. I'm like, I feel awkward. Part of you is dying inside. I feel I feel kind of bad. I get I get it sucks. Like his teleprompter failed. Right. And that's not a great experience. I mean, he would have had to basically just ad lib. And he may be very nervous on stage. Some people are not you know, the director is behind the camera. He's not a guy's although he has done commercials and stuff. But even like it's not improvisational. He's there's a script. He's planned everything in advance. I mean, it just it just you know, it just is. It's so delicious. How bad how bad it seems it's tabloid in the little tabloid. But it's just my understanding is Michael Bay is a pretty intense dude, pretty temperamental dude. And so this may have only been a small, a real small taste of what he's like. He walked away before we actually saw the full blown. Yeah, you gotta hand it to him. He he at least just just bailed. Right. What's happening? Is something running into this tent? I don't. Okay, good. Anyhow, but but so that weirdly became the news. Talk about that. We were not planning on talking about Michael Bay. But then what happened is he did something amazing during the Samsung event. There's actually news since I had real news. Right. That wasn't just a famous director. There's been a lot of stuff that's happened. We did a show this morning right after LG. Yeah, we've done that since then. There's been Panasonic. You were not on that show. I was not on that. Dieter was on that show. That was Dieter. Yeah. I know we look much. Well, he's more blonde. He's way more blonde. He's got a blonde. Way more attractive. Blond style. A little more consistent. A little more consistent. That's right. Yeah. Blonde beard, though. Blonde beard. It's always weird. But yeah, so we did an LG after show and and then we were like, hey, we'll do the Samsung after show. Little did we know we'd get this extra treat of weird stuff happening on stage. But so they introduced actual products. Let's talk about some of the products. A bendable prototype, 105 inch. That was a 105 inch Ultra HD television, which Ultra HD, I guess, is their branding for 4K. I mean, there's some debate about what Ultra HD. I'm getting very confused about this. We've seen what I think Visio, Panasonic. They're all saying Ultra HD. Yeah. Yeah. Is this the same Ultra HD everywhere? Same 4K? I don't I don't I'm not sure that we know the answer to that. I think there's some debate about whether Ultra HD is a single resolution or a set of resolutions. Anyhow, they introduced this Ultra HD bendable display. This is a display that goes from curved to flat. Yeah, so let's be clear. So the 105 inch is a real TV. That's going to come out. That's a 5120 by 2160 resolution, just like the LG one. Right. 85 inch prototype. Oh, it's an 85 inch. That's right. 105 inches are real TV, which is just is curved. It's not curved. It's curved. That one's curved. That would be on sale. It just stays curved. It stays curved. That's 105 inch. That's 105 inch Ultra HD. Then they showed a prototype of an 85 inch, which goes from curved to flat to flat. Yes. And nobody knows why. No one knows why you want curved in the first place. If Michael Bay hadn't gotten off stage, we would fucking know why the TV can go from curved to flat. I mean, he didn't know. It was going to be revealed on his teleprompter. And now we'll never know. We will never know why the TV moves. What if he comes back? What if he's like, all right, guys, I'm cool. No, it's over. It happened. What if Michael Bay, by the way, he's close enough that he could just roll in here right now and flip this table and then rip our faces off. You really think he's going to rip faces? You were saying this earlier, too. I think that if Michael Bay attacked you, he would first rip the flesh off of your face. It's a face off. And then he'd punch a hole through the skull. Okay. And then you'd be dead. Wait, did he do face off? No, he didn't do face off. Is that a John Woo movie? That might be John Woo. Is face off John Woo? Did I just invent that? That's definitely John Woo. Because there's a scene with doves in it. It's John Woo. Right, the white doves. The white doves. That's a classic John Woo move. Anyhow, but getting back to Samsung's CS announcements. So we had that. So there's these new TVs, Galaxy Tab Pro and Note Pro tablets. And you've got the Note 3 here. And you were talking about how much you love... No, I wasn't talking about that. I have a Note 3 here that I'm messing around with. And I'm blown away. It's been a while since I've used a Samsung stock, not stock Android, but like a Samsung Android phone. I spent an hour disabling applications on this. And it still has like all kinds of things that are super annoying. Yeah. Like their interface stuff is completely out of control. I don't know who's doing their design. I don't know who's responsible for what's happening on this phone. But it just is really, really depressing. Listen, the phone is good. Some of the stuff on here is really interesting. It's just like you have to get through a thicket, if you will, a forest of a tangled web of weird UI tweaks and customization that seems completely arbitrary and just meaningless. Here's a random one. You can't put widgets on your lock screen if you use a pin or a swipe motion. If you lock your phone in any secure way, you can't have any widgets on your lock screen because you can't decide that's weird because every other Android phone lets you have them on the lock screen. Like that's not a Google thing. Android things like or sorry, that's not a Google thing. It's not an Android thing. Samsung thinks there's a security issue, which is weird because all I want to look at the web. I feel like Samsung assumes their users are so stupid that they're immediately going to do something awful with the phone. Well, they do have what simple mode, which is actually great. I think I'm not a bunch of security stuff on here anyhow. But this is a we're talking about the note three. But they introduce these new tablets. There's a 12.2 inch. Right. Is that the tab pro? No, that's the note. There's two. The tab pro has a 10.4 inch and a 12.2 inch version. Oh, there's OK. I'm very confused. Oh, no, sorry. 10.1 inch. That's right. Gats tab pro has an 8.4 inch, 10.1 inch, 12.2 inch. Yeah, we hear some video. Note pro next to it. I feel like I don't know. Call me crazy, but I feel like the lawsuit has had little impact on the design of Samsung. Products, I guess, do they have hardware issues? Do they get they get slapped for the hardware? I can't remember exactly what exactly the attack was. I don't remember either anymore. But at any rate, so they got new big tablets. 12, 12.2. Yes. 10.4. Can you tell, by the way, that we're already feeling the burn? So I'm getting sick. I'm losing my voice. I'm extremely ill. And like little by little, we have a writer who's already down. Like we've got one man down. Yes. Michael Bade. In that he pees. But we think he has a flu. Yeah. So he's quarantined. We hope you're OK. Anyway, the big thing here is 4-Pane multitasking, which is basically saying this version of Android is getting closer to desktop. You can now do way more at the same time. Some new UI stuff on it. Right. Obviously, pen input. Actually, this UI, the stuff they're showing off here is definitely some of the more handsome work that Samsung has done. Oh, yeah. When it comes to their when it comes to their mobile products, because there's a lot of bad stuff. But this actually looks really nice. I can't say what it's like to use because I haven't used them. But, you know, not a huge announcement. But there are going to be certain people who are very excited about this. Definitely like puts it I mean, when you think about a 12.2 inch tablet in a 16 nine aspect ratio. Right. Is there are these 16, 10 or 16, 9? I think there's 16, 10. It's a little doesn't look narrow enough to be. Yeah. Am I crazy? Wait, 16, 10. 16, 10 is the narrow. Yeah. All right. Doesn't look narrow enough to 16, 10. Just get me out of here. Just airlift me back to a normal place. The thing that like these Pro models use and I think the ASUS is another example that is this diverge. I remember when Windows 8 first came out and they're showing we're trying to figure out this tablet keyboard hybrid. Yeah. With the Tab Pro, the Note Pro, they're offering Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for accessories. They really do think this is that be all computer. I think it's why they're right. This is multi-paying. Yeah. Yeah. No, they're definitely trying to turn Android on tablets into basically a laptop replacement. Right. Yeah. And in some ways, I mean, with what they're doing, it can be. We were saying, I think last night we were talking about, I can't remember now because I'm so tired. Talking about the idea of a Chromebook. You realize the show floor has not opened yet. No, I know. That's the crazy part is that the official CES has not started yet. But we were talking about the idea of having a Chromebook with Android apps, windowed Android apps. I mean, this is, it's pure Android, but you can see how if you dock this with a keyboard, its utility goes way up. Not just keyboard, but they're selling a Bluetooth mouse with this too. And what are the price points on these? Did they announce? Let me see. We don't have price points. No. I assume some of these are going to be carrier deals. Probably. I'm sure they'll be selling. LG, LT, sorry. They do have LT. Well, they're going to have both. Right. All right. What else did they announce? I can't stop thinking about Michael Bay, so it's hard to concentrate. Yeah. And I am losing my voice. Well, same thing we saw with LG and we're seeing with other companies. Like they did their 4K streaming stuff. The partner here is Amazon. Reed Hastings came on for LG. Yeah. But Netflix 4K seems also on Samsung. They're getting, was it Technicolor and Go? We'll stream 4K movies. Amazon's going to be a 4K streaming partner for here. Yeah. I mean, Samsung's obviously just pulling out all the stops to bring that content. And I get it because the cable companies haven't announced any 4K options right now. It's going to be internet streaming. Yeah, it's going to be internet streaming, but I don't see how they're going to be able to do this except to the people with just the most ridiculous bandwidth. Right. I mean, offices with big fat pipes. Like I don't know- Kansas City. To a consumer, yeah, maybe in Kansas City, but to an average consumer, I don't know where they're going to get the bandwidth required to stream any of this content. I mean, it's aspirational. It's almost like they're, well, they're future-proofing essentially. Because like, no one is buying an 105 inch curved TV to run 4K streaming. Well, I mean, there are other 4K options. There are. Still, the point is, I mean, this would be exclusive to Samsung. Okay. So there's a huge truck outside right now. We really got to get thicker walls next year. I mean, I thought we had hard walls this year. I really felt good about it. I have a hard time calling the walls in the first place. It's cloth. Yeah. It's a little bit of cloth. Yeah, a little bit. It's always been the chicken and the egg thing because no one's going to buy a 4K television unless there's 4K content. Even the new consoles aren't 4K out of the box. Right. I mean, I just feel like we're so far away from 4K being a thing. Right. I think we're at least five years away from any kind of even beginning adoption. I mean, adoption of 4K. Right. I mean, I think we're five years away from the first consumer spending money on 4K TVs. Well, how long was 1080p here before it became a thing? I mean, HD existed forever in Europe and Asia before it came to America, which actually is a great example of how long the stuff can hang around in other places, even in other places, before it gets to our shores. But beyond that, we've got bandwidth issues to contend with, delivery issues to contend with, and the fact that almost everybody's going out right now and buying brand new 1080p televisions. Right. So, we're right now in this golden age of television. TVs have become wildly affordable in the last, I'd say, 10 years. Right. The kind of price drops we've seen for really high quality televisions is a little bit insane. So, we've seen this decrease in cost of TVs. We've seen this increase in quality of the stuff you watch on your TVs, better delivery for things like movies. We've seen rentals and purchases faster because of streaming. So, everybody's kind of like, yeah, TV is a thing. So, they're out there buying Roku, they're buying Apple TV, they're buying consoles that will play nice as a home entertainment. Okay, that's a bad pun, but I'm totally unintentional. They'll play nice as a home entertainment option, and then you're going to go like, hey, oh, guess what? There's another thing. It's even better than this. I just don't think the consumer is nearly ready for that. Not here. I mean, not when we've only had like 10 years of HD. I don't even know if it's been 10 years. I mean, listen, five years ago, go back to the game console thing. Five years ago, we were just figuring out Blu-ray, HD DVD. We didn't know what a non-480p movie would look like. Yeah, no, it's crazy. I mean, remember the Wii? Didn't do HD. It was a 480 console, and that was like the most popular console in America. I mean, it might still be the largest selling. It's up there with a PlayStation 2. It's really close. People are still jamming on their Wiis. That doesn't sound right. Just going to wing it. But at any rate, so... Are you okay? So I just think the 4K push is real exciting. You can roll it out at CES and be like, hey, look at this new thing we have. But in reality, you're selling vaporware. But also reality in the US. I think we were talking about US content partners, and I'm very curious, international. LG and Samsung, both Korean companies. And broadband Korea is a much different story. I think you'll see it happen in Korea much sooner. You still have to have the content. You have to have the cameras. Every TV studio has to have the cameras. If you're going to do a soap opera in 4K, you need a room full of cameras. If you're going to do a newscast in 4K, you need a room full of cameras. If you're going to shoot a drama, you need... I mean, I guess you can shoot... There are 4K devices out there, but most people aren't using them. As an example, I know for a fact that a lot of networks shoot at 720. So if we're still shooting at 720, and we're talking about trying to go to 4K, I mean, people aren't even doing full HD. But again, this is aspirational technology. It depends on how far out are we talking about. Well, we're talking five to 10 years. This is the year Paul Allen buys 4K. Next year, maybe the CEO of Qualcomm will get one. Who is... Year after, we'll start working our way down the executive chain. Who is... Yeah, who's the customer? You think it's like a Paul Allen. It's Paul Allen, Mark Cuban. What are they watching on it? There's no content. I don't know. But they're not broadcasting Mavs games in 4K. Mark Cuban might have his own 4K camera set up somewhere in the state, like in the arena. I guess that's possible, but I highly doubt it. By the way, I'm sorry, we're going to go back to that for a second. He wore sweatpants and dress shoes. Like, we completely forgot about this on stage. Samsung had a lot of like... A lot of weird stuff. Celebrity gaffes happening. I'm sure they expected like some kind of chatter. I mean, Mark Cuban though, he just kind of does what he wants all the time. Doesn't give a shit. Right? Or, sorry. No, it's okay. I've already sworn. I've completely like thrown all sense of propriety to the wind here. Right. I dropped an F bomb in the Michael Bay post. You know what? It's time to grow up people. We're not children. Time to swear for no reason. Because children don't do that. Thomas Rigger has been yelling at me in the trailer that he says that I insert swear words where they don't need to exist. And I disagree. You disa-fucking-gree. Come on now. All right. So what else did Samsung announce? Moving along after my 4K rant. I do think the 4K stuff is annoying. I think it's annoying the way the 3D was annoying. It's like, you got to have it. You need it. You want it. It's like, no, actually people don't need it or want it. You just need to show something off. I just feel like, isn't there a better way to focus your energy? Is there something more interesting you could do than try to sell a new television or a bigger television or a curved television? In my opinion, curved is the biggest scam of all time. It's like a gimmick that's worse than 3D and worse than 4K. I'm not going to say 4K is a gimmick because it's a resolution bump. Fair enough. In 3D, there are people who enjoy that feeling. Curved, I don't get. Because if you're straight ahead, curved makes sense. If you are five feet to the right, five feet to the left, what the hell are you looking at? Curved doesn't even make sense if you're straight ahead. No, I mean, it's not like it's wrapping around you. No, it's marketing foiled by geometry. Simple math. What the hell are you thinking? My guess is that the argument will be you can have an IMAX experience in your home. But the problem is an IMAX screen is gigantic. It's really, really big. It actually does kind of wrap around you. Yes. Whereas 105 TV, even if it's really, I mean, that is very large, you're still going to be sitting like 12 feet away from it or something. Yeah. And the thought is like, I remember when we were looking at the Oculus Rift last year, like they were doing the curved a little bit, just to say like, this is your peripheral vision. We're going to cover it up. I don't think people are shooting for curved. I don't think they're shooting to say this is your peripheral vision. Just think about that. No. It demands. And I don't see any cameras ever doing that. It demands a kind of buying that nobody's going to provide. Right. And there's no ecosystem for it. 4K I get, we're building ecosystem, three-day they tried. 4K makes sense because it's a natural evolution. Right. Resolution goes up. That's a real thing. You know, CPUs get faster, screens get higher resolution. Like those are things that make sense and are real and that we actually have found utility in and use for, right? Right. We know that like adding memory, making faster chips, adding screen resolution, like that has positive benefits that people really respond to. Right. What we don't know is, you know, will they respond to insane gimmicks like your TV is curved and they won't. What's going to happen is it's going to be like 3D and next year they'll have some other thing like we made triangle display. Well, to be fair, 3D lasted a long time. It got close. I mean, yeah. This year Visio said they basically announced like 3D is dead. Yes. They said we're not, they said we're not making any more 3D television. But 4K is the thing. 4K I can, I can, I can understand the argument even if I don't fully agree that it's going to happen really soon. I get that 4K is a thing that will happen. I believe that 4K will someday in the, in the distant future replace 1080. But we're a decade away from that. We're a decade away. So here's the thing. People will buy them sooner than that, but we're a decade away from it replacing what exists. We're like being, like possibly affordable, even like a Black Friday. Of course, imagine the internet in a decade. Imagine the web in a decade. Imagine streaming services in a decade. Can you even fathom? Think about the dial-up in the era. Like we could not have even made, like imagine an HD video back then streaming. Assuming that humanity exists in 10 years, of course. I mean, we're probably all going to get wiped out by a dirty bomb or something. Or a drone. Or a drone. Or a drone we've seen at the show. Or a drone with, carrying a dirty bomb. Yeah. But if that doesn't happen, in a decade we'll probably be watching 4K television. And we'll be angry about these 8K triangles. Like enough with the 8K. But that's, see that's the annoying thing. Back in my day, we were fine with 1080p. I'm excited about technology. I love technology. What I don't like is technology for the sake of, new technology for the sake of saying it's new. And I do feel like there is something to the 4K push that's like, I know you want us to want it, but we don't really need it. It looks great. I mean, but my TV looks amazing. This is the pixel density argument. At some point, the screen size you have. You're far enough away from the screen that pixels don't matter. We don't have consoles that can do 4K gaming in any level of detail or quality. But this is definitely a get off my lawn kind of argument right now. Because in a couple years. It's not. It's get on my lawn. It's get on your lawn. It's something I want. Okay, anyhow. The other thing I want to talk about for Samsung, and this is early on, pre-bay. Pre-bay. This is a. It's a new service where you buy and sell clips of Michael Bay melted down. This is President and CEO B.K. Yoon. This is where we're talking about the smart home stuff, which is interesting. Imagine taking a call from your refrigerator without picking up your smartphone. I love it. Can you imagine? Just I'm like reaching for a beer in the fridge. My water dispenser says you have a phone call. Here's the amazing thing about mobile phones. They go into your pocket. You can carry them around anywhere. They're small. They're light. They slide right into. Well, I mean, not the Note, but you know, other ones are small. It's pretty light. But why would you want your refrigerator to receive a call? It's convenient. It's glanceable information. Oh, okay. I'm just playing double-zap kit for this one. Because what's convenient is that you happen to be standing in front of the refrigerator at the moment a call comes in. And you don't want to reach into your pocket because you have two bears in your hand. Yeah. And you have voice commands. Why not just put something that's. Why not just instead of having me replace my refrigerator with the one that takes calls. Why not just make a unit that sits in the kitchen that can take calls? Well, eventually all they can sell for like $100. Like all cars now come with like, you know, power steering. What if they could make like an earpiece you could wear in your ear and then when your phone would ring, even if you didn't have your phone in your pocket, you could answer a call using it. This is the Ray Kurzweil. We're going to inject phones into our. No, that's describing a Bluetooth earpiece. Well, we're getting there. But we're. I know, but I'm just saying like that would be more convenient than the refrigerator that picks up phone calls. This is also I sound like a Lodi right now, but like again, I'm all for refrigerator tech that's really useful. Like Samsung has refrigerated to make seltzer. Yes. That's a cool refrigerator. I want that. Remember, they also want you to have a Galaxy Gear smartwatch and say, I want seltzer. If you're wearing a smartwatch, what do you need the refrigerator for? I don't get it. Got two giant kegs. They're just dragging them around. I got these two liters. I got like the three liter. Remember the three liter bottles. They were like, look, we can make bigger. It's like I got my six liters of Coke right now. I just don't have my hands free to answer my. My watch is on the wrong. I can't do this because my Coke will pour my glasses. I don't have the smart glasses. Can't get up here. Yeah. That thing I'm chewing my mouth closed. I can't really voice act. No, but is there a command for answering the call on the refrigerator? I probably leave me alone. Oh, wait, no, that was OK. OK. Refrigerator. Yeah. OK. Refrigerator. Let's do this. OK. Refrigerator. Answer the call. I don't know. But I mean, there is an element and this speaks more broadly to this essay you wrote years ago. This is my next hour. The persistence idea where I want my chat persistence everywhere. The continuous client. This is too extreme of it. Well, the question about the continuous client idea is that first of it's great, but the idea is like, is your but you want your best client or any kind of like you want your experiences to follow you and be consistent. But your refrigerator is not a place where the experience has to live because it's a refrigerator has circuitry, has a connection. I understand that. But then why not just make units that go in the house that have those things? Because then you could put them in every room. Refrigerator is a five thousand dollar for their they're selling is probably a five thousand dollar investment. Right. You know, you don't need a five thousand dollar refrigerator to answer a call in your kitchen. Maybe you don't. I just bought a refrigerator. Let me tell you what. Does it have Internet? Does it? It is a connected refrigerator that knows when I'm hungry. OK, and it has it has a motorized arm that swings out and can snake through my house. It's like the Inspector Gadget. You just can snake through my house. Go go gadget. Yeah. And then it'll hand me food wherever I am in the home. How well does it make a sandwich? It makes amazing turkey sandwiches. I don't eat turkey sandwiches. That's the problem with it really, that I don't eat turkey and it keeps preparing turkey sandwiches. You would think it learns. I have an artificial intelligence. Which I find frankly a little annoying. So thanks a lot Samsung. You made a refrigerator with a robot arm that produces sandwiches and delivers them to me anywhere in the house. And yet the sandwiches are always wrong. You just have buyer's remorse. You wanted to wait for the voice command. So now you have to wait for the voice command. And it was twenty five thousand dollars. But I feel like it was worth it. You know, but seriously, all I'm saying is I just want us to make technology that makes sense. I'm asking for a little bit of sanity. I know that things are a little weird right now. I know that the weather patterns seem confusing. You know, there's there's, you know, body parts falling from the from the sky. You know, Michael Bay's walking off stage. You don't know if it's going to be OK next week or next month. But when we think about making new technology, I just would like us to say, hey, do we really need this? Is it cool or does it suck? Is this a waste of everybody's time or is it going to be awesome? And then if it's not awesome, I wouldn't make it. Clearly, you never owned a Tamagotchi. A Tamagotchi is the that's the animal, the that's the little guy you had to keep alive, right? Exactly. Completely worthless. But. Well, I mean, it was it was it was like it was like it was a candy crush. Right. Candy crushes and isn't anything you don't need. It's like, oh, candy. Candy crush is cool. It's a highly addictive mobile video game. Yes. I think that's great. That's wonderful. A talking fridge. A fridge that has skype. Terrible idea. Candy crush. People want to be distracted by games. They don't want to be distracted by taking a call in the refrigerator. They want you know what they want to do? They want to get the food out of the refrigerator. They want to put the food into their mouth. All this technology constantly makes us until they're morbidly obese. But this can't fit in and can't fit into the iRoad. We have all the technologies making us antisocial. This is a fridge that lets you talk to your friends. I can't believe you're even saying this to me with any kind of straight face. No, this is not a straight face. I know you're playing devil's advocate. I am very tired. I know you're playing devil's advocate right now. But I think you know the truth. I would never buy that. Here's the thing. I'm not saying that the fridge is not cool. Yeah. But I don't think you need to be able to. OK. Your children. We are belaboring this. Just say your children and your children's children are going to have talking fridges. I mean when you think about in 10 years what the kids who are born now, what they're going to be like and what they're going to know in 10 years, it's upsetting to me. What are your grandchildren going to bitch about on a hologram triangle AK set? They're going to bitch about their invisibility suit, you know, it's like malfunctioning in certain light. Their clothes filters. Their hovercraft is, is, doesn't reach light speed fast enough. What do you think your grandkids will be bitching about? Like you think I'll have grandkids. That's very, oh no, but uh. OK fine. I don't know. You asked me. I'm just asking you. I'm trying to be polite. I'm sorry if that's upsetting to you. It's very upsetting. Yeah. Well, let's pretend that you were going to have grandkids. Let's say they would. What, you know, you don't want to address the kid topic right now? Why not? Why don't you want to have grandkids? It's a funny story. I'd like to hear about it. I would like to hear about it too. We'll get to it. Let's go deep dive right now. Hypothetically, if you had grandkids, very uncomfortable, you're going to walk off like Michael Beck. I'm just trying to wing it here Josh. So you have grandkids. This is like what, in 30 years. Yes, 30, 40 years. What do you think they'll be bitching about? They'll be bitching about, you know. Will there be a CES in 30 years? There will be a CES. And your grandkids will be bitching about what? It'll be streamed to the brain. They'll be mad because they injected the new Samsung TouchWiz into their bloodstream. Oh God. Oh my God. And look, the problem is like. TouchWiz will take on a whole new meaning though, won't it? It's got a very new meaning. But like, one of their friends jailbroken. It's in your body. It really is. You really will be touching. Just to submit, our grandchildren will have a snow crash problem. I feel like snow crash will be, will seem quaint and outdated, but maybe you're right. Maybe. You're saying they're going to be, their brains are going to be getting crashed by a virtual reality. One of their friends was just being cool trying to jailbreak their bloodstream and then it just spread. Like it's the techno HIV. Oh hey, where's your friend Bobby? I haven't seen him around lately. And they're like, oh he bricked himself. Trying to jailbreak. Trying to unlock the baseband in TouchWiz, in bloodstream TouchWiz. In fairness, his fridge told him it was a good idea. Yeah, exactly. He's bricked himself. Let's move on. There was a couple things that happened before Samsung. I think Pebble we'll talk about later in the week too, but we should talk about that for a second. What else happened? There's Pebble Steel. Oh yeah, Pebble Steel, which is the first smartwatch I could, might actually consider buying. Right. Everybody in the trailer bought one. Already? Yeah, I came back. It was like, it was going on and I walked in. I was out for a minute and then I came back and everybody was like, yeah, I just bought three Pebbles, new Pebbles. Jesus. I don't know. I mean, it's like, why not wait, check it out. We're going to get a review unit probably. Let's see what the review says. You think that, you think that we know better. Well, who do you think? Wait for the review. Everyone, I mean, Christ, I'm using a Pebble right now. You are. I like it. You kind of sound like a spokesperson at this point. This Pebble is amazing. You're wearing the Pebble. You're wearing the Pebble. Let me tell you all about it, Josh. No, it's a, but like we want the glanced full information. We're tired of being the assholes that like pull phones out at the dinner table. We want to be assholes who look at our wrist at the dinner table. But is this better than doing this? I mean, I don't see a huge, this is great for- It's the I can hold my finger crawler. It's great for a little bit of information, but I just feel like, I don't know. No, it's still looking down. It's a convenience factor. I mean, when you check your watch, when you're with somebody and you check your watch, the first thing they think is like, do I need to wrap things up? Like if we were talking right now, just start talking about something. Okay. So the other day I was talking to my friend. I mean, what is that? How does that make you feel? Makes you feel like I need you to finish, cause I have to go do something more important. It does. Yes. Yeah. So how is it better to do that while you're talking to somebody than to do this? I think we're going to get to a point where- This almost is like, we know like, okay, he's checking his phone. He might get back to this conversation. I mean, yes and no. I'm like Andy Rooney now. Let's not forget though, like at some point these are going to be where you get notifications. I'm going to be looking right at you. I'm not here to like wave at people. Right. But the future is you're going to be talking to me and I'm going to be staring right at you and I'm just checking your email. Well, I'm checking email. Are you checking your email? Yeah. This is playing. Well, like Google Glass. Archiving. That's what you're describing. Yeah. Are you just winking at me for sex reasons? It's a Snapchat. That's what people are going to say in the future. They're going to say, are you winking at me to take a picture or are you telling me you want to have sex with me? Yeah. So this will be the like the more tasteful one. Like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm seriously just looking at my phone. You're not saying I want to have sex with you by the way. These are not creep shots. Seriously, just checking my email. Yeah. All right. So is there anything else about Samsung you need to talk about? No, no. That was way, way off. I think we're going. ASUS had one interesting internet of things. Oh, yeah. The other thing I mentioned, Samsung said it's the internet of things. Last year when Qualcomm did their keynote, they said it was the internet. It was the internet of things. It was the mobile generation. Yeah. Internet of things. But they said they had another term for it. It was like not generation mobile. It was like, no, but it was like not the internet of things, but it was like the internet of stuff or the network of things. It was some variation. Was it of everything? Internet of everything? The internet of everything. That's what it was. Yeah. It's like some minor variation that means exactly the same thing. Anyhow, go ahead. So Samsung now said this is the year. 2014 is the year of the internet of things. Right. Which is they say every year. But I think what's happening is like, let's stop trying to define the year that the thing, the internet of things happens and accept that the more things we make that can be connected, the more we're going to connect them. Right. And things are going to be connected. And it's not going to happen in a year. Like a year is going to be, this is the time when it happened. Unless Apple makes something. And then they'll have officially started the internet of things. Right. Apple's going to make like a cube that's just connected, but they don't tell you what it does. I do realize that. It's a black cube and they're like, this is connected in the home. And you're like, what is it doing? Where has this live show gone to? And that's it. You're in here first. So what is happening? We're having our own Michael Bay moment. We need to have a wrap up. I mean, I guess we're just going to wing it. We're just going to wing it. Okay. So we're going to skedaddle because that's what we do here. Yeah. But we do have a lot to go because like the actual nonsensical podcast that we do. The actual Vergecast after hours is going to happen later tonight at 6pm Pacific, 9pm East Coast. Right. And here's what's going to happen before that. Right. Sony is doing a press event. It's 5pm. It's always very... At 5pm we'll have that live on the site, live blog and stream. Yes. And then Valve. So Valve is also happening at 5. It's unfortunate timing. Yeah. So Valve and Sony are happening at exactly the same time. You're just going to pop up two browser windows locked to the Verge where we're going to be streaming both of them and live logging. Are we streaming Valve or no? We're streaming Sony. We only have one stream. Okay. We're streaming Sony but not Valve. Sorry Valve. But should be some interesting stuff. This is like, this is the year of... This is the coming out for the Steam Box. Yeah. Which is a different way of thinking about consoles that we've seen before. Right. Hopefully it does something. They call them Steam Machines though, right? Steam Machines. Steam Box is that colloquial. Steam Box is a better name but that's fine. I guess it's too much like Hot Box. You know, like for weed. Because you know, nobody at Valve smokes weed. We're just going to wing this goodbye. Yeah, we are winging it right now. So anyhow, so tune in to The Verge tonight. 5 o'clock Pacific for Valve and Sony. And then after that, when those wrap up, we will be back with The Verge Cast After Hours dissecting those events, the whole day's events, probably talking more about Michael Bay and definitely, definitely drinking. Absolutely. So get ready. So that's the show. We'll be back soon and thanks for tuning in. Thanks.

It's Tuesday, January 14th, 2014. I'm David Pierce and I have yet to take off this Oculus Rift. My doctors are worried about my mental state, but it's okay. They're not real. This is 90 seconds on the Verge. A federal appeals court today struck down the FCC's net neutrality rules, saying the agency didn't have the authority to impose rules on carriers. The ruling will now allow internet service providers to make some traffic run faster or block other services, but the carriers must tell subscribers what they're doing. Verizon responded by saying the FCC could no longer, quote, impose last century's common carriage requirements on the internet, and insisting that service will only get better. Actor Michael Douglas just got a very small, big role. Marvel has announced that Douglas will play Dr. Henry Pym in Edgar Wright's Ant-Man. Pym is the first Marvel character to don the persona of Ant-Man, followed by Scott Lang, who will be played by Paul Rudd. Plot details are still being kept tightly under wraps, but then again the movie is still far from release. Ant-Man will crawl into theaters on July 31st, 2015. And finally, good news and bad news. Good news, the newsroom is coming back. Bad news, it's the last time I'll be saying that. Aaron Sorkin's HBO melodrama will return for a third and final season. The new season has been up in the air as Sorkin has been busy writing his Steve Jobs biopic, but the writer has reportedly finished the script. Hey, three seasons is a great run for a show, and whether it ends on a high or a low, it'll always be better than Studio 60. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, I continue to perfect my time machine and travel a hundred years into the past. And I'm not the cool guy to be. No, Young David, talk to it, it's not worth it.

This year at CES, you're going to hear about three other very important letters. UHD. Let me start by throwing you a curve, the first of many. Please welcome the jaw-dropping 105-inch Samsung curved UHD TV and the stunning flagship 78-inch U9000 Samsung curved UHD TVs. At 105 inches, this is the world's largest UHD TV. The U9000 TV offers twice the enhanced contrast ratio of a flat TV. The curved screen with our auto depth enhancer gives an even greater sense of depth. It delivers a 3D effect without the glasses. Don't take our word for it. Who better to talk about heart-pounding explosive action than a Hollywood transformer? Ladies and gentlemen, director and producer Michael Bay. Hollywood is a place that creates a viewer escape. And what I try to do as a director, I try to... The type is all off, sorry, but I'll just wing this. The curve, how do you think it's going to impact how viewers experience your movies? Excuse me, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, let's thank Michael Bay for joining us. Sorry about that, folks. The Food Showcase demonstrates that we are constantly and relentlessly innovating to achieve true excellence. It's a personal journey for sharing and giving emotions. We call it Samsung Chef Collection. It's pretty spectacular. Yeah, it is spectacular, isn't it? You know, many people don't realize how important temperature is to getting marinating meat just right. Right. So again, as a result of this insight, we've created the ChefPan. Chefs have even helped us to innovate the dishwasher. Christopher, some insight there. Exciting. We also have to talk about laundry. Do more with one device. Powerful multitasking on a beautiful large screen. Note Pro includes our innovative S Pen that provides access to features such as Action Memo and Pen Window. A full-size virtual keyboard with 2.3 gigahertz quad-core processor with 3 gigs of RAM. It's powered by Android 4.4, which brings in added functionality like multi-user login. We use the latest and greatest Wi-Fi technology. It's a powerful 9,500 milliamp battery for 10 full hours of video back consumption use. It weighs just 750 grams. But that's not all. We have more devices and sizes to fit any lifestyle. We're bringing the capabilities of Pro Series to the 8 and 10 inches that people are already familiar with. Both have stunning WQXGA display resolution, and have same powerful processors, and they also run Android 4.4. As you can see, we're bringing the capabilities of Pro Series to the 8 and 10 inches that people are already familiar with. Samsung will be at your side to provide the solutions. These are TVs that will grow with you. Technology and innovation. We know we are meeting the challenge of the home of the future. So please take a look, enjoy, and have a great CES 2014. Thank you very much.

From the earliest days of the Trinitron and the Walkman to the dawn of the digital and high definition areas to 3D and now ultra high definition TV and high resolution audio and across any type of platform, Sony is always a leader out in the front. Sony's network vision is to deliver rich entertainment experiences that empower you to discover, connect and engage with your favorite content on virtually any device when and how you want. As we built the new network, we asked ourselves what if we could unlock PlayStation's library of games so that they're instantly available on PlayStation devices as well as non-PlayStation devices. We've been steadfast in our commitment to make this a reality and have made incredible advancements towards integrating Gaikai's advanced cloud-based technology into our network. I'm pleased to announce the new streaming game service PlayStation Now. This service will in the long term provide existing PlayStation gamers with instant access to the games they love from previous generations from the original PlayStation, PS2 and PS3. Equally important, the service will also introduce the world of PlayStation to even non-console owners via smartphones, televisions and other devices. Today I'm thrilled to announce that Sony will introduce a new cloud-based TV service in the US this year. The service will give you the most popular live TV programs combined with a large library of video on-demand content so people will have all of their favorite movies, TV shows and sports programs available through a single destination. We plan to start testing this service in the US later this year. Now at the beginning of this presentation, I shared with you about my childhood and how I became enchanted by what might be possible. And that curiosity has continued to grow within me and today I'm even more excited and inspired by what might be next. So in looking forward, as Andy described, our desire is to break out of the confinements of physical places or even primary devices as the only points of access. Sony will be releasing products in the very near future that will create an entirely new concept of consumer electronics. These concepts will reshape our personal media landscape and transform our living spaces into evolving environments. We're envisioning and creating a world where people can enjoy, where you can enjoy, new ways of experiencing entertainment freely and without the restrictions of frames, boxes and displays. And with its stylish design, this ultra short throw projector enables a cinematic-like experience to be wherever you want it to be. It's easy to install and is capable of projecting a 147 inch 4K image. And I'm happy to announce that the first version of this product will be available to consumers right here in the United States this summer. And I believe it's time to move beyond the just good enough era. No more commodity products, no more parody products, no more just good enough products. We must and we can do better.

It's Monday, January 13, 2014. I'm Ellis Hamburger, and I am just so hoarse and pooped from CES. Can I get a chair over here? Thanks very much. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge. Google is now firmly in the smart home business. The company has just purchased Nest Labs, the maker of the Nest Learning thermostat, for $3.2 billion. According to Google, Nest will continue to operate independently under the leadership of CEO Tony Fadell. There were plenty of first-time winners at last night's 71st annual Golden Globe Awards. Thanks. Robin Wright took home the award for best actress in a TV drama for her work in House of Cards, marking the first Globe for a Netflix original show. Meanwhile, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston finally won best actor in a TV drama for his portrayal of Walter White. This was Cranston's fourth nomination for the show. It was also a celebratory night for sci-fi fans. Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón took home the best director Globe, and writer-director for Her, Spike Jones, took home best screenplay. And finally, after four years off field duty, Jack Bauer is back in action. 24 Live Another Day, a 12-part miniseries, will return to Fox on May 5. The network will also premiere Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos, a Space Time Odyssey, a reboot of the Carl Sagan classic on March 9. Fox has come a long way since CGI glowing hockey pucks and celebrity boxing. And that's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow, we're going to do the show all over again. No drill.

Hey, I'm Sam. I'm Valentina. And this is The Verge at CES 2014 where, just like every other year, there's been a whole range of new home appliances to check out here on the show floor. LG, Samsung, and Haier have come out with some new products. Some of them are smart, some of them are dumb, and some of them we never thought we'd see before. But we're going to go see if we can find the coolest ones. Last year Haier impressed us with its innovative range of environmentally friendly washing machines. There's not so much like that this year, but we did find something cool in the field of air conditioning. So here we have Haier's smart air conditioner. We don't really know why it's huge. I mean, I guess it's because it's a heater, air conditioner. It looks quite pretty. It's very pretty. This is the app that kind of acts like the remote control for the Haier air conditioning system. You can change the temperature just by tapping on the number and moving it up or down. And it will change it on the actual unit. This thing is only available in China right now. It retails for about 20,000 yuan, which is about $3,000. Let's say you're running out to work. You have to go to work really early. You throw your clothes in the wash. You know you can't turn it on at that time, or you want it done when you get home, right? You don't want to start too early. So you can go, go to work, do whatever you have to do. And at the right time that you want it to start, so it'll be done immediately when you get home, you can just text washer on and Line will show you the cycle that it's going to do and you can just tell it to start. I feel like the time consuming thing with washing machines is not like telling it to wash your clothes. It's like putting the clothes in the washing machine. True, but I guess just like a mobile way of doing your wash. You sound pretty convinced. I mean, I'm convinced that if I don't have to like be home to start my washer, then that's cool. You know? You don't have to wash your clothes and me. I probably do. So we're here with the Samsung Chef Collection of appliances. There's a bunch of things in this collection. There's a refrigerator, there's a dishwasher, and right here we're with the Chef Collection range. What's really cool about this is that it's an oven, but it can kind of be two ovens because it has this little tray here that you can take out and put in as you like. When you put it in, it kind of creates two compartments. You can choose over here upper or lower, and you can essentially cook two types of things, two totally different things like meat and cookies at the same time because you can control the temperature in the upper compartment and the lower compartment. Meat and cookies sounds good right now. And the top of the range. It's an induction-cell hub, so it doesn't get super hot until you actually put a hot pan and preheat it on it. So yeah, there's no smartphone app or anything. You can't message it online to tell you to cook your chicken. I'm just excited to have two ovens. So a big thing for Samsung at last year's shows was smart fridges with tablet-style screens and apps like Twitter and Evernote. This year's show, they've kind of thrown that out of the window. There aren't any fridges like that on show right now. And there's more traditional designs like this, but there's still innovative features. So this one, for example, you can open it like this and it looks like a regular fridge with different storage and compartment, but you have the option to open it in only like a different section such as this. So if you have more frequently accessed items like milk, you can open the door and access the milk or the food without exposing the rest of the food to the warm air outside. So one of the few truly new appliances at CES this year is the 3D system food. This is the Chefjet, and on the other side there's the Chefjet Pro. And they're the world's first 3D printers for food. So you can actually print out chocolate or candy from digital design. So should we try some? It's actually really good. Really? It's really good. I'm going to get this chocolate. Does it actually have the texture of chocolate? The texture is like very brittle, but the taste is like chocolate. It's definitely chocolate. Yeah. Wow, that's amazing. So the Chefjet will cost below $5,000 when it launches in the second half of this year, and the larger Chefjet Pro, which can produce multicolored candy, will be just below $10,000, and it'll come out at around the same time, second half of this year.

Hey guys, it's Casey with The Verge. We're here at CES in our studio, and in studio with us this morning is Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora. We're going to talk about a bunch of music stuff. Tom, thanks so much for coming by the studio. It's great to be here. So you told me earlier that this is your tenth CES. It is. And do they give you like a watch out of a catalog at that point or anything? Yeah, you get a pebble actually. That's nice, it's a smart watch. It's a smart watch. That's wonderful. So you've been working on Pandora for just about ten years. So take me about, what was CES like for you ten years ago when you first showed up? Let's see, we stayed at the Excalibur. Wonderful. Which is very nice. I think three of us came, we had a single meeting with a brick and mortar retailer and talked about putting music listening kiosks into their CD department. So yeah, we've come a long way since ten years ago, CES. And I think Pandora has evolved in a lot of interesting ways since then. Obviously any tech company over ten years is going to change a lot. But can you give us a sense of just like how big the scope is of Pandora on consumer electronic devices? Yeah, I think Pandora is on more than a thousand different consumer electronics devices today. And it's funny, I was looking back at some photos that I took at that first CES ten years ago. I was like a kid in a candy store for the first time on the showroom floor. And it's amazing. The stuff that was on the showroom floor ten years ago was digital cameras, big flat screen TVs, cell phones that were increasingly looking like little computers. It's the same exact stuff that's on the show floor this year. But it feels like the world has changed a lot. So I've been kind of thinking, well, what's driving that sense of change other than the TVs are getting bigger and flatter or less flat? I guess this year they're all curved. And I think that one of the big transitions is that ten years ago, none of that stuff was connected to the internet. I mean, literally the only thing in my life that was connected to the internet ten years ago was my laptop, my personal computer. And today, like everything on the show floor is connected to the internet. Every TV, every speaker. We have a refrigerator that streams Pandora and a jacuzzi that streams Pandora. There's a smart vacuum now, too, so you might want to look into that. That's great. That's great. I'd like to be able to control my vacuum from the office with my smartphone. Who wouldn't we all? Who wouldn't? Yeah. And then, of course, the other thing that's really changed over the course of the ten years is the services that we use. I mean, ten years ago there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, there was no Netflix streaming, there was no Pandora. And so you kind of sum that together. I think, at least for me, that's what's driving the sense of innovation and change at CES is the internet connectivity being kind of ubiquitous and these services that have come along in the context of that ecosystem. Right. And as the internet gets connected to more devices, that creates more opportunities for companies like Pandora to put their services on board. At the same time, it can create challenges because every implementation is a little bit different. But you guys have done a lot of stuff around HTML5. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing to try to make all those implementations a little bit easier on yourselves? So for the first many, many years, going back six or seven years now in Pandora's history, we had a strategy that said, let a thousand flowers bloom. One of the strengths of radio generally is that it's ubiquitously available. Pandora's going to step into the opportunity of defining what the next generation of radio looks like. We have to enjoy that same level of ubiquity. And so to get there, we developed a SDK and a platform and a set of developer tools and services that would allow a partner to implement Pandora on a television or a connected speaker or a set-top box. And they'd build the Pandora client to our specifications. They'd send us an example. We'd run it through a set of certification tests and so forth and tell them, OK, go ahead and ship it. And there are a bunch of advantages to that approach. It's meant that we've been able to get Pandora into tons and tons and tons of devices with a relatively modest amount of work on our end. The downside is there are probably hundreds, literally hundreds of different Pandora implementations that are baked into firmware, sitting on devices that will never evolve, that will never change. Occasionally in the worst case, they end up looking more like a Korean karaoke machine than the Pandora that we know and love. Unfortunately, that's fairly rare, but it occasionally happens. And so about 18 months ago, we started to think about, what does the next generation of this look like? As it becomes more mainstream, it becomes increasingly important that we can evolve the experience for our consumers, for our advertisers, and get back in control of the user experience. And so we made a bet that web standards, things like HTML5 and WebKit and some of these things would make their way into the consumer electronics world, starting first with televisions and set-top boxes and then migrating to other things. And we were either prescient or lucky. I think we were just kind of lucky, frankly, but that's really, really happened. So we've got a great version of Pandora that's built entirely out of HTML5 and other web standards that we can target at any devices capable of rendering a web page. And so Chromecast is a great example of that. Chromecast, of course, adds the additional kind of wrinkle that your smartphone becomes a really interesting remote control for the content. Sony has Blu-ray players and televisions that have a great HTML5 engine that runs this native Pandora platform. We've demonstrated with Samsung. We're working with lots of other players as well, which accomplishes that goal of putting us back in control of user experience because every single time one of our listeners activates the Pandora application, what's really happening under the covers is the device goes out to the internet and says to Pandora's data center, what's Pandora today? And we can change the answer to that question every day if we want to experiment and so forth. And just to mess with people sometimes. And just to mess with people, right. One of the reasons that's interesting to me is that in the mobile world, HTML5-based apps never really took off. Like Facebook famously made this huge bet on HTML5 apps. And eventually Mark Zuckerberg said, this was a mistake. This didn't work for us. It went back to native apps. Why do you think that HTML5 has been successful for Pandora on all these devices where maybe native apps seem to be succeeding more in the mobile world? That's a good question. I think one dimension that's at play is that we're just really good at HTML5 development. No, I don't know. The experience really is indistinguishable from the native applications on the same platform. So there's no deficit to the user experience. And I think in some of the things that have been done in mobile, it's really obvious that you're not dealing with a native experience. And some of that maybe even comes from the fact that in the mobile environment, there's a whole kind of aesthetic to the user experience that's delivered through the native platform. In the context of the television, we don't really have that. There's not a set of native user interface elements and things that's consistent across applications. And so we don't find ourselves trying to mimic platform behavior through HTML. So there's a bit of that. I don't know. It's working now. Yeah. Let's talk about advertising a little bit. Advertising normally a boring topic for me personally, but I read a really interesting story in the Times over the last week about some of the things that you guys are doing around targeting ads of people based on their music preferences. And I think that most of us think of ourselves as unique little snowflakes. But from what I read in the Times, just by knowing a couple of the things I like, you can actually tell a lot about maybe my political preference, maybe about where I might like to travel. Can you tell me about some of these insights that you're getting about your listeners just from the music that they're listening to? Yeah. So it's been a really interesting year for us in that dimension. We've got an incredible team at Pandora whose job it is just to make the best playlists in the world. So these are data scientists and machine learning experts, algorithm guys, big data guys. It's a really best in the world kind of team with respect to the task of personalizing the Pandora listening experience. But it turns out that the skills that that group has are really easily applied against the data science problem of how do you deliver exactly the right ad to the right user at the right time, the right song to the right user at the right time, the right ad to the right user at the same time, which is really the goal. No one wants to put an ad in front of you for a product or service that's not interesting to you, just like we don't want to put a song in front of you that you don't like. And so Pandora knows a handful of things about you. When you register, you tell us the year you were born. You tell us the zip code that you live in. You tell us your gender. And then, of course, as you interact with the service, we become familiar with your musical preferences as well. And it does turn out that the combination of that data, a sense of what part of the country you live in and the kind of music that you listen to, we can use to extrapolate to lots of interesting things, political preference, household income, ethnicity, which allows us to do smarter, inferred targeting for advertising beyond what you might be able to do just from the obvious things that we collect, like gender and zip code and so forth. Do you ever try to log in as a 95-year-old woman just to see how the ads will change? All the time. All the time. Yeah. I mostly use Pandora as a 95-year-old woman. Awesome. So I would be really curious to know what you have coming up on the product side this year. It's a new year. I'm sure you've done a lot of strategic planning over the past couple of months about what you're going to be up to. That's right. And I'm here to tell you all about it. Let's just lay out the product roadmap. Let's just lay out the whole product roadmap. That's what Steve Jobs would do. Exactly. Well, I think one of the things that we're working on here at CES and is a really important sort of dimension of the evolution of Pandora is getting Pandora into the automotive environment. About half of all radio listening takes place in the car. If we're going to reinvent radio as a medium, we have to have a really strong presence in automobiles. And so we have, over the last few years, developed really close working relationships with all of the major automotive OEMs, I think more than 20. We're in 130 different automobiles today. And I don't mean like you can use the AUX cable to listen to Pandora Bluetooth streaming. These are custom Pandora implementations where your cell phone provides the data connectivity and actually runs the application, but it connects to the dash and all of the user interfaces facilitated by the car. So if you're in a car that features voice control, you'll use your voice to control Pandora. If you're in a car that has a touch screen, you use the touch screen. If it's a hardware-centric environment, you use the hardware buttons to control Pandora. And so we've done a lot of work to get Pandora into that kind of generation of the automotive internet. But we're just at the cusp of the second generation, which we call the connected car. And the connected car really is the fulfillment of the vision that we had in 2004 when we started designing and building Pandora, which is that everything in your life is going to be connected to the internet, including the automobile that you drive. And so we're talking about cars that are fundamentally and constantly connected to the internet, just like your television and your Blu-ray player and everything else in your life. And what that does is it really makes Pandora appear to FM radio. There's a FM antenna, there's a cellular antenna. And so the consumer gets in the car, turns the key, and Pandora starts streaming right where you left it when you got out of the car the last time. And so we're really excited about that. But what it means is that it's an entirely new runtime for the application. In the first generation scenario, we are able to take advantage of the fact that the application is actually running on your cell phone, Android or iPhone. In this connected car scenario, it'll be the car's platform. And so what's interesting is that environment is shaking out to be very web standard centric, HTML5 centric as well. And so we're able to leverage a lot of the investments we've made in that technology platform in the context of the car. But there's tons and tons of work going on at Pandora around just making sure that we have best in the world implementations of Pandora and this next generation of connected car scenarios. Right. Well, cool. So a few years from now, we'll have self-driving radio in our self-driving cars. Exactly. Wonderful. Tom, thank you so much for coming by the studio. Thanks. Super fun. Thanks for having me.

You know, it feels like every year I come to CES and ride electric skateboards. And I've made it my mission to find the perfect design. The first year I rode the board of awesomeness. It was awesome. Last year I experienced unparalleled speeds on the Zboard. And this year, the boards are back. So this is the Ego Electric Skateboard. I'm cruising, I've got this little controller here. You just slide up to go, and you're off. So the board's really light. And the coolest thing about this, I think, is the fact that it feels way more like an actual skateboard than the previous boards I've ridden. It's literally a longboard with a motor attached to it. And it's super lightweight, and you cruise. So this is the underside of the board, and obviously there's a nice big battery attached to the bottom here. We're told that this thing has a range of 18 miles on a single charge, and has a top speed of 12 miles an hour. So you could take this thing pretty damn far. The Ego is hundreds of dollars cheaper than most other electric skateboards. At 700 bucks, I might just pick one up. Let's see what happens when I crank it up. I've ridden plenty of electric skateboards here at CES over the years. But this next one I tested, it tested me. So this is the Onewheel. You can't really call it an electric skateboard, but it is very much a personal transportation electronic device. It's pretty simple the way it works actually. You sort of just put your foot down on the back here, and then you lean in and make sure your other foot is on the switch. And once you hit the middle, the board's accelerometer and gyroscope kick in and will maintain your balance. And if you just lean, the accelerometer and gyroscope both kick into action. You really just have to feel it out. And once you lose your balance, you'll fly right off. So range on the Onewheel is four to six miles on a single charge, and it has a top speed of 12 miles an hour. But for something this wonky, I think that's fast enough. The Onewheel is an awesome concept brought to life. The self-balancing technology inside made me feel like I'm riding something out of the future. But at $1,300, you're getting a 25-pound contraption that has a pretty limited range. As interesting as it is, it's not something I see myself buying. So I guess my search for the perfect electric skateboard continues. I'll see you next year.

Here's the thing about CES. Vegas is insane. You know, I'm sorry for people who live in Las Vegas. It's a terrible place to be. As a city, it's f***ed up. The show can be very stressful. Lots of announcements, lots of companies cheerleading their products and talking about their amazing innovations. The food is bad. The show can often be disappointing in places, but it's also often exciting and interesting and fascinating. It works. There were some very cool things here. We saw some stuff that I think got us pretty excited. Oh my god. Oh my god, what's happening? It's IRL Gran Turismo. It's a blast. Harder. All right. Oh, this is the car of the future right here. Oh boy, this is terrifying. This is awesome. I want to take one of these home right now. Coming up tomorrow, everything will be fine. Yeah, someone will find us out here, right? We're going to go through periods where your smartphone isn't going to get dramatically better. But on the flip side, we're going to have things like the Model S and bullet trains and doing infrastructure and energy initiatives and things that are really big. It's the most terrifying fun you can have at the hands of a fully automated robotic car. What's amazing about this is that we get the entire Verge team in one room with our video team, with our product team, and everybody's in one big room for a week straight. We're having conversations in real time about stories that are breaking. We're swapping ideas. What's amazing to me is that we have a team full of brilliant, incredible, fascinating, funny people. I think that we all like each other, which is extremely rare, I feel. That is what makes CES kind of awesome regardless of what the show is like. If we find something cool at the show, that's a bonus. We got a fire truck here. This is the best thing ever. I honked the horn earlier. Now, I don't have any experiences left to have. I'll see you in the future, suckers.

It's Friday, January 10th, 2014. I'm Casey Newton, and love is in the air! This is 90 Seconds on the Verge. Google is about to make it really easy for strangers to email you. An upcoming Gmail feature lets you send emails to anyone with Google+, even those you aren't connected with. The setting will show up in the next few days, but the feature itself won't roll out until a later date. Email through Google Plus is an opt-out feature, so if you don't want strangers finding you, make sure to change the setting. It turns out that 70 million Target customers were affected by the recent data breach. Following last month's revelation that 40 million debit and credit card numbers were stolen in a hack, Target revealed today that up to 70 million names, addresses, emails, or phone numbers were also stolen. To make it up to their customers, Target is offering a free year of credit card monitoring and identity theft protection. And finally, it's a nice day for a red wedding. Game of Thrones season 4 is set to premiere on April 6th, according to Variety. That's just shy of 10 months after season 3 ended. Game of Thrones has been a huge success for HBO. Incidentally, the season finale has also been named the most pirated show of 2013. April 6th will also see the return of Veep and the premiere of Mike Judd's new comedy, Silicon Valley. I'm sorry. That's it for today's top stories. Coming up tomorrow...

Hey, this is Ben Popper reporting for the Verge from CES 2014. I'm standing here with the Will, which is an advanced wheelchair created by a team of engineers in Japan, folks who previously worked at places like Nissan, Sony, Toyota, and Olympus. There's a lot of interesting components to the Will. First obviously is the design, which is more futuristic than anything I've seen before in a wheelchair. So you notice this arm here folds up to make it easy to get in from the side, and then when you sit down, you just drop this down like this. I turn it on here to power it up. Those lights go blue. So this is the controller here. What's really interesting about this is it's designed to work just like a mouse. So I have 360 degrees of motion here. I can go left, I can go right. And I just started using it a couple minutes ago. It's extremely intuitive. I feel like I'm able to direct it with a lot of certainty, and I can make kind of complex maneuvers. The wheel design, which includes these 24 separate tires, is made so that you can have a really tight turning radius for indoors, and also four-wheel drive so that when you're outdoors, you can go over any kind of terrain. So this is the Will. It'll be available for around $9,500 starting in April. You can place your pre-orders now, and they're going to do a pretty limited run between 50 and 100 units. This is the third prototype, and they're continuing to improve it as they have more and more people test it out.

here at CES 2014. I got Matt Rogers, co-founder of Nest. Matt has brought us a fire truck. MATT ROGERS We got a fire truck here. And it's awesome. This is the best thing ever. I honked the horn earlier. And now I don't have any experiences left to have. Why on earth would you want to be a fire truck driver? Why on earth do you have a fire truck? Because it's awesome. It is awesome. And which engineers do not want to have a fire truck? Yeah, this is the best thing. We talk about fire safety. We take kids for rides. We show up at schools and home depot locations and talk about the product and talk about fire safety. So you actually, there's like demos and stuff on the side, right? Yeah, so we demo the product, show some of the cool features. We have like fireman suits and hats for the kids to play with. We have t-shirts. It's all good stuff. I mean, I really want one. They let me light off the siren earlier and I'm going to do it again. I just want everyone to be warned. So Matt, why does an S come to CES? So we do a lot of meetings at CES. So it's kind of the one time of the year where every vendor under the sun comes to one place at one time. So like all of our different chip vendors and manufacturing partners are all here. I mean, CES, it seems like the whole nature of the show is changing. It's like there was a minute when everyone was making laptops and then a minute when everyone was making phones, a minute when everyone was making tablets. And this year it's sort of like sensors for the phones and tablets you already have. That's right. And in a lot of ways, Nest is like part of that sensor network, right? So do you see that like as a big trend here? Are you part of it? Well, you see a lot of smart home stuff and there's a lot of noise, but in the end there's a lot of stuff coming out. And I feel like we're at kind of the dawn of something new. And it's not like an immediate thing, but I think over the next five to ten years, we're going to see a lot of cool interconnected devices. Again, it's still early days now. So you just launched your second device to protect, right? Yeah, we launched it about two months ago. How's it going? I mean, it's going really well. I mean, one, it's selling very well. Like we're a top seller on Amazon, we're kicking butt in Home Depot and Apple stores, all those kind of things. But it's also working and saving lives. We actually got an email from one of our customers saying they never had a carbon monoxide alarm before, but they bought Nest Protected. They actually had a carbon monoxide alert and they left the house, they called the fire department, and they had a real emergency. Really? They had like ten times the safe limits and they could have died. It's a serious product and it works. So that's actually, when you were launching it, when we were doing the big story before it was launched, I asked you, you know, the thermostat, you get to play with it all the time, it's a toy. And the Protective kind of mount on the ceiling, you wait for kind of something bad to happen. Are your customers like seeing it that way, they're mounting it, they feel safer? You have all these features in it to like sort of interact with you all the time. Are they asking for more feedbacks? So we get a lot of feedback for more. Like actually the biggest thing we get is more ties in with our old product, with our thermostat. So today you have this feature where it turns off the furnace if there's carbon monoxide in the house because the furnace can't generate fire. And also we have this feature where basically they tie together for auto way. So if you're in one room in the house and your thermostat doesn't see you, Nest Protect will see you. But that's all we've done to date and there's a lot more we can do. We actually have a temperature sensor and humidity sensor in Nest Protect. Now why couldn't that be communicated to the thermostat at candy? It's just things we've got to do. There's lots more ways to tie those two products together. And then there's a whole wide world of other products. And you announced some stuff that, you know, there's a lot of question marks over whether Nest would ever open up and kind of work with other partners. And you recently announced you're going to start doing that. So are you seeing anything great at CES that makes you excited for what could happen in smart home in general? Definitely. Actually we met with some of the Phillips you guys yesterday to talk it through, like what things we could do together there. I mean there's a lot of really interesting stuff. I don't know if you saw the Mercedes booth, but there's a tie in there where like your car now tells Nest it's coming home. So like it ties in like that. I think it could be really cool and add good user features. It's not about connectivity for connectivity's sake. It's about adding some cool stuff that users can appreciate. So let me ask you, if you put in all these sensors on all these smarts in your house, how do you guys think about like security, right? Like I can control my parents' thermostats at will, and I'm always like I should just turn them up all the way. Like do you guys worry about that aspect of it? Like once you have more sensors and more cameras and more whatever in your house, how do you sort of lock things down to make sure that everything is safe and secure? So we actually worry about it a lot. To the point where sometimes we do things that are a little bit more difficult because it's for security and privacy reasons. Like for Nest Protect, when you installed it, it asked you to scan a barcode, not just to kind of connect to its network. And the reason why we do that is we want to make sure it's you who are installing it, not your neighbors trying to kind of hack into your system. So we actually put a lot of time and thought into this. We have all these encryption protocols, and we actually go above and beyond to make sure this stuff is secure. We have to. I mean if we don't, again, like your parents, heat could get turned up and that would be horrible, right? I mean I'm doing it to them constantly. I temperature-troll my parents. That's a phrase that you should use. Temperature-troll. I do it constantly, like all the time. And so that was actually another thing. I was telling you a story before we started the interview. You guys are still kind of teaching your users how the products work, right? So I went home over the holidays, and my parents' program was like wild swings. My mom turned it all the way up to 80, and my dad would turn it all the way down to 60. And Ernest was like, he kind of didn't understand it. You had a big base of early adopters who kind of understood this stuff. I think it's a challenge for smart home in general. You've got a big base of early adopters who have like control 4, and they want this stuff. And gadget heads are like, fine, I can just buy one thing. But you've got to, there's the big broad market out there that's still learning how this technology integrates. How do you go after that? Like in terms of, there's a lot of cost there, right? So we have a lot of work to do in terms of explaining the features and letting people know what Nest does. So I think for the most part, people aren't even aware of who Nest is yet. Really? Like in the tech community, people know who Nest is. I think the broader population has no idea who we are. And part of that is learning is a difficult concept to understand. And part of it is we have to get the word out, and we're a new company. Well, there's getting the word out, but there's also like, wearables are a big story at the show. I think the roadblock to wearing something on your body is it has to provide you with benefit that's worth the cost. Like glass, the cost is you look like a huge dork, and the benefits aren't in line, right? The benefits aren't in line. You don't get something out of being a huge dork all the time. You like take a picture. And that's kind of not worth it all the time. With stuff in the house, it's like, well, I've got to replace all of my light switches, and that's a big cost. With Nest, it's a pretty low cost. Like it's a great product, and you can install it really easily. You can install mine in like 20 minutes, right? But once you kind of get beyond that set of products, you've got to start telling people what the benefits of these extra costs are. Is that a challenge for you in the home? Or are people eager for it? I think people are pretty eager. And from what we've seen, what's helped us get more mass is actually utility partnerships, and rebain the product, and getting people to understand more about the energy savings. Because you can save a lot of money with Nest, and it's about getting that word out. And again, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of making it easier to use, and efficient, so that you don't have to think about how it works. You just use it. But this is, again, early days. Yeah, and it's funny because you see, I see at CES, like the halls, every hall is popular at different times. So like five years ago, the South Hall was all Intel and Microsoft. And then right now, it's all the device manufacturers sort of in the middle. And then you see the car companies, they're in North Hall. And like in five years, the North Hall will be the most popular one, because the car companies are doing crazy stuff. What I don't see is anywhere where like a unified home, there's bits and pieces everywhere. There's no standards to talk to each other. You kind of walked into one ecosystem, or Nest only has two products, and you're waiting for them to have more. How do you see that kind of network? How do you make it so that all these things can talk to each other, and people have like choice in the market? Or is that not something you guys really worry about? So what we think about it is, there are standards today. But there are multiple being standards. So it's really hard to pick one from the other. I mean, from a user's perspective, they shouldn't care what communication standards that companies use, as long as the products work together. So the way we think about it is, let's find some really high value products and work with those guys, and build out really obvious experiences that people can understand. So like Philips Hue, like what if the lights could turn down when you leave home. Like really obvious stuff, but that's kind of the important things. Like it's less important about tying all these things together and having one app. Just let's make it work together. Right. But doesn't that like, with the Hue, to me the Hue is crazy because it's light bulbs, not switches. And I kind of in my mind can't understand why people are more willing to change a light bulb than they are to change a light switch. But they are. Like absolutely, the entire market has gone to light bulbs. And it's like, I look at Nest and you guys are reinventing these all-moth products, like that's the line you always say, Tony always says. But I don't see, I'm always curious like, where do you guys see the next one? That's always the question. I know you're not, you probably won't answer it. But I always see, in terms of how you think about the next one, is it where the market is not gone or is it where the market is rapidly expanding? Like, you know, you surprised everybody at the thermostat, but people aren't going to be surprised anymore. Like Samsung's here, right? They're trying a bunch of stuff. LG's here, Sony's here, they're all trying a bunch of stuff. Where do you see like the market really going in terms of smart homes? Do you think it's a broad penetration? It's like going to happen everywhere from every company? Or is it going to be kind of select vendors? So I think it should be pretty broad. Any company that makes home appliances today, in the next five years, will build a connected appliance. That said, there's not a really good reason to have a connected appliance. Yeah, I can't think of one. Have you tried the texting and washers thing? I have not, but I can imagine tweeting from your refrigerator is not too useful. It's about finding an application. That said, what's next for us? We have to find other great products to do. We're going to. When we're going to improve the products we already made, those are going to get better. But too, find those unloved categories. And we like to find things that have no innovation, that people are not. Like the Wayne Gretzky style, that's where the puck isn't, right? Where it's going to be, right? So we're not going to follow. We're going to lead. I look at what you guys do as almost an extension of a phone. They're standalone devices, but really they become great when you add a phone to the mix. And the phone knows what your sensors in the house are doing, what your temperature is, what's going to happen. You can look at all your energy saving charts. Do you think the phone is kind of the central computing device? Is it the tablet? Is it still the laptop? I don't think there's any central computing device. It's definitely a primary user interface device. It's what you're going to look at. It's the best way to interact with your house. That said, I think the intelligence in the home has to be distributed amongst the home. So if your phone isn't there, it still works, right? One of the things that we're thinking about is, how do you take advantage of the phone, the hardware you have in your house, like your smoke alarm or your thermostat, but also the cloud? And how do you tie all these things together and make sure they work seamlessly, and when one's there and one's not there, how does the benefits remain? Those kind of things. I've been wanting to do a contracting interview all the time because we're in a fire truck. And I've been wanting to lean out the windows and scream I'm in a fire truck this whole time. And thank you very much for letting me ride in your fire truck. Matt, it was a pleasure. Great. This is the best. Ready? Oh, God. That's the best thing I've ever done. It is the best thing I've ever done. Okay, I'm done.

Hey, this is Ben Popper reporting for The Verge from CES 2014. I'm here with the Scandidoo medical tricorder. You put it to your temple and it gives you your vital signs. This morning, for example, it's telling me I'm very hungover. So you can see here as I place the Scandidoo on my temple, it starts to take my readings. It's looking at five vital signs, the five things they would be looking for when you come into a hospital. So for example here, you can see my heart rate and temperature. This is basically just a check on your most basic vitals to get a sense of your health at the current moment. So what I'm showing you here are the new prototypes which are going to begin shipping to the Indiegogo people who backed this project in March. The product won't be available for retail right away. They're going to go through an FDA approval process and the folks who backed this on Indiegogo are actually going to be part of the usability study testing out the Scandidoo.

I'm Ellis Hamburger with The Verge. At CES 2014, everybody seems to be trying to find the best way to track your body, your hands and even your eyeballs. But up to now this technology has been pretty useless aside from the Xbox Kinect. But I saw some pretty cool stuff today that might just make it into your next smartphone or tablet. First I checked out Tobii, an insanely accurate eye tracking technology that pinpoints where you're looking down to the centimeter. In eye asteroids, anywhere you look becomes victim to a missile strike. I felt like God summoning hellfire with every glance. Tobii also lets you zoom in on maps using your eyes and even lets you change the radio station in the car without taking your eyes off the road. But that feature isn't quite ready for production yet. I also checked out Soft Kinetic, a crazy Oculus Rift Xbox Kinect hybrid setup that lets you view a virtual world in 3D but also manipulate objects inside it. You can't feel the blocks you're stacking of course, but I felt one step closer to being inside a holodeck for the first time. Cameras and sensors are battery killers though, so Elliptic Labs developed ultrasonic technology so your phone and tablet can pinpoint your location using only sound waves. You can gesture to switch songs, scroll through articles, whack mobsters and answer phone calls, even if your hand is inches away from your phone or tablet. Most gesture based interfaces are still a pipe dream, but Intel hopes to change that with Reelsense. A new Kinect-like sensor that it plans to ship in tons of computers this year. The company's initial demos let you tug on psychedelic harp strings, play virtual piano and screw around with a digital electric guitar. We haven't quite achieved the brilliant gestural interfaces Tom Cruise manipulates in Minority Report, but we're getting closer. After slicing up melons in Fruit Ninja with only my eyes, I knew these guys were on to something. So make sure to keep your eyes and hands inside the ride.