"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everybody and welcome to the friday debate podcast by android authority i am of course your host for the fdp joshua vergara from android authority what is going on everybody and today we have a bit of a special episode if you are not already able to tell because this episode is being released on a monday but it has been a very busy lead up into the mobile world congress of 2015 here in barcelona spain if you can't hear the sounds of the cars going by and the people walking through the mean streets of barcelona maybe not so mean but they are going to get really busy over the next few days because mwc is officially starting but i have been here for a good four maybe five days already because i've been here with the htc frequencies panel in order to take a look at what you now know is the htc one m9 but that is of course not the only thing that we're seeing here at mwc but i wanted to get a couple people together my usual collaborators when we go to tech shows michael fisher from pocket now and of course nicole scott from mobile geeks the three of us always seem to get together whenever we go to a trade show together and i call this the trifecta of collaboration but nonetheless we got into a rather echoey room and put a mic in between us or among us rather and we all just sort of talked our faces off about all of the things that we had seen up until that point on the one hand we had htc we had alcatel and then we even had samsung and lg now all of the embargo times were before us talking about all of these things on the podcast so the release is far past those embargo times so um we were able to sort of just riff about how we felt about all of the devices but my favorite part about this particular podcast that i hope you'll enjoy is that the first 20 minutes we actually didn't talk about anything tech related we just wanted to share our experiences with barcelona spain so i hope you all really enjoy it for those of you watching on youtube remember that you can find the android authority friday debate podcast on all of the podcast channels including pocketcast stitcher and itunes and don't forget to drop us some reviews so that we'll get a little bit more visibility and thank you for all of you who are listening to this podcast without any further ado we're going to jump into this episode 6 pre mobile world congress with michael fisher of pocket now nicole scott of mobile geeks hope you guys enjoy because we use the last podcast to get to get into the groove yeah for the most part now now we're just jealous well now what what was once loopy is now delirium so yeah now we're just going to start being like oops that phone had butt boobs it's it's the product of us just being here for the last few days talking specifically with htc i mean they're the reason why we're even sitting in the room we're sitting in right now that's just that's very true how was your how was your guys's uh like you know mwc is not just about the trade show and the tech that's there but it's also about the city itself um like what we're in barcelona guys i love barcelona this is one of my favorite cities and one of my favorite trade shows yeah yeah absolutely because it's so focused on mobile and like yes you're like washing machine car blender blender i remember the first time i went to ifa there was that huge washing washing machine bubbles coming out of it yeah i didn't see any bubbles when i was there oh man you got ripped off yeah i said that ifo was my favorite for a little while because berlin's a very easy city yeah berlin is easy and plus ifa's very news focused because everything's in germans you're like that german and then you're like actual names right so it's actually really easy to focus in on like interesting stuff at ifa and then it's it's and it's also in that perfect place where you're like what is everyone gonna buy for christmas right so i you also have this other easy focus in on like these are the last products that are going to be released and for me it's there's a lot of laptops that come out of that show so yeah i'm always like for sure i'm walking around seeing all these great ultra books with my msi which is a great ultrabook i don't know why you keep calling me out on it nobody owns an msn yeah i didn't i had to ask what i had to ask josh what that was is that a pc no i swear i'm going to find someone at msi they're going to give you computers because there's nobody i'd love to yeah let's go let's do a photo shoot and i'll i'll say yeah i'll sit on the stairs they are a taiwanese company yeah yeah it's been i must know somebody there it's been a workforce man how is uh barcelona treating you right now anyway i'm very well actually you know by the way i didn't get to compliment you on the shirt so she given the news that that that was coming out yeah yeah let her name my dad yeah and a couple days ago yesterday and uh this was the shirt to wear yeah yes he has the the communicator on yeah is that right yeah yeah and we'll let it go okay so in barcelona no no it's it's wonderful because you fly over here from the east coast and if you're maybe you live in boston and there's snow banks that are taller than you everywhere oh yeah exact middle of the misery of winter in new england is february for me i think it's a terrible time so to come over here where the people are you know walking around in like coats like it's cold but it kind of looks like everyone's just playing pretend because you're walking around being like this is great tropical and paradise out here it was 60 degrees this is awesome yeah that's wonderful it's like it's like a springtime in the middle of the winter and barcelona i agree with you i think it's a wonderful city um i'm not i'm not terribly attached to it i just i like being here with people who are in our industry who who i like i think we're fortunate in that regard i feel like we don't maybe this is not true for you guys but i feel like we don't often sit around and like about people because we don't like there are people we don't like like you know and then in the same field can we curse on the show oh just go for it um i don't have i don't have a rating on it yet so okay yeah um i don't have a hard line yet make it explicit when i come okay but no i feel like we have a lot of good friends and other outlets and it's really great to see them in person and to just hang out late into the night like we're doing now yeah it's crazy this is like an excuse to hang out that's always the and i'm i'm going to use the such the wrong word because i can't find the right word for it but it's it's the it's the trade show aphrodisiac of sorts like it's it makes the whole experience better you know and it makes it it also romanticizes the the whole experience for you because yeah i don't know maybe my romanticism is kind of high because i'm actually really excited to be here and i'm walking around and and lon who's gonna be on the the cast uh for our next one our posts uh nwc uh show this is his first time here and i just got so excited like oh i know all these places to bring you man like i was so excited it is true yeah and walking around i i gave you the the tip to walk by yourself to our sessions venue it wasn't a tip it wasn't a tip it was a transcendent experience more than that so we're talking about going to the thing and josh's like yeah is there a shuttle yeah i'm gonna take the shuttle over there or whatever i'm gonna get on the bus or something like that yeah and josh is like no man you got it you gotta you really gotta just just walk i'm like well i'll see if anybody's walking i'll see if it jumps up no man you got to do it by yourself you got to like you know listen and listen to the people speaking the language and michael was like why are you touching me man it was legit yeah yeah and it's awesome i mean that's great because i feel like some if you can get jaded really easily where it's like all right or too much work did you think about that i'm sorry it's my fault everyone oh it's fine it's uh it's something that i've really fought for with my colleagues to um you know just just kind of remember where you know where we are and it's not that they have any problems doing that it's just i'm always reminding them you know so well and and it's also like i'm always fortunate because i'm because i'm like because i booked my own tickets for the most part so it's like i'm gonna show up three days early and then leave three days late like i don't know i got i i got into tech blogging because i was like i gotta find a reason to buy plane tickets for work you know and like that's that's actually like one of the big draws of this of this industry is that is that my travel is so consistent and great places and like it sucks that i don't get to choose the places i go anymore and this is like my ninth year in barcelona but at the same time like i love coming back here and i love going to berlin for eva every year and yeah and in nine years you still whenever i see you at a place like this you still have the eyes of wonder yeah you're silly yeah you're not slogging around being like oh god another one of these people who do like i feel like that's the that's that's such so common it's almost a stereotype right this one you know news reporters like oh that's exactly why i keep reminding people you know live in this moment you know it's our work is important we love what we do but you know if you get too caught up in it you might not be able to like what was that that no the bruce lee saying you know it's like uh it's like a finger pointing to the moon and then he slaps the student don't concentrate on the finger or you'll miss all that heavenly glory oh yeah that's just a good quote yeah so you were saying but um don't you feel that the thing that everyone's saying now is that smartphones are predictable we all know what's going to happen the htc event we were here it was really iterative everything's really iterative samsung's put a curve on the on the edge right like it's is that useful or is that just like a wow factor to get people to pay attention to it anymore because there's no real use for the edge on the display yet well okay we're going to get into the specifics but i love that you brought up the more existential question when it comes to what we do and what we're covering here um i think that this year's crop of flagship smartphones um especially here at mwc given what i've seen today um it's all about creating the phone that the phones in the past should have been in the first place it's not necessarily about a massive innovation it's not about really going far and beyond past iteration but past iterative and incremental updates it's picking up the phone and thinking man a couple years ago this is what that should have been like and i really truly believe that that's i'm choosing to be positive about it and thinking of myself like with the htc m9 which we'll talk about uh one m9 which we'll talk about in a bit of course uh i had that phone in my hand i said the htc one this is the one like this feels right but i also don't think that using a city like barcelona is a is a what's the what's the right term for it is like uh it's a distraction you know like i don't think it's i don't think i don't think that's the case it's it's a cherry on top of what we do as as people as as our as our occupation as our station um that being said i've i've spent this is my third year here in the last two years i've never felt like fully safe here i've never felt like i i really was a part of this city but like with that walk and like this morning when i walked from this hotel to 45 minute walk all the way to uh to to where android authority is staying you know it was a slog that was a slog but i still enjoyed myself because it was such a nice day this morning yeah i went to plaza espana today yeah yeah so it's where the the old fira or the the old wc was oh cool because i forgot my wallet and i was like i needed to get b-roll for the intro and i'm let's walk it i guess yeah we're doing our intro tomorrow probably at pepcom or something but um how do you feel about that assertion i put out that led you know obviously you haven't really seen all of the phones that we're going to see at mwc just yet if i'm not mistaken yeah but you know am i am i out of line there i don't think you're out of line but i do take a different perspective because i think it is easy to in our field we um we all three of us make videos right and we like making pretty videos and it's easier to do that when the products are pretty and products are sort of getting prettier so making things look good is really easy i always try to shy away from any mindset that's going to make me try to make a commercial for a product of course and naturally right but you know so so i i find myself maintaining a if i'm airing i'm airing on the side of of critical yeah because every phone if you think about it is what what smartphones should have been four years ago you know what i mean yeah so uh i try to retain the sense of wonder that that because that's exciting that's the only reason we do this right it's just like oh my god i can hold all this power in my hand and it can still somehow be usable and beautiful this is amazing i love what i do because i get to play with these awesome toys but at the same time i'm like people are going to drop a ton of money on this thing bring out mr cynical face yeah oh look he's been here the whole time so yeah i try to walk alone yeah you try to walk down but there's a but there's a difference between being jaded about the industry and critical and being critical about products yes there is right there's a there's a big difference because i think when we're critical we're more passionate that we're upset that they got him wrong yes we were like uh why did you not take a picture before you handed in the sound how did you think that was good how did you not notice this thing here how did you know what i mean like just like some of these blatant errors and and like we all get critical because we're still passionate but i think that you know i think that it's different that a lot of people are just like this is predictable i expected this of course this got better and like there's a there's a way to be dismissed as dismissive in your critique and i think that that's what i'm getting a bit bored of in the industry and that's what i'm getting a bit bored of in my peers yeah right yeah yeah totally yeah they did that kind of persistent that like and come over it yeah like yeah why are you here yeah i do leave right you get out if you don't want to be right but again that's where that's where my that's where my perspective comes in where it's like if if you hate the work at least be passionate about something i i'm okay with someone who's a little bit jaded about what it is that we do people people who have been in this for like a dozen years i can definitely ex but if you're going to stand in the middle of barcelona and be dismissive about life you're staring at a gowdy museum slash church slash apartment and you're not having some sort of reaction you know let's see i i i i satisfy that requirement because i did have a reaction and it was that i vomited in my mouth that was a terrible structure i hate that place don't and don't get me wrong i am i feel amazingly great grateful that i got to experience it on the outside two years ago on the inside of this trip really it's something you should see but i hate it really i can't it's not often you see something so chaotic yet so symmetrical at the same time you know he's vomiting in his mouth right now there's like a poker sour face and now he's holding his eyes because he's crying remember the actual description of what's happening we're not making it out that's true like you look at you look at that structure in any of the structures and you think to yourself like yeah this is such this is the weirdest the weirdest shapes i i know that there's just just just chaos happening but somehow it makes sense sure you know no like htc you know well before we get into the specific devices i i will i will preface everything that you know we're we're here right now it's it's it's so late and we're loopy and delirious uh we're recording before the times that we're supposed to be broadcasting these things we're talking about which is why you're listening to this far after that time and yes yeah and we're supposed to be sleeping getting ready for day zero event starting the event well for anybody keeping track this is day four yeah for all of us yeah yeah and for any of our any of any of the listeners keeping score i have not started one video yet and you're about to see nine come out at the end of this day you know yeah exactly so i have a long long night ahead of me but you know as some of my listeners do know that's the kind of that's how i am when it comes to these shows i am usually up very very late uh but that being said we are like we're saying here in barcelona for the mobile world congress of 2015 uh as always we are already into the thick of it um a few days in we were here for htc frequencies that is as it is called but of course a lot of stuff happens right before the show and uh to varying degrees we have seen some of the devices we may not have seen all of them i probably have seen the most out of the three of us and we're gonna talk about them a little bit what we're probably excited about i will lighten our our flow into this i did mention htc and uh i do want to get h c out of the way because we just spent an hour and five minutes talking about it at length for a previous podcast oh the pocket now weekly podcast yes oh yes yes when that goes up so i mean we can given that we have a lot of topics that we're going to talk about because there's a lot of devices we don't have to go at length about the htc one m9 uh but i will ask you uh general opinions on the phone itself we'll start with michael as i looked at nicole i keep reaching for it as though i still expect to have the review device and i like to refer to um it is uh it is the manifestation of what we were complaining about a second ago with the people who are over it you know if you are someone who is not easily impressed by um changes that are not visually very apparent then this phone will infuriate you oh god they just did the same thing again you know you're too good at that voice but it's not that you know it's opponents about subtlety on the outside and on the inside it impacts quite a few improvements um it is not a i do not think it is a grand slam device i don't think that htc thinks it's a grand slam device it's not it's it's the iteration it's the sensible improvement um done up in htc's typically excellent industrial design and if they figure out how to sell it it'll sell very well they probably will take a long time to figure out how to sell it yeah if their history is any indication and so i don't know i don't know i will say that i i didn't immediately fall in love with it okay i intellectually understand that it's a very very compelling smartphone but when i first touched the m8 there was a something that happened with me and it hmm that's the opposite of blessed family that's right yes and they just didn't happen with the m9 for me so so that's just that's my my situation okay because that thing i mentioned earlier about how these phones are what their line should be like that's how i felt with the m9 like this is the one and i i i i did definitely feel that way but there are obviously some flaws with it and uh you know uh it was it was uh mostly the camera i think we all agreed on that it was you know a bit of a misstep given that it might improve yeah right it's pre-production software and they made it clear that it's pre-production i mean fingers crossed better yeah it has to it must yes it was imperative yes they should not release it with that were your general thoughts on the phone uh i really liked it i was a little like meh um i loved the m7 uh not not so much into the m8 i think i prefer the m9 over the m8 um just because i am the biggest klutz ever with my phones and that is impossible for me like it's just two slits like a bar of soap it's like walk me while you're on the white barb soap that will fly into your eye so like just like as a you know i like my friends i don't want to kill them by the phone i can't carry an inmate right that's just such a good looking vlog it's just slippery yeah and so like i think that the design uh was done really really well the way they squared up the corners like that they've almost over compensated too much with the edginess it's quite sharp but i quite like that it feels very very substantial i do like the two-tone i'm excited that they launched it with four colors uh here here at the show and that the possibilities are endless for the colors they could go with right and i like that they're demonstrating two-tone now and if they were to like i like the idea of silver and black or like a red and black or like something like that i think i think they could make some like really really dynamic and interesting welded handsets and i think that industrial design is going to become increasingly something that uh smartphones are going to have to differentiate on yeah everyone's just getting so good at it if there's something that hcc knows very well is that their design has always been received quite well so to perfect let's say perfect their design in this m9 is something that i'm really in tune with i really do think that they've gone in the right direction without going so far that we forget why we liked htc in the first place maybe it's a question of expectations for me i think when the m8 leaked which they all leaked and when the m8 leaked i thought what is this photoshop monstrosity with this weird second eyeball and like these two round corners and i was like oh and then i held it and then i i got it instantly yeah and now i look at the m9 and with its with its narrow radius corners that evoke the m7 and once again i understand it's it's very pretty but i i don't think it's as comfortable i don't you know you said it nicole said it it's sharp you know when you handle it it's not it's not as as holdable and if you want to hold it you've got to put a clear dot view case on it and you know then it feels like cheap plastic i don't know i keep talking about the pinch on there you know you you have that tactile feel that you know to grip on yeah a little bit more you know it's true it's easier maybe i just like a little bit of pain on my phone yeah maybe i need to get rid of my dish pants but it's also that they have two lips on it right that that there's like the sharp edge of the back and then there's that kind of like limp for it's it's it's not a floating display because the lip is way far down but it's it's almost that kind of aesthetic that comes with that floating display look that i really like and that it i feel like i'm not going to break it and i'm not going to drop it wow nice way to go well i mean to to close out our talk on that particular phone i i do want to make it clear like one of the best experiences i've ever had on a phone is right now on this one because uh we had one other phone come out with what is supposed to be the fastest processor available the snapdragon 810 right and unfortunately it just was not the right showcase for it and we will we will set going into that in a little bit but this sense iteration sense seven it flies screaming yeah it absolutely dreams snares ass and it's funny because we've been spending the last two or three days being very critical with htc being very very very uh honest with them at least you know to an extent um to an extent yes to an extent and um seeing how smooth and fast this operating system is and how much fun it is to use because of just how nice it looks and smooth and goes through transitions very well and i can i can use the recent app screen like so so so seamlessly i realized i really am the kind of person that notices stutter in a in an interface i always used to let it slide but now we're coming and i would love to hear you guys thoughts on this we're coming into an era of smartphone technology where uh stuff like stutters are so much more scrutinized because we know what kind of processes we're getting especially in something like the 810 which is being marketed as being the most powerful processor out there and then we have something like the lg g flex 2 that just did not live up to that expectation we and i thought maybe the 810 is not quite what we thought it would be but it wasn't that case once we got sense in our hands but i mean like lg's never been good at making their ui clean fair right so i mean like the lg g3 you know this is why i can't wait can't wait to get to a certain point later but the uh but yeah how do you feel about that idea because today i had that i i had the confirmation that i became that person after after being the the the combination of i know what a super fast and speedy interface feels like now on the a10 and the last two days of being encouraged to be critical i kind of tore uh alcatel a new one when they showed us their phone and they sat us down and and jason god bless god bless you and your colleagues you sat down and said give us your honest feedback and this click went off in my head you were honed by three days solid feedback like yeah yeah yeah i said what what processors in here this is the 610 in their case and their their skin on the phone that they are releasing here at or launching or announcing here at mwc is a very light skin on top of lollipop and what i noticed was that the lollipop elements were nice and smooth but the alcatel elements were the ones that stuttered and struggled to come out and i oh my god i told i pointed out every single time it happened and when i was done i was i felt so bad and and and and that camera on the idle through they have to be like look how good it looks and i'm like tap tap i'm like are you sure because when you do that there's some really horrifying things that i'm seeing on the screen i was like that was like literally i'm like you think this looks good do you have no kidding but i mean like the the potential for that phone actually i think is quite good yes but i think i think it's early i can't judge them too hard on the stutters and um just because it's it's still not released but yeah you're right i'm doubtful they'll fix it yeah right um but but for that price point i'll forgive that that's the i made that very clear with that right for that for that price and for how they designed it yeah it's beautiful it's light the display looks nice the camera i mean it has it has all of the things you want to say it's got hyper or it's got time lapse it's got you know like yeah well it's got time did they show you the picture in the bar that they uh yes thank you they can see you can see their faces yeah i was like okay uh no but at the same time i get it what was it it was some subs they stopped short of actually saying the price and said sub 250. so it's one yeah so it's 249. okay that's what i was thinking too yes and then there's a 4.7 inch addition that is subject so why are we forgiving where we why are we forgiving interface lag on a phone is 249 when i used phones that don't have it almost at all at 179. well i never said i was really forgiving it i mean i tore them and you won as i said earlier no you did yeah yeah but you said are you um well well i i tend to review a lot of chinese phones right and so like um chinese manufacturers just do not do software very well right they're like it it is getting a lot better right so i actually reviewed a oneplus phone uh one plus clone um at 160 yeah no for sure and like i actually was slow to move off of it onto another phone because you know the camera was decent enough um the ui was was clean uh there were centers but if you just change the transitions then you could you could work around it yeah right so that's my thing is that the i'm forgiving of the stutters because then i just take one subway ride where i sit down and i'm like what do i do to make it better to make it better yeah right and so a lot of the time you can look at the way that you interact with your phone to fix something like that so absolutely um i'm forgiving of it because i can take the time to fix it like there's some things you cannot sometimes just you cannot it's true sometimes you cannot but i feel like with the alcatel phone that you could figure out what transitions you would turn off and what things you would remove to make that totally fine i was just astonished that the person that came out once they said give us your feedback even darcy was looking at me like this this very positive man just changed in front of my eyes like yeah that's that's what happened did you see the alcatel phone yet no or uh took a look at it but i've seen the you know the release and the oh sure yeah um flipping that phone over i like the fact that it's pick it up in reversible direction and the screen will flip to the upside down kiss yeah it's an interesting marketing strategy yeah yeah and everyone's going to say spider-man but i'm still not sure why they were so big on pushing that that mixer like there's a music mixer where you could dj probably to showcase the front-facing speakers right now which were quite loud they were pretty good yeah i have to say um but the mixer the thing that i like about it is it will tap into streaming services at some point google play and pandora will be a part of it and it will just buffer it on one side of the turntable and then the other side is whatever you want so yeah i feel like a photo one touch is still one of those companies to where like if that's what you're promising me okay i just can't wait to see like a house party where the guy has a one cord into a huge sub and trying to do dj stuff on the phone never mind i've seen it my friends are nerds 80 dollar gig i mean the the the stutters and um you know moving from there um into um let's let's let's let's visit lg sure okay and they don't have a flagship phone that they're talking about here at mwc rather it's four mid-range phones which you know what i'm always excited when lg puts on mid-range phones is that true is that a sentence that anyone has ever said because because he likes the bella you thought the bellow was great well you know what it was is um i i have this i have this one portion of me that despite always wanting the flagship phones and messing with them i have let's say i have a lot of relatives in the philippines who ask me all the time what funds that they should get and i always i'm thinking about like the recent android one release in the philippines i was all over that that article that we put on our website i was so happy about it and i hope that it's successful because you know i my dad consistently goes back to the philippines with phones i don't use anymore to give to our relatives wow yeah so you know i i want i want a good experience for you know people out in that part of the world you know um but you know the four ones also darcy had me trained because two years ago i covered every single l and f oh yeah we did that too oh my goodness yeah there were too many not fun there were almost no differences between them i did not do that i made roland do that and we did that's when we learned our lesson then we looked at the analytics on those and it's like well we've we didn't do many people did you group them together per per f and l i think we did i think yeah that's what i did too i did i did i did a single walk through i was like let me walk down this aisle with you and i will just shout things out a good call yeah like somewhat bigger screen somewhat bigger screen five megapixels eight megapixels lg did show us um today was um what me us a today was we're seeing it tomorrow yeah i thought everything in the morning and i do want i do want to that's part of the reason why i was excited to do this for this version of the podcast was to excite you about what you're about to see if if of course what i tell you is exciting to you but but from lg it is obviously the wearables and um you we all know about the urbane not the g-watch urbane just just no but the watch is still in there it's just the g that's not in there see that was confusing at our meeting personally i don't know if it was true or not i i still don't know whether to call it the watcher bane or the the urbane sandwich because there's a there's a urbane place i know but uh we have a silver iteration without the um the the the markings on the bezel it's a bezel yes yeah yeah yeah the chronograph there you go um that's what we've all agreed on yeah there's michael pouts over there the thing you don't use yeah but also a rose gold edition rose gold edition so did you guys already have like some opinions on you obviously you have to put it on your wrist to to get a really good feeling it's not going to fit on my wrist why don't they make a rose gold edition i already know it might because it's it's significantly less diameters than the g watcher right it's significantly narrower isn't it because it is it is more narrow it's definitely smaller than the j watch r i will tell you that well because that's impossibly larger absolutely is it smaller than the moto 360 no okay yes because there's as big as shoulders on top and bottom exactly it has what it is to me the urbane is um a horrible name but also a name but also i like the ads yeah it's it's it is a watch electronically you know what i mean yeah yeah it has the feel of an actual sort of high-end watch like if you were to buy say a girlfriend or yourself a michael kors watch that is exactly what you're getting here except it has an android wear inside and uh i like that rose gold actually seemed to me like a good choice you know especially if not that they're specifically trying to uh say that they're going for the feminine market but i was there when the g watch r came out and they received a lot of flack about it because they stood there and told me that that was for women yeah as like we stood in front of an end cap that had a pilot and a man on a boat and then like leather and then like aviator glasses like well this is for women i was like are you kidding me like just try it on i'm like okay it's funny you mentioned that because as a good friend flo was uh was was the one asking the questions about you know this isn't is there going to be an iteration of this that is suitable for women and as she says um as as she was saying that one of the women from lg you know with her pantsuit on and all that like she uh she i saw her twitch her wrist like she knew what she was talking about like yeah she's right it felt like she knew it's heavy and painful how did you feel about the g-watch shower were you the one that that covered it for you guys i did it i did cover it and um i thought it had admirable traits to it but i could very easily relate to it because like i'm a dude and also sometimes i go into the woods to walk around and if i'm wearing like sasha loves yeah but but i don't know i didn't love it i thought that the bezel was was too thick i thought the numbers in the bezel were totally unnecessary yes and it didn't even rotate right it just wrote it not that that makes a difference because i don't i just spin it when i'm nervous you know like yeah but what's the noise there are positions yeah there are times the screen is beautiful yeah um and there are times that i don't want to bring my moto 360 into because like i bash that thing on door jambs you know what i mean like i'm clumsy and it's it's held up well yeah but if i beat up the g watch out i'm going to feel a lot less bad than if i beat up my my 360. so like it has a place as like a a working man's or android wear watch so what does so what does a fully polished metal frame compared to the j watch r a little bit smaller yeah uh what would that say to you having already used the g watch r to me it doesn't do it doesn't do anything for me because i don't think i don't think it's a very elegant casing from what i've seen we mentioned the watch brackets the band brackets on top and bottom that yes it looks like a watch yeah like the conventional idea of a watch exactly but to me that's rather generic i bought the moto 360 because i like it's i like that it's a circle they decided to make like a can and and make it that minimal and make the screen go and and not have these these things taking of what distracting you from the circle except for the flat tire and then the shitty screen and the bad processor and all that kind of stuff yeah and it's uh the illusion is sort of broken i will admit when you you look at the watch screen off and you're like oh you know that that looks like a watch and then screen comes on you're like well i expected that and then you turn it around and the back has the heart rate monitor on it oh you're just like and of course the heart rate monitor is on the actual wearables the android wearables haven't really been like great no no one swears by him uh the the the band is genuine leather real stitching in it rather than fake that's good so you know there's certain elements to it that they're trying to get right you know i don't know if it's because it's like 1 45 in the morning but i am and i'm a woman and i can't play in the wearable space but i'm so bored of this conversation because yeah because why no no no no no because because it doesn't make sense to me that we're iterating a brand new category of device into something that was 250 years old the first pocket watch was 250 years ago and why are we like praising a device that looks like something from a million years ago trying to be like well now let's innovate how we're going to use this but let's jam it into something that has nothing to do with what we're trying to do with it like i just i'm so and then like but like but is it but it's true like you guys sit there and you debate the virtues of how watched like it is and it's the metal the leather strap with the stitching and you want all the high quality things and you want the luxury and you want all these amazing things but why if we're technology journalists are we not like more engaging on like why why is android wear so crap what would we actually do with a smartwatch like what what what do you want out of it is it simply a notification screen right like all of these other things and i'm just like why are we still doing this and it hasn't only been a year so i'm terrified that if i'm like right now what it's going to be like in a year they better give me a smart watch for what actually works for women soon or else i'm just going to be like i was in the direction of your frustration back at ifo when i was on your podcast and on your live stream yeah and by the way like it seems during these trade shows we are going to be the trifecta of collaborations every single time they get so burned out on each other why am i doing this again are we talking about wearables yeah i don't want to be i'm going to close on she better learn some new facts about watch history michael doesn't know what a chronograph is but yeah i remember i remember voicing out this a similar opinion if technology the way technology has become so great aside from just you know becoming ubiquitous in our lives is that it has owned its own form factor yeah and watches just aren't technologies no you and you know i i kind of got made fun of because i kept using internet we have to own but you know and and we don't have to talk about this at length this next part but they do have the urban lte now yeah okay so tell me everything all right so this is essentially lg creating their own version of the uh timex uh triathlon the garmin forerunner the super high 299 dollar one but this one will probably be something like 500 i bet you uh non-changeable band because inside of it are the actual antennas for lte gps bluetooth all right it snaps on and it is huge it is big if you thought the g watch r was big this one because you can't change the band it just feels like you are putting on a shackle like it loads so it's like an arm cuff it has the look of one of those super crazy uh digital watches from from like it has the feel of that from the 90s okay with the g-watch our aesthetic so it's not but it's not the same casing as the web os watch from ces no they have it well yeah no it's not because this is this is this is its own standalone thing and speaking of web os they have put so many changes into the web os interface for this lte edition that they're not calling it webos it's the lg watch it's the lg wearable platform yeah because webos has a very specific connotation exactly yeah inane discussions i will say the interface is quite lovely is this circular one it's the circuit only okay and um having the connectivity there is great but uh what we were told was it's not made for connectivity with a smartwatch it's supposed to be completely standalone with a smartphone it's not it's not it's not made it's not interactive exactly which to me sounds a little odd i'm still not quite there when it comes to devices like this well i i've been playing around with the oh mate for a while so i i kind of have the concept of like this is by itself and i actually kind of like it because i i i often try to disconnect so if i'm being let me leave my phone but i'm gonna try something else so if someone really needs to get a hold of me or something like that then i do have this on those times where i'm like bad at disconnecting so i've been trying to use like the omit a little bit and so i get i get the moment where that's useful actually okay yeah like not not as like a i had one sent to me and i didn't pay for it and i reviewed it right right but i don't you know i don't i don't know who is going to go and buy this but i do see if i have one kicking around that i do kind of like it i can't wear it every day but the oh mate's not really meant for everyday use i think i spent like four weeks trying to get that with the gear s like trying to understand that that thing that people there's always that commenter when you do a smartwatch piece it's like until it's self-contained i don't want anything to do with it and i'm like i don't understand why that is why would you want that that's right yeah and i keep like but i i feel you like you know what i mean it was totally the smartphone home for a second and just like it would still be connected on the wrist and it was cool to play like inspector gadget for a bit yeah and and to be like oh i got a whatsapp right let me right let me because like the keyboard is cool man like honestly you have that like whacked but this is lifted but this is the very height of impracticality right i mean it is it's you everything you do on it is frustrating because you can't just when you get fed up with the android wear or pebble i'm just like ah this is just where's my phone you get your phone in your thing but when that is your phone it's like i i need to punch someone in the face you know this is like two it's cumbersome it's gonna get out so i don't understand i don't know how i could fit that in the mouth yeah but i mean like the original oh mate was for extreme sports oh right yeah well i do those all the time too there's a there's that's why clearly i do lots of extreme work there's a level of fitness fitness tracking that they're trying to sort of push with this one but it is supposed to be an all-in-one device and i did play around with the call and the message stuff like at the very top of the imagine the g-watch r and right above the chronograph is a small slit for a speaker and then right below the bottom of the chronograph is a small slit for the speaker so you're gonna be able to take calls and stuff like that much like the guerris um but and then actually the keyboard on that didn't didn't really frustrate me as much um you know it's still small and if you're gonna if you're gonna sit there and going like this for a long time you're gonna look like they didn't have sweat i didn't check actually i i'm so used to touch typing right now that i didn't even they didn't yeah because like because i honestly like like swipe on those on on the watch screens no problem oh really whatsapp chat with you ten minutes no way okay don't don't believe i'm gonna take many photos of myself next time i do that okay it's just such an odd thing though because that fitness tracking one like it has the gps it has the ability to track a lot of stuff there's a heart rate motor on it also but you know it's so large and i don't want to say it was too heavy but it definitely was more cumbersome than your let's say pebble like the one i'm wearing that if i was running my left arm would probably be stronger than my right arm because of that yeah yeah yeah yeah all right so i wanted to move into uh i want to change switch gears a little bit uh we will talk about samsung and i will give you guys you know the somewhat you know info that i that i have and how i feel about it then you can tell me but was there anything here at mwc that you were actually looking forward to that is outside what we may know of already did you have something sort of on the skirts like maybe a sony even though we heard from sony that you know they're not really pushing mobile as much anymore totally not it's not sounding for me but i totally have one you haven't done this oh yeah totally okay yeah mine is from your favorite company to call oh it's not you know what is some of your favorite company or is your favorite company oh well mine is from your second favorite company well let's use sisu's for laptops yeah asus uh should teased their zenfone zoom at ces but wouldn't let it out from under the plastic box what's using here uh they are they're not exactly they're at the they're at the trump hotel do they have somebody here yes because they're because their little team didn't come out that's that's why it's the people you introduced to meet you yeah it's the people i met because of you but no my people told me they weren't here they like you more i'm kidding oh god wait did did they tell you that they're not here though yeah they told me they're not here well all right i'm sorry this is we'll talk about it off the air but i no i if they said that to me they were here oh okay no cool no that's totally fine okay i want to see that really bad i've wanted to see it for a while i need to you know i love this sort of sub movement of manufacturers who are doing this thing where it's like it's a camera it can also be a phone but it's a camera you know like the panasonic thing oh i can't wait for those lenovo uh vibes and asus is doing really good with their camera technology yeah what are they calling it the pix the pixel picture mastery yeah yeah they're doing really well with that they're beautiful is disgusting oh you you you get pointy chin you put it on fire low light butterfly box stuff amazing and that's on their 200 zen phone yeah just and this thing is built with a big old like lumia like oreo on the back it's obvious they're pushing the camera i want to see what they can do when they're actually like saying yeah look at this yeah that's a camera yeah i remember i said yes they wouldn't let out the case they wouldn't let it out of the box i was like come on actually what they did i got to hold it right but they couldn't do anything yeah so that when they told me that i was like no don't say that i still took a shot of myself taking a picture with it just yeah i would have done the same thing yeah exactly but i was still looking what's the camera like i wish i could tell you man it was there um mine i'm excited i'm excited for two things the two things that i want to track down on the show floor when it opens i want to go see the yola tablet yes and i want to go see the yes project ara right i forgot oh yeah yeah those are the two things that i'm kind of keen for because like i saw like everyone forgets this but zte at their booth last two year two years ago showed under glass a modular phone actually they had three different examples for how they thought the phone of the future would look like and i made a video about it and i was like guys everyone's gonna watch it no one watched it nobody cared i was just like really and then like literally four weeks later protect ara was announced and i was like guys but zte totally just did that nobody gave a the perils of brandon i guess i could kind of see that especially back when zt put it out because people are probably looking at like a modular phone that i have to put together myself that's why i don't go to korean barbecue steakhouse you know i just wasn't there yet yeah exactly why am i cooking my own food right now yeah just saves my ass every 15 minutes right i think i've seen what i've wanted to see already in terms of like you know what i want to set aside in my mind you know that but you know i'm always i'm always willing to look at the fringe products um i love visiting arcos oh yeah i still love articles we'll never do another archos review but i still love seeing what they do exactly yeah they've been making tablets longer than anybody yes and the reason why is because they started off making portable media players so way back in the day like oh five you had the pmp yeah and it was like the a thick because you had to fit a laptop hard drive in there and then it had a little joystick and i used to watch i watched like kill bill on that thing i remember it was great and it's nice to see them in the android space because some of that language translates to their current smartphones is that french company yeah yeah so yeah it's like articles yeah so yeah you know i i don't have too much that i'm itching to see that's outside of what i know i'm going to see anyway but if i had to say i love seeing the fringe products i love seeing them the ones that don't necessarily get the most traffic on our site but it's still interesting you know you know what's funniest like i feel like wearables has a has a as an ever growing sort of um dumping ground of of sort of half-assed products like every time i come to a trade show i sort of forget that there's a lot of crappy smart watches out there and i'll be walking past rows of them and i'll get it's always the same ride for me because i'm always like oh sweet oh these look awesome and then the crushing disappointment of like oh these are just dummies hey just dummies because you haven't figured out how to build this yet but cool concept or be like oh literally a dummy yeah yeah it's a widget on your wrist or it's like one of the super minimal ones that's like the super niche target like a lot of people like the whittings thing and then because i don't care about what it's just a step tracker right yeah yeah yeah especially yeah that's fine yeah okay here we go so we're about to get into it all right so um hopefully our lives we're going to be going over my usual a lot of time but i'm perfectly fine with that because you know we're having the conversation this is our first since the pilot live episode of the friday debate podcast uh all the rest have been telecommuting so you always have that clock on the side telling you when an hour's coming up but this one it's not really phasing me much because i know we're going to get into it we have a great conversation already so i hope the listeners have been enjoying us hanging out that's that's that's that's really half of what i was really hoping this was going to be and i'm happy about that already but now um samsung samsung tv in front of us actually i just realized no way those are so rare i was like how pertinent did i recognize that just now um so we we spoke about this a little bit earlier um the yes there has been there have been a few briefs on this particular day but this like i said this podcast is coming up far before after i should say far after the embargo time so um you know this our conversations are back in time uh michael you told me that you've heard what there is needed to be heard about the samsung device what is it that you've heard i've heard that it's made of metal and glass and that these things work together to make it i know it's like unicorns i know this sounds like a snarky sentence but i really have heard that it's glass on top of metal and it looks beautiful so that's what i've heard i've heard it is as far away from the dimpled uh plastic nonsense as you can get i've heard some people say it's the most beautiful samsung phone they've ever held i've heard some people say that it's more impressive than the m9 in terms of its uh look and feel uh i've heard all kinds of crazy things and not many of them negative about this device okay i have to corroborate the positivity damn that one i i was sitting there ready to be underwhelmed by what might be yet another weird move by samsung to put maybe there are two heart rate monitors on the back i was expecting to be underwhelmed by whatever innovation they had but as the slides were being presented each thing made me think samsung finally listened and every next thing they said was another thing i wanted on a phone and it's it's insane it's insane and then i got the thing in my hand we're not even talking about the ss s6 edge yet good uh which technically we don't really have to because the edges are if you've held the if you mess with the note edge it's two of them yeah both sides are edged yeah you don't need them well one side now let me give you the one feature of the edge that was actually really cool now if you if you've used the note edge you know that it's a information panel yeah so when it's off you you you genie wipe it and uh and it comes up with the time and the weather no to be fair when it's off you swipe at it a couple times and then it acts like you don't exist i only find that stupid sweet spot that gets it oh okay yeah here i just keep rubbing it you know what i'm so glad that that that my last thought was just interrupted because i was about to say really awkward sentence so yeah okay um so that's that's the left panel the right panel is a uh people calls and messaging oh i don't see messaging people on calls and when you swipe from us from from that area you get a quick widget with all of your contacts so you can easily just call people so the idea is it's in your right hand you swipe over you hit the person's face and then you start calling already but you assign a color to each one and what happens is if your phone is upside down that edge that comes up from off the ground off the table i should say if you're getting a call from somebody but your phone is upside down and silent it will glow the color you picked that person from the demonstration we had showed him getting a call from his colleague and it looked like a ricer like like a like a like a jdm's import tuner car the bottom portion it was like the ground effect yeah which which you know what i have to say when it happened i was like that's cool but why well that's very presupposes that you put your phone face down your curved phone okay you know if you are being polite out with people you put your phone face down because it shows that you're in the media okay all right or the other notification light blinks and it's annoying and all that kind of i get it right but but this phone looks so dumb upside down on the table with the flare of the curve how many times do you make a phone call in a week or get a phone call in a week that thought came up later and i was like i would never be able to use that yes that's exactly the kind of feature that samsung would have put in the galaxy s4 if it could have like this is this is from that era of thinking where it's like yeah we're gonna get a bunch of people at a party together they all have galaxy s4 so they're all gonna be independent speakers and everybody's going to have a great party like it's like these cool ideas in the lab well there in line's the segway okay because that's one that's that's basically the main feature of the s6 edge that i can give you right now and it's not that there are many more but that's the one that that they presented to us and to be honest the essex edge actually ergonomically feels pretty good whereas the note edge was really weird because this one they added enough of a rim to it that you can hold it comfortably and the smaller size at 5.1 inches makes it a lot easier to hold that's crucial okay so i'll give you that i'll give you that much you have me i'm interested again okay yeah yeah once you have it in your hand you're like wow this actually feels really right s4 how did you feel about the s4s uh like in general as foreign the most boring flagship phone i've ever reviewed it's so terrible really yeah it was packed with the things that we were packed with to make it unboring so or just didn't work right or were unnecessary favorite galaxy out of all of them i am so sorry i was going to say s4 galaxy s or a galaxy note i mean galaxy s yeah uh s3 because otherwise would be note 4 but s4 for me i'm i'm i'm s2 yeah s2 was a lot of people's favorite i think yeah that was like that was well regarded yeah like the camera to today still looks good interesting right but we haven't had to realize it because i really wasn't convinced back i have one still the thing is like i wasn't were we in the industry when the s2 was out s3 was the first the s3 was the first review i did that for me it was technically s4 i was in the middle i was in the interim between this three and four the uh the the s4 was boring so boring it's boring see the s4 was the first one it was like features you could write about all of them find relevance for everything like it was it would like the s4 to screamed at you the entire time you had to deal with it so i feel that way with the s5 which i'm sure is not a thing yeah exactly not a surprise but the s4 was the first phone that when i put it in my hands given given that the you know i was just in the industry for a little while before that when i put it in my hands it just kind of fit and you know the flat sides and it was just the right size it was really it felt right you know and i've been using that phrase a lot but you know that was that that's the thing and the reason why i bring that up is because the best way for me to describe the design of the s6 is that it is a metal and glass s4 in the sense that it's the same size it has the same feel it has the same like but this is the thing surely it can't look like the answer no it doesn't it doesn't it has the it has the tapered edges on the sides of the notes that's what the s4 felt like felt like to you yeah you said that along the glass okay so maybe to you because i cracked two that s4 cost me 400 extra dollars i cracked it just like twice like you don't even mean so i'm like that feels like crap right well i'm glad that i could share my my my reaction to the feel because that's what i felt but i will tell you that all these suspicions that people have that you may have about it are completely true it is the best iphone 6 clone you have ever seen right down to the speaker grill on the bottom that is in the same placement as the iphone 6 one now the difference is between the two and i wish i had my camera to show you um are that the edges of the metal on the sides are very much like the note fours where there's just that tapered lift yeah that's nice the corner buttress it has its own tropes it has its own tiny little design languages but when you put them side by side with the slight curve on the side the 2.5 d glass as if you will it is definitely it's going that's the vitriol it's going to get is that it's too much like it and it felt to me that samsung said we know exactly why people love the iphone 6. we don't have that in android yet we'll do it it's like an android iphone 6 no but like to be fair the iphone 6 is a is an amazing phone yes right like ergonomically to me that's one of my favorites the hardware feels great the camera yeah how's the camera okay so the camera yeah we have a now i'm i'm blinking i'm blanking on the i'm blinking on the front cameras megapixels i want to say it's eight okay and then the rear is 16. and what we have what we have there yeah you can i don't have the info here i think my phone died actually but um 1.9 aperture which is nice and low auto live hdr on both sides on both cameras with smart ois on the rear what else and what makes it smart yeah well it wasn't something that they iterated but i think it's the uh uh it's it's it's the same oas that was on the note 4 that's what i want to say which is an amazing camera yeah like straight up that's an amazing if if i would carry a phablet i would be carrying the note four the front is five megapixels five not eight sorry yeah i thought eight sounded like too much uh the interface on the camera allows you to uh to get into a manual mode that includes manual focus nice yes and um the uh the various elements are just buttons on the screen it does look a little bit nicer though once you hit like the pro mode it gets a little cluttered uh the various modes are still in there like you know the pro mode is nice and then the uh selective focus is there obviously too and whatnot it felt like a samsung camera still just somewhat different but uh obviously the claims of super great picture quality is something we're going to figure out later yeah i mean like i can only imagine that it would be better than what they're doing on the note 4 right yeah i absolutely think so too and especially at a sub 2.0 aperture so the 1.9 the metal styling like how did like you were saying it feels good but like how does the actual metal feel that's that's that's where the analogy to the iphone 6 comes in because it is as thin it has the glass back so it feels a little bit like an xperia in that way but really when you have it in your hand the metal feels cold to your touch and it's just narrow enough that you're able to have a grip on it that's super great and it's also very light phone it's a very light phone so once i did my comparison video with the iphone 6 it felt like i was holding the same phone how many milliamperes is this uh the battery yeah it's something like 26 80. they brought it down in size didn't they yes because the uh the the operating the uh the processor and this is the part that i wanted to get to um because i need to talk to you about the software um yeah i need to ask you about this yeah you need to talk about the software the um the processor yeah worldwide globally exynos no more qualcomm right and um a bit of a precedent i have to say um that makes me hella nervous because we get the exynos versions in taiwan and they are nowhere near as good no they're not okay but they were not compared to the crate snapdragons and that is not what they ate 810 but it's the ui experience no i know but the yeah well anyway well the ui has been uh updated to the lollipop edition obviously and there are a lot of aesthetic changes to it um it actually kind of feels like uh they've minimized it a little bit a little bit a little bit i won't say a lot um there there are certain elements to it that have been optimized for this particular experience and the one that will get that wow factor from you is the double tap the home button to launch the camera now what you're going to do is you're going to double tap that thing and within a fraction of a second and what happens then that the camera just sort of slides up from the bottom in a fraction of a second cool and the best way for me to describe it is that most if not all the interface feels like that and cool super surprised i was i was floored okay this is why i keep bringing up the idea that this is where we're scrutinizing performance so much because these processors are supposed to be amazing right you know there's really no excuse for them yeah and if you can't nail moving around your your home screens like how like what hope do you have of doing anything i do obviously we will when we're doing our actual reviews these opinions might change or in the think of like you know sure but i honestly i i was floored by what what that software performance was like now the most important question about the software experience is when you tap on interface elements does the phone make a sound like you're dripping water in a cup no oh thank god see that's what i'm saying minimize a little bit you know and it just feels like yeah i mean briefing is still there which yeah the flip floor you can take it out though you can take it out yeah uh but i i don't know i i i did i hit the the recent apps button and i kept going through the cards and i went everywhere else and then i brought down the notification drop down and i just really didn't feel like i was being slowed down at all that's great okay that is great okay that's great okay i think that though is the experience i had in the note 4. the note 4 didn't didn't bog down on me almost ever the s5 even was speedy when i when i reviewed it better though the the excellence s5 was a disaster no the exodus versions of all those were tuition yeah no totally that was always the case but the the snapdragon ones were good but almost but it's so it hasn't been about speed so much i mean touchwiz still is heavy and it feels heavier over time and that's a problem that all they all have but it's just ugly as sin so have they fixed that like do the is it at all modern it's still colorful and bubbly and you know but but it to me it didn't feel anything like the note 4 touchwiz i have to say it didn't feel like it while it still punched you in the face with color and some of its features are still in your face because of the notification drop down it somehow felt very different it's transitions when you hit an application it sort of like floats in from the bottom and then comes up and then when you hit the home button it slides down as if you're putting it away and you know very very i hate to say it but very ios like movements in in and out of applications and menus and because of how smooth they were because of how it felt like there wasn't much keeping it from doing what it had to do it was a very interesting experience um samsung made it very clear to us at our briefing that uh they wanted to go back to fundamentals to create a phone that focused on what they knew was right and what they knew was going to work and just refine on those things so from a design standpoint i think they succeeded despite where their inspirations came from it feels great it looks pretty great because the the backings on these are all translucent so it's not just like a solid color but because it's glass it had that reflection you could almost feel like you could see right through the back um so design actually is pretty good already the software experience and and and the the performance to me it's i don't know they might have hit it out of the park at this point how are they doing the waterproofing now that wasn't really presented and i know darcy asked that question but i don't have that information right now and um because if they remove that that's going to be a huge i think they did remove it that's that's terrible that's terrible it's a requirement for you um now that i have it yeah like after having it on the s5 having it on the z3 um i think all phones should just be waterproof i mean i don't i don't see like after having it i don't see why i wouldn't have that like as like a protective option of just against accident accidents if i'm gonna keep this expensive device for this long how many times have has someone spilled a drink on my phone sure i mean i maybe hang out at the bar too much i don't know but you know what i mean like it's just one of those things and like condoms i live in a country that's quite hot yeah and you put your humidity you put your phone down beside a drink and then suddenly it's sitting in a puddle yeah you know it's just like and i've had phones that i've taken in there like you dropped it or it's it's wet inside i'm just like that's just the humidity of this country i'm sorry i brought this phone from a dry land to a wetland right right so i for for me it is really important that that it has that okay i think yeah good i don't think that's that's representative said because i i spend half the year on it on the beach or on a boat so it's very important to me too yeah okay but i think we are a huge minority of people i've never had someone ask me like it's like oh man i need a waterproof phone really bad unless this was like someone who worked on a boat so like i think it's a it's a regionally specific thing i get that from women yeah yeah i i've started tracking that actually um yeah i've actually started tracking that among among my friends when we go through features that we want and i'll throw it out there i'm like what what about waterproof women more than men say yes to that yeah i just feel like they maybe put it into the s5 thinking that a lot of people were going to hail this as a great is a great thing and i feel like no one really talked about it afterwards you know it wasn't it wasn't covered very well in our little section of the impression no fair i guess i guess so but i think it's a great feature okay i i i don't remember uh if it certainly wasn't um explicitly uh articulated in the presentation well i mean if they've gone that thin um the waterproofing is one of the things that will stop it from being that thin and samsung did do the seals on it so that would add to the thickness and if this is a really thin phone then it may not be in there well going deeper into the specs it was uh yes the exynos and it's going to be a was it it's a 14 nanometer processor which was going to help it with its power consumption given the smaller battery ish smaller h battery um ddr4 ram uh let me see here what else is there oh uh fast charging um in uh half an hour will get you like something like a lot okay i believe it was uh fast charging is also becoming something that's more important yeah wireless charging over 50 return wireless charging built in for both standards for all the standards i should say yes and they are going to push the rate yeah they are going to push their samsung pay with this their version of it but it's via nfc the second standard and barcodes so they're they're trying to cover every single spectrum so that you will always have an option when you're using the samsung phone i'll never be excited about that yeah i wasn't too sure about either like it's like i i tried google wallet when it first came out on the galaxy nexus and i had a great time then the carriers got in and started saying certain effing with the secure element then they had to dick around and do that and then now apple pay is the thing and i was like well it's only supported half the war about the which retail establishments have it and i was like it's just a big morass and now you have samsung say no no look we can do it too well they're saying that they could do all of the standards but the thing but the thing about samsung they they they sell the fingerprint maybe yes it's a it's a press type now no longer swipe that is good news yes but that's the thing about apple pay is that it's frictionless right because because of the fingerprint reader when you just bring it near it's frictionless right the screen lights up and you decide if that's what you want and then you swipe right with google with you enter your passcode yeah open it up yeah right and then sometimes the system will recognize as a card so you have to sign or put in your pin right so i mean like the the levels of friction for google wallet are still quite high whereas on apple pay it's friction less i'm quite certain that samsung pay right so if if there is an android version on on a phone that is frictionless then that could be quite interesting yeah and i'm quite certain that that that is what it is because they made a big deal about how their version of pay will cover 90 of all of the um places available in terminals and stuff okay all right um i didn't get to the the other like obvious spec uh 5.1 inch screen quad hd oh likes well over 500 pixels per inch stupid yeah waste waste of resources total waste of resources yeah i'm trying to think of what is it like yeah like the screen points gonna like blow my mind it screams at you yeah it absolutely screams that you super amoled like i said it jumps out of the screen and punches you in the face yeah uh and yeah those that is what it's you know it's feeling like and it's it just constantly felt like you know they're packing in a lot of these specs that if you're into the spec wars you're going to be satisfied no but not not one specific subset of people you know what i'm talking about the people who have bought samsung phones for generation after generation because they have two things removable battery and expandable memory yes these are the yes thank you for reminding me oh my god right but this is also about me but yeah this is this this is also a this is also what they were saying is you know going back to just the fundamentals just like what is in there is what you get and it should work already and if they succeed in that then sure 32 16 32 128 64. uh all of those still available actually not 16 i think that's not a thing anymore but um the so you know the hope is obviously that you know this phone will be able to deliver on all fronts and it did really feel like it might because you have such a lightweight package and an attractive package and a metal package that has all of yeah that has all of the features that at one point or another you tried and you said i want this minus those two obviously right yeah but those are two really big ones yeah right they're certainly the ones people get vocal about yeah i mean oh oh but well no micro sd card slot no expandable storage but you get two years of 100 gigabytes of if onedrive were here right now he'd be throwing a table i don't want that i don't know what i don't want to be uploading all the time it's true oh you're abusing my connections yeah so that that's the story of the uh the samsung galaxy s6 thus far yeah that wireless charging thing is admirable i just wish they had fully leveraged that opportunity to do something no other oem has done and put the wireless charger in the box you're pitching something accessories it's an accessory that's going to cost them more money and it's never going to see the adoption that they could yeah and from some manufacturer didn't decide to eat some money and just try and push this this thing i just really look forward to when you get that phone in your hands and to see what your reaction your your first very visceral reaction is because the first thing you're going to feel is how light it is how comfortably it sits if you thought that the iphone 6 was a greatly designed phone then this comes very close honestly and and i'm saying that on the android authority podcast so yes i have now lost all credibility as i'm sure all the youtube comments will say horrible fanboy i i don't know if i'm ready to live in a world with a beautiful samsung phone that's not a note or an alpha you know i think it's about time though it's beyond time yes well and and if we if we kind of look at what the rest of the landscape looks like for flagship phones in that space this is this this is it for like basically for mwc right oh you mean like it has to be the headliner well i mean it's just timing-wise and everything else like everyone's kind of like so it's basically the m8 right and that's not that's not a enough of a design change because like the s6 is a huge design change oh yeah like a huge design change taking a huge risk on that and i'm sad that samsung's gonna steal the show again and really they they are and it and it's also sad in the sense that they're doing it with so so few things it's just a one phone we're not getting any tablets we're not getting any wearables we're not getting any mid-range phones well thank god they're stopping that because they honestly weren't very good at wearables i'm glad they may be taking a break yeah we're like well hold on let's maybe go back to the driveway okay fair enough but it's just crazy that you know i was standing in that room and there were only two tables with three of each of either phone and i said and i said to myself yeah this is going to be the one everyone talks about this is the one everyone's going to love you know because i i'm having a weird reaction to it right now like i'm actually holding an s-line phone and i love it it's great that's what i mean that's what's recent apps recent apps app recent apps app recent apps no slow down like i've had no problems that's impressive so yes that's the other thing that i wanted to say earlier suspicious what did it make sense though that they would be able to fully optimize their operating system on their own processor well that would make sense but if you'd heard joshua hope there's a second name drop in the second podcast talking about how those things run like they're just apparently there are some laughable oversights and how and how those those processors operate and they're not as efficient as they could be if they were designed better i see um but if who cares if the operating system flows like that yeah and it's and it happens when you take home a production device yes and it's not in the demo room um then that's awesome you have some inefficiency i'll sacrifice seven percent of battery life just you know because they wanted to get it on the market now instead of six months from now so they're fine if it runs great then good food use your own chips and oh yeah absolutely all right wonderful well then you still get to you know have your phones be a showcase for your products and like a just a destination point for your assembly lines of components like this yeah hey cool absolutely and then who knows if this version of exynos will prove itself to the point where it's something that's put into other phones other other manufacturer's phones samsung probably won't happen i know they finally love it well i mean i i'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys think of it afterwards you know because given we were given such a small amount of time to mess around with it but i was i was satisfied with every little bit of it aside from you know versus iphone 6. that's good to hear though i mean at the at the same time i'm i'm glad that we've got like a phone that's not disappointing from samsung yeah yeah yeah you know what i mean like two generations yeah yeah and finally an s to be excited yeah and and and the fact that you know that everyone's gonna go and buy it or it's gonna be the benchmark for your comparisons and all the other flagships are gonna come out and if it's a legitimately a great product then i'm excited to try to take it down yeah right i mean it'll be great to do comparisons to it not because we want the key word but because it's a legitimate comparison yeah yeah so i mean that that that maybe makes 2015 more exciting it definitely does yeah yeah i i i'm still not convinced that touchwiz is is going to be great it's not going to look the way you want it to i'm sure but i i just couldn't get over just how nice it was and and i understood where they they cut corn not cut corners but where they sort of changed it up to make it seem uh as faster than it might be might or might not be in production units again iphone 6 in one hand galaxy s6 in the other certain elements look exactly the same from one to the other like two alike really two alike open uh open uh a folder when you get the chance on that thing background blurs and it floats into your face really really i love that they still get away with like that open and close applications and you'll see that while it's a different type of animation it's the same speed um when you lock the phone it fades out in a very nice way you know there's certain things to it that i guess they all do we just got done on the last show talking about htc stealing stuff from av-8 right yeah and you know everybody steals from each other i get it it's just samsung did it so you know because the question is always what do you guys never give anybody else about it samsung always takes crap from you guys like samsung did it blatantly for a long time and got their assets sued for it and that legal battle still continues and you know what no one at the briefing i was at despite there being a small group but still no one said anything even when i was right in front of the design uh the person who gave us the presentation yeah doing the comparison because they're worried about losing access i wonder what that's like never mind well i i felt like i felt a little weird doing my comparison in front of them because i i wasn't sure if anyone was going to say anything but it almost felt like they were they almost felt like samsung knew what they were doing they know what they're going one spots they're going to get in terms of that comparison and they're just like yeah it's fine but in any case uh stay tuned to android authority for when we get our hands on the galaxy s6 and all of the other phones from mwc 2015 but also tune into the pocket now with michael fisher over here on my left and of course two mobile geeks whether or not it's dot com or that day with nicole scott on my right thank you so much for listening to the android authority friday debate podcast on monday and thank you for for being very understanding as to why that is it is now 2 41 in the morning we have a very big day ahead of us this is the first podcast that i've gone to 90 minutes instead of just the usual 60. so i want to really thank you guys for being here and for for for indulging you know we this is probably what how long is this like three hours worth of podcasting now that's yeah we're having like professionals tonight yeah we're sledding it up yeah are you sleeping right after this i don't think i can i'm so jazzed about the samsung go to sleep you'll dream and you're probably going to bed um yeah i may edit a video but thank you for uh for for for having me on i had a good time i uh i i really appreciate it i'm super happy that i'm you know this is kind of a dream of mine to have a podcast and now i have guests and guests like i said we are every time we come to a show together we should call it the trifecta of collaboration um nicole tell us where we can find you on the internet uh i'm on the twitter at nicole underscore scooter and i like google plus a lot so i'm there nicole scott no comment but you guys can have twitter and instagram i'll take google plus okay we michael where can we find you in the iot uh in the meat space you can probably find a fast food restaurant shortly after this i just i didn't have dinner twitter.com slash captain two phones that's captain the number two phones i'm not on google plus he won't let me wear his holster he let me wear his holster learn something i honestly think it would look weird on me yeah no you'd rip it out you should carry it off well really not rip it off yeah i would rip it yeah i totally don't know with my bulging torso pad this is the ld west original oh instagram same same handle captain two phones i like instagram yeah you know so i found you on instagram and i followed you and then i had to unfollow you because it was weird because you had 5 000 followers exactly and i didn't want to be five thousand and one oh i forgot you told me so then i had to come back like a half a day later to be like five thousand and three i'm gonna get three followers in two days oh no get on that it was later that day instagram.com slash captain two phones very nice and of course you can find me at the android authority website and youtube channel and of course josh vergara from android authority what's going on everybody it's great to see that at the end of the show instead of the beginning of it that's weird it's weird right yeah but in any case i am josh salutes on twitter and on instagram and you can find me on google plus as well but if you message me on there you may not get a response also if you keep friending me on facebook i will not friend you back if i do not know you so please find me on twitter instead because i will respond to you on twitter if it's a good day so remember to keep it tuned to android authority and our youtube channel and if you're watching the friday debate podcast right now on youtube please remember you can find our podcast on all of the various channels including pocketcast stitcher and itunes and once again thank you for the last week or two putting us on one of the top 100 for the podcast networks make sure you keep listening to our podcast so we can continue to hopefully get that kind of recognition and don't forget to review us on all of them whether it's positive or negative we will take all that you say because thank you for listening anyway so keep it tuned here and drop us some likes on our videos on youtube subscribe if you haven't already and remember to stay tuned for all of our coverage of mobile world congress 2015 here in beautiful barcelona spain which took up 25 minutes of our podcast because it's that amazing over the city yes all right everybody thank you guys very much and don't forget to listen next week or actually in the next five days for the next friday debate podcast discussing topics in android every single week nicole michael thank you guys very much once again and i want you guys to join me i'm going to make you do this okay i want you to say the final word at the end all right android it is okay remember to stay tuned to this and all future coverage of android authority and mobile geeks and pocket now because we collectively are all your source for all things androidhello everybody and welcome to the friday debate podcast by android authority i am of course your host for the fdp joshua vergara from android authority what is going on everybody and today we have a bit of a special episode if you are not already able to tell because this episode is being released on a monday but it has been a very busy lead up into the mobile world congress of 2015 here in barcelona spain if you can't hear the sounds of the cars going by and the people walking through the mean streets of barcelona maybe not so mean but they are going to get really busy over the next few days because mwc is officially starting but i have been here for a good four maybe five days already because i've been here with the htc frequencies panel in order to take a look at what you now know is the htc one m9 but that is of course not the only thing that we're seeing here at mwc but i wanted to get a couple people together my usual collaborators when we go to tech shows michael fisher from pocket now and of course nicole scott from mobile geeks the three of us always seem to get together whenever we go to a trade show together and i call this the trifecta of collaboration but nonetheless we got into a rather echoey room and put a mic in between us or among us rather and we all just sort of talked our faces off about all of the things that we had seen up until that point on the one hand we had htc we had alcatel and then we even had samsung and lg now all of the embargo times were before us talking about all of these things on the podcast so the release is far past those embargo times so um we were able to sort of just riff about how we felt about all of the devices but my favorite part about this particular podcast that i hope you'll enjoy is that the first 20 minutes we actually didn't talk about anything tech related we just wanted to share our experiences with barcelona spain so i hope you all really enjoy it for those of you watching on youtube remember that you can find the android authority friday debate podcast on all of the podcast channels including pocketcast stitcher and itunes and don't forget to drop us some reviews so that we'll get a little bit more visibility and thank you for all of you who are listening to this podcast without any further ado we're going to jump into this episode 6 pre mobile world congress with michael fisher of pocket now nicole scott of mobile geeks hope you guys enjoy because we use the last podcast to get to get into the groove yeah for the most part now now we're just jealous well now what what was once loopy is now delirium so yeah now we're just going to start being like oops that phone had butt boobs it's it's the product of us just being here for the last few days talking specifically with htc i mean they're the reason why we're even sitting in the room we're sitting in right now that's just that's very true how was your how was your guys's uh like you know mwc is not just about the trade show and the tech that's there but it's also about the city itself um like what we're in barcelona guys i love barcelona this is one of my favorite cities and one of my favorite trade shows yeah yeah absolutely because it's so focused on mobile and like yes you're like washing machine car blender blender i remember the first time i went to ifa there was that huge washing washing machine bubbles coming out of it yeah i didn't see any bubbles when i was there oh man you got ripped off yeah i said that ifo was my favorite for a little while because berlin's a very easy city yeah berlin is easy and plus ifa's very news focused because everything's in germans you're like that german and then you're like actual names right so it's actually really easy to focus in on like interesting stuff at ifa and then it's it's and it's also in that perfect place where you're like what is everyone gonna buy for christmas right so i you also have this other easy focus in on like these are the last products that are going to be released and for me it's there's a lot of laptops that come out of that show so yeah i'm always like for sure i'm walking around seeing all these great ultra books with my msi which is a great ultrabook i don't know why you keep calling me out on it nobody owns an msn yeah i didn't i had to ask what i had to ask josh what that was is that a pc no i swear i'm going to find someone at msi they're going to give you computers because there's nobody i'd love to yeah let's go let's do a photo shoot and i'll i'll say yeah i'll sit on the stairs they are a taiwanese company yeah yeah it's been i must know somebody there it's been a workforce man how is uh barcelona treating you right now anyway i'm very well actually you know by the way i didn't get to compliment you on the shirt so she given the news that that that was coming out yeah yeah let her name my dad yeah and a couple days ago yesterday and uh this was the shirt to wear yeah yes he has the the communicator on yeah is that right yeah yeah and we'll let it go okay so in barcelona no no it's it's wonderful because you fly over here from the east coast and if you're maybe you live in boston and there's snow banks that are taller than you everywhere oh yeah exact middle of the misery of winter in new england is february for me i think it's a terrible time so to come over here where the people are you know walking around in like coats like it's cold but it kind of looks like everyone's just playing pretend because you're walking around being like this is great tropical and paradise out here it was 60 degrees this is awesome yeah that's wonderful it's like it's like a springtime in the middle of the winter and barcelona i agree with you i think it's a wonderful city um i'm not i'm not terribly attached to it i just i like being here with people who are in our industry who who i like i think we're fortunate in that regard i feel like we don't maybe this is not true for you guys but i feel like we don't often sit around and like about people because we don't like there are people we don't like like you know and then in the same field can we curse on the show oh just go for it um i don't have i don't have a rating on it yet so okay yeah um i don't have a hard line yet make it explicit when i come okay but no i feel like we have a lot of good friends and other outlets and it's really great to see them in person and to just hang out late into the night like we're doing now yeah it's crazy this is like an excuse to hang out that's always the and i'm i'm going to use the such the wrong word because i can't find the right word for it but it's it's the it's the trade show aphrodisiac of sorts like it's it makes the whole experience better you know and it makes it it also romanticizes the the whole experience for you because yeah i don't know maybe my romanticism is kind of high because i'm actually really excited to be here and i'm walking around and and lon who's gonna be on the the cast uh for our next one our posts uh nwc uh show this is his first time here and i just got so excited like oh i know all these places to bring you man like i was so excited it is true yeah and walking around i i gave you the the tip to walk by yourself to our sessions venue it wasn't a tip it wasn't a tip it was a transcendent experience more than that so we're talking about going to the thing and josh's like yeah is there a shuttle yeah i'm gonna take the shuttle over there or whatever i'm gonna get on the bus or something like that yeah and josh is like no man you got it you gotta you really gotta just just walk i'm like well i'll see if anybody's walking i'll see if it jumps up no man you got to do it by yourself you got to like you know listen and listen to the people speaking the language and michael was like why are you touching me man it was legit yeah yeah and it's awesome i mean that's great because i feel like some if you can get jaded really easily where it's like all right or too much work did you think about that i'm sorry it's my fault everyone oh it's fine it's uh it's something that i've really fought for with my colleagues to um you know just just kind of remember where you know where we are and it's not that they have any problems doing that it's just i'm always reminding them you know so well and and it's also like i'm always fortunate because i'm because i'm like because i booked my own tickets for the most part so it's like i'm gonna show up three days early and then leave three days late like i don't know i got i i got into tech blogging because i was like i gotta find a reason to buy plane tickets for work you know and like that's that's actually like one of the big draws of this of this industry is that is that my travel is so consistent and great places and like it sucks that i don't get to choose the places i go anymore and this is like my ninth year in barcelona but at the same time like i love coming back here and i love going to berlin for eva every year and yeah and in nine years you still whenever i see you at a place like this you still have the eyes of wonder yeah you're silly yeah you're not slogging around being like oh god another one of these people who do like i feel like that's the that's that's such so common it's almost a stereotype right this one you know news reporters like oh that's exactly why i keep reminding people you know live in this moment you know it's our work is important we love what we do but you know if you get too caught up in it you might not be able to like what was that that no the bruce lee saying you know it's like uh it's like a finger pointing to the moon and then he slaps the student don't concentrate on the finger or you'll miss all that heavenly glory oh yeah that's just a good quote yeah so you were saying but um don't you feel that the thing that everyone's saying now is that smartphones are predictable we all know what's going to happen the htc event we were here it was really iterative everything's really iterative samsung's put a curve on the on the edge right like it's is that useful or is that just like a wow factor to get people to pay attention to it anymore because there's no real use for the edge on the display yet well okay we're going to get into the specifics but i love that you brought up the more existential question when it comes to what we do and what we're covering here um i think that this year's crop of flagship smartphones um especially here at mwc given what i've seen today um it's all about creating the phone that the phones in the past should have been in the first place it's not necessarily about a massive innovation it's not about really going far and beyond past iteration but past iterative and incremental updates it's picking up the phone and thinking man a couple years ago this is what that should have been like and i really truly believe that that's i'm choosing to be positive about it and thinking of myself like with the htc m9 which we'll talk about uh one m9 which we'll talk about in a bit of course uh i had that phone in my hand i said the htc one this is the one like this feels right but i also don't think that using a city like barcelona is a is a what's the what's the right term for it is like uh it's a distraction you know like i don't think it's i don't think i don't think that's the case it's it's a cherry on top of what we do as as people as as our as our occupation as our station um that being said i've i've spent this is my third year here in the last two years i've never felt like fully safe here i've never felt like i i really was a part of this city but like with that walk and like this morning when i walked from this hotel to 45 minute walk all the way to uh to to where android authority is staying you know it was a slog that was a slog but i still enjoyed myself because it was such a nice day this morning yeah i went to plaza espana today yeah yeah so it's where the the old fira or the the old wc was oh cool because i forgot my wallet and i was like i needed to get b-roll for the intro and i'm let's walk it i guess yeah we're doing our intro tomorrow probably at pepcom or something but um how do you feel about that assertion i put out that led you know obviously you haven't really seen all of the phones that we're going to see at mwc just yet if i'm not mistaken yeah but you know am i am i out of line there i don't think you're out of line but i do take a different perspective because i think it is easy to in our field we um we all three of us make videos right and we like making pretty videos and it's easier to do that when the products are pretty and products are sort of getting prettier so making things look good is really easy i always try to shy away from any mindset that's going to make me try to make a commercial for a product of course and naturally right but you know so so i i find myself maintaining a if i'm airing i'm airing on the side of of critical yeah because every phone if you think about it is what what smartphones should have been four years ago you know what i mean yeah so uh i try to retain the sense of wonder that that because that's exciting that's the only reason we do this right it's just like oh my god i can hold all this power in my hand and it can still somehow be usable and beautiful this is amazing i love what i do because i get to play with these awesome toys but at the same time i'm like people are going to drop a ton of money on this thing bring out mr cynical face yeah oh look he's been here the whole time so yeah i try to walk alone yeah you try to walk down but there's a but there's a difference between being jaded about the industry and critical and being critical about products yes there is right there's a there's a big difference because i think when we're critical we're more passionate that we're upset that they got him wrong yes we were like uh why did you not take a picture before you handed in the sound how did you think that was good how did you not notice this thing here how did you know what i mean like just like some of these blatant errors and and like we all get critical because we're still passionate but i think that you know i think that it's different that a lot of people are just like this is predictable i expected this of course this got better and like there's a there's a way to be dismissed as dismissive in your critique and i think that that's what i'm getting a bit bored of in the industry and that's what i'm getting a bit bored of in my peers yeah right yeah yeah totally yeah they did that kind of persistent that like and come over it yeah like yeah why are you here yeah i do leave right you get out if you don't want to be right but again that's where that's where my that's where my perspective comes in where it's like if if you hate the work at least be passionate about something i i'm okay with someone who's a little bit jaded about what it is that we do people people who have been in this for like a dozen years i can definitely ex but if you're going to stand in the middle of barcelona and be dismissive about life you're staring at a gowdy museum slash church slash apartment and you're not having some sort of reaction you know let's see i i i i satisfy that requirement because i did have a reaction and it was that i vomited in my mouth that was a terrible structure i hate that place don't and don't get me wrong i am i feel amazingly great grateful that i got to experience it on the outside two years ago on the inside of this trip really it's something you should see but i hate it really i can't it's not often you see something so chaotic yet so symmetrical at the same time you know he's vomiting in his mouth right now there's like a poker sour face and now he's holding his eyes because he's crying remember the actual description of what's happening we're not making it out that's true like you look at you look at that structure in any of the structures and you think to yourself like yeah this is such this is the weirdest the weirdest shapes i i know that there's just just just chaos happening but somehow it makes sense sure you know no like htc you know well before we get into the specific devices i i will i will preface everything that you know we're we're here right now it's it's it's so late and we're loopy and delirious uh we're recording before the times that we're supposed to be broadcasting these things we're talking about which is why you're listening to this far after that time and yes yeah and we're supposed to be sleeping getting ready for day zero event starting the event well for anybody keeping track this is day four yeah for all of us yeah yeah and for any of our any of any of the listeners keeping score i have not started one video yet and you're about to see nine come out at the end of this day you know yeah exactly so i have a long long night ahead of me but you know as some of my listeners do know that's the kind of that's how i am when it comes to these shows i am usually up very very late uh but that being said we are like we're saying here in barcelona for the mobile world congress of 2015 uh as always we are already into the thick of it um a few days in we were here for htc frequencies that is as it is called but of course a lot of stuff happens right before the show and uh to varying degrees we have seen some of the devices we may not have seen all of them i probably have seen the most out of the three of us and we're gonna talk about them a little bit what we're probably excited about i will lighten our our flow into this i did mention htc and uh i do want to get h c out of the way because we just spent an hour and five minutes talking about it at length for a previous podcast oh the pocket now weekly podcast yes oh yes yes when that goes up so i mean we can given that we have a lot of topics that we're going to talk about because there's a lot of devices we don't have to go at length about the htc one m9 uh but i will ask you uh general opinions on the phone itself we'll start with michael as i looked at nicole i keep reaching for it as though i still expect to have the review device and i like to refer to um it is uh it is the manifestation of what we were complaining about a second ago with the people who are over it you know if you are someone who is not easily impressed by um changes that are not visually very apparent then this phone will infuriate you oh god they just did the same thing again you know you're too good at that voice but it's not that you know it's opponents about subtlety on the outside and on the inside it impacts quite a few improvements um it is not a i do not think it is a grand slam device i don't think that htc thinks it's a grand slam device it's not it's it's the iteration it's the sensible improvement um done up in htc's typically excellent industrial design and if they figure out how to sell it it'll sell very well they probably will take a long time to figure out how to sell it yeah if their history is any indication and so i don't know i don't know i will say that i i didn't immediately fall in love with it okay i intellectually understand that it's a very very compelling smartphone but when i first touched the m8 there was a something that happened with me and it hmm that's the opposite of blessed family that's right yes and they just didn't happen with the m9 for me so so that's just that's my my situation okay because that thing i mentioned earlier about how these phones are what their line should be like that's how i felt with the m9 like this is the one and i i i i did definitely feel that way but there are obviously some flaws with it and uh you know uh it was it was uh mostly the camera i think we all agreed on that it was you know a bit of a misstep given that it might improve yeah right it's pre-production software and they made it clear that it's pre-production i mean fingers crossed better yeah it has to it must yes it was imperative yes they should not release it with that were your general thoughts on the phone uh i really liked it i was a little like meh um i loved the m7 uh not not so much into the m8 i think i prefer the m9 over the m8 um just because i am the biggest klutz ever with my phones and that is impossible for me like it's just two slits like a bar of soap it's like walk me while you're on the white barb soap that will fly into your eye so like just like as a you know i like my friends i don't want to kill them by the phone i can't carry an inmate right that's just such a good looking vlog it's just slippery yeah and so like i think that the design uh was done really really well the way they squared up the corners like that they've almost over compensated too much with the edginess it's quite sharp but i quite like that it feels very very substantial i do like the two-tone i'm excited that they launched it with four colors uh here here at the show and that the possibilities are endless for the colors they could go with right and i like that they're demonstrating two-tone now and if they were to like i like the idea of silver and black or like a red and black or like something like that i think i think they could make some like really really dynamic and interesting welded handsets and i think that industrial design is going to become increasingly something that uh smartphones are going to have to differentiate on yeah everyone's just getting so good at it if there's something that hcc knows very well is that their design has always been received quite well so to perfect let's say perfect their design in this m9 is something that i'm really in tune with i really do think that they've gone in the right direction without going so far that we forget why we liked htc in the first place maybe it's a question of expectations for me i think when the m8 leaked which they all leaked and when the m8 leaked i thought what is this photoshop monstrosity with this weird second eyeball and like these two round corners and i was like oh and then i held it and then i i got it instantly yeah and now i look at the m9 and with its with its narrow radius corners that evoke the m7 and once again i understand it's it's very pretty but i i don't think it's as comfortable i don't you know you said it nicole said it it's sharp you know when you handle it it's not it's not as as holdable and if you want to hold it you've got to put a clear dot view case on it and you know then it feels like cheap plastic i don't know i keep talking about the pinch on there you know you you have that tactile feel that you know to grip on yeah a little bit more you know it's true it's easier maybe i just like a little bit of pain on my phone yeah maybe i need to get rid of my dish pants but it's also that they have two lips on it right that that there's like the sharp edge of the back and then there's that kind of like limp for it's it's it's not a floating display because the lip is way far down but it's it's almost that kind of aesthetic that comes with that floating display look that i really like and that it i feel like i'm not going to break it and i'm not going to drop it wow nice way to go well i mean to to close out our talk on that particular phone i i do want to make it clear like one of the best experiences i've ever had on a phone is right now on this one because uh we had one other phone come out with what is supposed to be the fastest processor available the snapdragon 810 right and unfortunately it just was not the right showcase for it and we will we will set going into that in a little bit but this sense iteration sense seven it flies screaming yeah it absolutely dreams snares ass and it's funny because we've been spending the last two or three days being very critical with htc being very very very uh honest with them at least you know to an extent um to an extent yes to an extent and um seeing how smooth and fast this operating system is and how much fun it is to use because of just how nice it looks and smooth and goes through transitions very well and i can i can use the recent app screen like so so so seamlessly i realized i really am the kind of person that notices stutter in a in an interface i always used to let it slide but now we're coming and i would love to hear you guys thoughts on this we're coming into an era of smartphone technology where uh stuff like stutters are so much more scrutinized because we know what kind of processes we're getting especially in something like the 810 which is being marketed as being the most powerful processor out there and then we have something like the lg g flex 2 that just did not live up to that expectation we and i thought maybe the 810 is not quite what we thought it would be but it wasn't that case once we got sense in our hands but i mean like lg's never been good at making their ui clean fair right so i mean like the lg g3 you know this is why i can't wait can't wait to get to a certain point later but the uh but yeah how do you feel about that idea because today i had that i i had the confirmation that i became that person after after being the the the combination of i know what a super fast and speedy interface feels like now on the a10 and the last two days of being encouraged to be critical i kind of tore uh alcatel a new one when they showed us their phone and they sat us down and and jason god bless god bless you and your colleagues you sat down and said give us your honest feedback and this click went off in my head you were honed by three days solid feedback like yeah yeah yeah i said what what processors in here this is the 610 in their case and their their skin on the phone that they are releasing here at or launching or announcing here at mwc is a very light skin on top of lollipop and what i noticed was that the lollipop elements were nice and smooth but the alcatel elements were the ones that stuttered and struggled to come out and i oh my god i told i pointed out every single time it happened and when i was done i was i felt so bad and and and and that camera on the idle through they have to be like look how good it looks and i'm like tap tap i'm like are you sure because when you do that there's some really horrifying things that i'm seeing on the screen i was like that was like literally i'm like you think this looks good do you have no kidding but i mean like the the potential for that phone actually i think is quite good yes but i think i think it's early i can't judge them too hard on the stutters and um just because it's it's still not released but yeah you're right i'm doubtful they'll fix it yeah right um but but for that price point i'll forgive that that's the i made that very clear with that right for that for that price and for how they designed it yeah it's beautiful it's light the display looks nice the camera i mean it has it has all of the things you want to say it's got hyper or it's got time lapse it's got you know like yeah well it's got time did they show you the picture in the bar that they uh yes thank you they can see you can see their faces yeah i was like okay uh no but at the same time i get it what was it it was some subs they stopped short of actually saying the price and said sub 250. so it's one yeah so it's 249. okay that's what i was thinking too yes and then there's a 4.7 inch addition that is subject so why are we forgiving where we why are we forgiving interface lag on a phone is 249 when i used phones that don't have it almost at all at 179. well i never said i was really forgiving it i mean i tore them and you won as i said earlier no you did yeah yeah but you said are you um well well i i tend to review a lot of chinese phones right and so like um chinese manufacturers just do not do software very well right they're like it it is getting a lot better right so i actually reviewed a oneplus phone uh one plus clone um at 160 yeah no for sure and like i actually was slow to move off of it onto another phone because you know the camera was decent enough um the ui was was clean uh there were centers but if you just change the transitions then you could you could work around it yeah right so that's my thing is that the i'm forgiving of the stutters because then i just take one subway ride where i sit down and i'm like what do i do to make it better to make it better yeah right and so a lot of the time you can look at the way that you interact with your phone to fix something like that so absolutely um i'm forgiving of it because i can take the time to fix it like there's some things you cannot sometimes just you cannot it's true sometimes you cannot but i feel like with the alcatel phone that you could figure out what transitions you would turn off and what things you would remove to make that totally fine i was just astonished that the person that came out once they said give us your feedback even darcy was looking at me like this this very positive man just changed in front of my eyes like yeah that's that's what happened did you see the alcatel phone yet no or uh took a look at it but i've seen the you know the release and the oh sure yeah um flipping that phone over i like the fact that it's pick it up in reversible direction and the screen will flip to the upside down kiss yeah it's an interesting marketing strategy yeah yeah and everyone's going to say spider-man but i'm still not sure why they were so big on pushing that that mixer like there's a music mixer where you could dj probably to showcase the front-facing speakers right now which were quite loud they were pretty good yeah i have to say um but the mixer the thing that i like about it is it will tap into streaming services at some point google play and pandora will be a part of it and it will just buffer it on one side of the turntable and then the other side is whatever you want so yeah i feel like a photo one touch is still one of those companies to where like if that's what you're promising me okay i just can't wait to see like a house party where the guy has a one cord into a huge sub and trying to do dj stuff on the phone never mind i've seen it my friends are nerds 80 dollar gig i mean the the the stutters and um you know moving from there um into um let's let's let's let's visit lg sure okay and they don't have a flagship phone that they're talking about here at mwc rather it's four mid-range phones which you know what i'm always excited when lg puts on mid-range phones is that true is that a sentence that anyone has ever said because because he likes the bella you thought the bellow was great well you know what it was is um i i have this i have this one portion of me that despite always wanting the flagship phones and messing with them i have let's say i have a lot of relatives in the philippines who ask me all the time what funds that they should get and i always i'm thinking about like the recent android one release in the philippines i was all over that that article that we put on our website i was so happy about it and i hope that it's successful because you know i my dad consistently goes back to the philippines with phones i don't use anymore to give to our relatives wow yeah so you know i i want i want a good experience for you know people out in that part of the world you know um but you know the four ones also darcy had me trained because two years ago i covered every single l and f oh yeah we did that too oh my goodness yeah there were too many not fun there were almost no differences between them i did not do that i made roland do that and we did that's when we learned our lesson then we looked at the analytics on those and it's like well we've we didn't do many people did you group them together per per f and l i think we did i think yeah that's what i did too i did i did i did a single walk through i was like let me walk down this aisle with you and i will just shout things out a good call yeah like somewhat bigger screen somewhat bigger screen five megapixels eight megapixels lg did show us um today was um what me us a today was we're seeing it tomorrow yeah i thought everything in the morning and i do want i do want to that's part of the reason why i was excited to do this for this version of the podcast was to excite you about what you're about to see if if of course what i tell you is exciting to you but but from lg it is obviously the wearables and um you we all know about the urbane not the g-watch urbane just just no but the watch is still in there it's just the g that's not in there see that was confusing at our meeting personally i don't know if it was true or not i i still don't know whether to call it the watcher bane or the the urbane sandwich because there's a there's a urbane place i know but uh we have a silver iteration without the um the the the markings on the bezel it's a bezel yes yeah yeah yeah the chronograph there you go um that's what we've all agreed on yeah there's michael pouts over there the thing you don't use yeah but also a rose gold edition rose gold edition so did you guys already have like some opinions on you obviously you have to put it on your wrist to to get a really good feeling it's not going to fit on my wrist why don't they make a rose gold edition i already know it might because it's it's significantly less diameters than the g watcher right it's significantly narrower isn't it because it is it is more narrow it's definitely smaller than the j watch r i will tell you that well because that's impossibly larger absolutely is it smaller than the moto 360 no okay yes because there's as big as shoulders on top and bottom exactly it has what it is to me the urbane is um a horrible name but also a name but also i like the ads yeah it's it's it is a watch electronically you know what i mean yeah yeah it has the feel of an actual sort of high-end watch like if you were to buy say a girlfriend or yourself a michael kors watch that is exactly what you're getting here except it has an android wear inside and uh i like that rose gold actually seemed to me like a good choice you know especially if not that they're specifically trying to uh say that they're going for the feminine market but i was there when the g watch r came out and they received a lot of flack about it because they stood there and told me that that was for women yeah as like we stood in front of an end cap that had a pilot and a man on a boat and then like leather and then like aviator glasses like well this is for women i was like are you kidding me like just try it on i'm like okay it's funny you mentioned that because as a good friend flo was uh was was the one asking the questions about you know this isn't is there going to be an iteration of this that is suitable for women and as she says um as as she was saying that one of the women from lg you know with her pantsuit on and all that like she uh she i saw her twitch her wrist like she knew what she was talking about like yeah she's right it felt like she knew it's heavy and painful how did you feel about the g-watch shower were you the one that that covered it for you guys i did it i did cover it and um i thought it had admirable traits to it but i could very easily relate to it because like i'm a dude and also sometimes i go into the woods to walk around and if i'm wearing like sasha loves yeah but but i don't know i didn't love it i thought that the bezel was was too thick i thought the numbers in the bezel were totally unnecessary yes and it didn't even rotate right it just wrote it not that that makes a difference because i don't i just spin it when i'm nervous you know like yeah but what's the noise there are positions yeah there are times the screen is beautiful yeah um and there are times that i don't want to bring my moto 360 into because like i bash that thing on door jambs you know what i mean like i'm clumsy and it's it's held up well yeah but if i beat up the g watch out i'm going to feel a lot less bad than if i beat up my my 360. so like it has a place as like a a working man's or android wear watch so what does so what does a fully polished metal frame compared to the j watch r a little bit smaller yeah uh what would that say to you having already used the g watch r to me it doesn't do it doesn't do anything for me because i don't think i don't think it's a very elegant casing from what i've seen we mentioned the watch brackets the band brackets on top and bottom that yes it looks like a watch yeah like the conventional idea of a watch exactly but to me that's rather generic i bought the moto 360 because i like it's i like that it's a circle they decided to make like a can and and make it that minimal and make the screen go and and not have these these things taking of what distracting you from the circle except for the flat tire and then the shitty screen and the bad processor and all that kind of stuff yeah and it's uh the illusion is sort of broken i will admit when you you look at the watch screen off and you're like oh you know that that looks like a watch and then screen comes on you're like well i expected that and then you turn it around and the back has the heart rate monitor on it oh you're just like and of course the heart rate monitor is on the actual wearables the android wearables haven't really been like great no no one swears by him uh the the the band is genuine leather real stitching in it rather than fake that's good so you know there's certain elements to it that they're trying to get right you know i don't know if it's because it's like 1 45 in the morning but i am and i'm a woman and i can't play in the wearable space but i'm so bored of this conversation because yeah because why no no no no no because because it doesn't make sense to me that we're iterating a brand new category of device into something that was 250 years old the first pocket watch was 250 years ago and why are we like praising a device that looks like something from a million years ago trying to be like well now let's innovate how we're going to use this but let's jam it into something that has nothing to do with what we're trying to do with it like i just i'm so and then like but like but is it but it's true like you guys sit there and you debate the virtues of how watched like it is and it's the metal the leather strap with the stitching and you want all the high quality things and you want the luxury and you want all these amazing things but why if we're technology journalists are we not like more engaging on like why why is android wear so crap what would we actually do with a smartwatch like what what what do you want out of it is it simply a notification screen right like all of these other things and i'm just like why are we still doing this and it hasn't only been a year so i'm terrified that if i'm like right now what it's going to be like in a year they better give me a smart watch for what actually works for women soon or else i'm just going to be like i was in the direction of your frustration back at ifo when i was on your podcast and on your live stream yeah and by the way like it seems during these trade shows we are going to be the trifecta of collaborations every single time they get so burned out on each other why am i doing this again are we talking about wearables yeah i don't want to be i'm going to close on she better learn some new facts about watch history michael doesn't know what a chronograph is but yeah i remember i remember voicing out this a similar opinion if technology the way technology has become so great aside from just you know becoming ubiquitous in our lives is that it has owned its own form factor yeah and watches just aren't technologies no you and you know i i kind of got made fun of because i kept using internet we have to own but you know and and we don't have to talk about this at length this next part but they do have the urban lte now yeah okay so tell me everything all right so this is essentially lg creating their own version of the uh timex uh triathlon the garmin forerunner the super high 299 dollar one but this one will probably be something like 500 i bet you uh non-changeable band because inside of it are the actual antennas for lte gps bluetooth all right it snaps on and it is huge it is big if you thought the g watch r was big this one because you can't change the band it just feels like you are putting on a shackle like it loads so it's like an arm cuff it has the look of one of those super crazy uh digital watches from from like it has the feel of that from the 90s okay with the g-watch our aesthetic so it's not but it's not the same casing as the web os watch from ces no they have it well yeah no it's not because this is this is this is its own standalone thing and speaking of web os they have put so many changes into the web os interface for this lte edition that they're not calling it webos it's the lg watch it's the lg wearable platform yeah because webos has a very specific connotation exactly yeah inane discussions i will say the interface is quite lovely is this circular one it's the circuit only okay and um having the connectivity there is great but uh what we were told was it's not made for connectivity with a smartwatch it's supposed to be completely standalone with a smartphone it's not it's not it's not made it's not interactive exactly which to me sounds a little odd i'm still not quite there when it comes to devices like this well i i've been playing around with the oh mate for a while so i i kind of have the concept of like this is by itself and i actually kind of like it because i i i often try to disconnect so if i'm being let me leave my phone but i'm gonna try something else so if someone really needs to get a hold of me or something like that then i do have this on those times where i'm like bad at disconnecting so i've been trying to use like the omit a little bit and so i get i get the moment where that's useful actually okay yeah like not not as like a i had one sent to me and i didn't pay for it and i reviewed it right right but i don't you know i don't i don't know who is going to go and buy this but i do see if i have one kicking around that i do kind of like it i can't wear it every day but the oh mate's not really meant for everyday use i think i spent like four weeks trying to get that with the gear s like trying to understand that that thing that people there's always that commenter when you do a smartwatch piece it's like until it's self-contained i don't want anything to do with it and i'm like i don't understand why that is why would you want that that's right yeah and i keep like but i i feel you like you know what i mean it was totally the smartphone home for a second and just like it would still be connected on the wrist and it was cool to play like inspector gadget for a bit yeah and and to be like oh i got a whatsapp right let me right let me because like the keyboard is cool man like honestly you have that like whacked but this is lifted but this is the very height of impracticality right i mean it is it's you everything you do on it is frustrating because you can't just when you get fed up with the android wear or pebble i'm just like ah this is just where's my phone you get your phone in your thing but when that is your phone it's like i i need to punch someone in the face you know this is like two it's cumbersome it's gonna get out so i don't understand i don't know how i could fit that in the mouth yeah but i mean like the original oh mate was for extreme sports oh right yeah well i do those all the time too there's a there's that's why clearly i do lots of extreme work there's a level of fitness fitness tracking that they're trying to sort of push with this one but it is supposed to be an all-in-one device and i did play around with the call and the message stuff like at the very top of the imagine the g-watch r and right above the chronograph is a small slit for a speaker and then right below the bottom of the chronograph is a small slit for the speaker so you're gonna be able to take calls and stuff like that much like the guerris um but and then actually the keyboard on that didn't didn't really frustrate me as much um you know it's still small and if you're gonna if you're gonna sit there and going like this for a long time you're gonna look like they didn't have sweat i didn't check actually i i'm so used to touch typing right now that i didn't even they didn't yeah because like because i honestly like like swipe on those on on the watch screens no problem oh really whatsapp chat with you ten minutes no way okay don't don't believe i'm gonna take many photos of myself next time i do that okay it's just such an odd thing though because that fitness tracking one like it has the gps it has the ability to track a lot of stuff there's a heart rate motor on it also but you know it's so large and i don't want to say it was too heavy but it definitely was more cumbersome than your let's say pebble like the one i'm wearing that if i was running my left arm would probably be stronger than my right arm because of that yeah yeah yeah yeah all right so i wanted to move into uh i want to change switch gears a little bit uh we will talk about samsung and i will give you guys you know the somewhat you know info that i that i have and how i feel about it then you can tell me but was there anything here at mwc that you were actually looking forward to that is outside what we may know of already did you have something sort of on the skirts like maybe a sony even though we heard from sony that you know they're not really pushing mobile as much anymore totally not it's not sounding for me but i totally have one you haven't done this oh yeah totally okay yeah mine is from your favorite company to call oh it's not you know what is some of your favorite company or is your favorite company oh well mine is from your second favorite company well let's use sisu's for laptops yeah asus uh should teased their zenfone zoom at ces but wouldn't let it out from under the plastic box what's using here uh they are they're not exactly they're at the they're at the trump hotel do they have somebody here yes because they're because their little team didn't come out that's that's why it's the people you introduced to meet you yeah it's the people i met because of you but no my people told me they weren't here they like you more i'm kidding oh god wait did did they tell you that they're not here though yeah they told me they're not here well all right i'm sorry this is we'll talk about it off the air but i no i if they said that to me they were here oh okay no cool no that's totally fine okay i want to see that really bad i've wanted to see it for a while i need to you know i love this sort of sub movement of manufacturers who are doing this thing where it's like it's a camera it can also be a phone but it's a camera you know like the panasonic thing oh i can't wait for those lenovo uh vibes and asus is doing really good with their camera technology yeah what are they calling it the pix the pixel picture mastery yeah yeah they're doing really well with that they're beautiful is disgusting oh you you you get pointy chin you put it on fire low light butterfly box stuff amazing and that's on their 200 zen phone yeah just and this thing is built with a big old like lumia like oreo on the back it's obvious they're pushing the camera i want to see what they can do when they're actually like saying yeah look at this yeah that's a camera yeah i remember i said yes they wouldn't let out the case they wouldn't let it out of the box i was like come on actually what they did i got to hold it right but they couldn't do anything yeah so that when they told me that i was like no don't say that i still took a shot of myself taking a picture with it just yeah i would have done the same thing yeah exactly but i was still looking what's the camera like i wish i could tell you man it was there um mine i'm excited i'm excited for two things the two things that i want to track down on the show floor when it opens i want to go see the yola tablet yes and i want to go see the yes project ara right i forgot oh yeah yeah those are the two things that i'm kind of keen for because like i saw like everyone forgets this but zte at their booth last two year two years ago showed under glass a modular phone actually they had three different examples for how they thought the phone of the future would look like and i made a video about it and i was like guys everyone's gonna watch it no one watched it nobody cared i was just like really and then like literally four weeks later protect ara was announced and i was like guys but zte totally just did that nobody gave a the perils of brandon i guess i could kind of see that especially back when zt put it out because people are probably looking at like a modular phone that i have to put together myself that's why i don't go to korean barbecue steakhouse you know i just wasn't there yet yeah exactly why am i cooking my own food right now yeah just saves my ass every 15 minutes right i think i've seen what i've wanted to see already in terms of like you know what i want to set aside in my mind you know that but you know i'm always i'm always willing to look at the fringe products um i love visiting arcos oh yeah i still love articles we'll never do another archos review but i still love seeing what they do exactly yeah they've been making tablets longer than anybody yes and the reason why is because they started off making portable media players so way back in the day like oh five you had the pmp yeah and it was like the a thick because you had to fit a laptop hard drive in there and then it had a little joystick and i used to watch i watched like kill bill on that thing i remember it was great and it's nice to see them in the android space because some of that language translates to their current smartphones is that french company yeah yeah so yeah it's like articles yeah so yeah you know i i don't have too much that i'm itching to see that's outside of what i know i'm going to see anyway but if i had to say i love seeing the fringe products i love seeing them the ones that don't necessarily get the most traffic on our site but it's still interesting you know you know what's funniest like i feel like wearables has a has a as an ever growing sort of um dumping ground of of sort of half-assed products like every time i come to a trade show i sort of forget that there's a lot of crappy smart watches out there and i'll be walking past rows of them and i'll get it's always the same ride for me because i'm always like oh sweet oh these look awesome and then the crushing disappointment of like oh these are just dummies hey just dummies because you haven't figured out how to build this yet but cool concept or be like oh literally a dummy yeah yeah it's a widget on your wrist or it's like one of the super minimal ones that's like the super niche target like a lot of people like the whittings thing and then because i don't care about what it's just a step tracker right yeah yeah yeah especially yeah that's fine yeah okay here we go so we're about to get into it all right so um hopefully our lives we're going to be going over my usual a lot of time but i'm perfectly fine with that because you know we're having the conversation this is our first since the pilot live episode of the friday debate podcast uh all the rest have been telecommuting so you always have that clock on the side telling you when an hour's coming up but this one it's not really phasing me much because i know we're going to get into it we have a great conversation already so i hope the listeners have been enjoying us hanging out that's that's that's that's really half of what i was really hoping this was going to be and i'm happy about that already but now um samsung samsung tv in front of us actually i just realized no way those are so rare i was like how pertinent did i recognize that just now um so we we spoke about this a little bit earlier um the yes there has been there have been a few briefs on this particular day but this like i said this podcast is coming up far before after i should say far after the embargo time so um you know this our conversations are back in time uh michael you told me that you've heard what there is needed to be heard about the samsung device what is it that you've heard i've heard that it's made of metal and glass and that these things work together to make it i know it's like unicorns i know this sounds like a snarky sentence but i really have heard that it's glass on top of metal and it looks beautiful so that's what i've heard i've heard it is as far away from the dimpled uh plastic nonsense as you can get i've heard some people say it's the most beautiful samsung phone they've ever held i've heard some people say that it's more impressive than the m9 in terms of its uh look and feel uh i've heard all kinds of crazy things and not many of them negative about this device okay i have to corroborate the positivity damn that one i i was sitting there ready to be underwhelmed by what might be yet another weird move by samsung to put maybe there are two heart rate monitors on the back i was expecting to be underwhelmed by whatever innovation they had but as the slides were being presented each thing made me think samsung finally listened and every next thing they said was another thing i wanted on a phone and it's it's insane it's insane and then i got the thing in my hand we're not even talking about the ss s6 edge yet good uh which technically we don't really have to because the edges are if you've held the if you mess with the note edge it's two of them yeah both sides are edged yeah you don't need them well one side now let me give you the one feature of the edge that was actually really cool now if you if you've used the note edge you know that it's a information panel yeah so when it's off you you you genie wipe it and uh and it comes up with the time and the weather no to be fair when it's off you swipe at it a couple times and then it acts like you don't exist i only find that stupid sweet spot that gets it oh okay yeah here i just keep rubbing it you know what i'm so glad that that that my last thought was just interrupted because i was about to say really awkward sentence so yeah okay um so that's that's the left panel the right panel is a uh people calls and messaging oh i don't see messaging people on calls and when you swipe from us from from that area you get a quick widget with all of your contacts so you can easily just call people so the idea is it's in your right hand you swipe over you hit the person's face and then you start calling already but you assign a color to each one and what happens is if your phone is upside down that edge that comes up from off the ground off the table i should say if you're getting a call from somebody but your phone is upside down and silent it will glow the color you picked that person from the demonstration we had showed him getting a call from his colleague and it looked like a ricer like like a like a like a jdm's import tuner car the bottom portion it was like the ground effect yeah which which you know what i have to say when it happened i was like that's cool but why well that's very presupposes that you put your phone face down your curved phone okay you know if you are being polite out with people you put your phone face down because it shows that you're in the media okay all right or the other notification light blinks and it's annoying and all that kind of i get it right but but this phone looks so dumb upside down on the table with the flare of the curve how many times do you make a phone call in a week or get a phone call in a week that thought came up later and i was like i would never be able to use that yes that's exactly the kind of feature that samsung would have put in the galaxy s4 if it could have like this is this is from that era of thinking where it's like yeah we're gonna get a bunch of people at a party together they all have galaxy s4 so they're all gonna be independent speakers and everybody's going to have a great party like it's like these cool ideas in the lab well there in line's the segway okay because that's one that's that's basically the main feature of the s6 edge that i can give you right now and it's not that there are many more but that's the one that that they presented to us and to be honest the essex edge actually ergonomically feels pretty good whereas the note edge was really weird because this one they added enough of a rim to it that you can hold it comfortably and the smaller size at 5.1 inches makes it a lot easier to hold that's crucial okay so i'll give you that i'll give you that much you have me i'm interested again okay yeah yeah once you have it in your hand you're like wow this actually feels really right s4 how did you feel about the s4s uh like in general as foreign the most boring flagship phone i've ever reviewed it's so terrible really yeah it was packed with the things that we were packed with to make it unboring so or just didn't work right or were unnecessary favorite galaxy out of all of them i am so sorry i was going to say s4 galaxy s or a galaxy note i mean galaxy s yeah uh s3 because otherwise would be note 4 but s4 for me i'm i'm i'm s2 yeah s2 was a lot of people's favorite i think yeah that was like that was well regarded yeah like the camera to today still looks good interesting right but we haven't had to realize it because i really wasn't convinced back i have one still the thing is like i wasn't were we in the industry when the s2 was out s3 was the first the s3 was the first review i did that for me it was technically s4 i was in the middle i was in the interim between this three and four the uh the the s4 was boring so boring it's boring see the s4 was the first one it was like features you could write about all of them find relevance for everything like it was it would like the s4 to screamed at you the entire time you had to deal with it so i feel that way with the s5 which i'm sure is not a thing yeah exactly not a surprise but the s4 was the first phone that when i put it in my hands given given that the you know i was just in the industry for a little while before that when i put it in my hands it just kind of fit and you know the flat sides and it was just the right size it was really it felt right you know and i've been using that phrase a lot but you know that was that that's the thing and the reason why i bring that up is because the best way for me to describe the design of the s6 is that it is a metal and glass s4 in the sense that it's the same size it has the same feel it has the same like but this is the thing surely it can't look like the answer no it doesn't it doesn't it has the it has the tapered edges on the sides of the notes that's what the s4 felt like felt like to you yeah you said that along the glass okay so maybe to you because i cracked two that s4 cost me 400 extra dollars i cracked it just like twice like you don't even mean so i'm like that feels like crap right well i'm glad that i could share my my my reaction to the feel because that's what i felt but i will tell you that all these suspicions that people have that you may have about it are completely true it is the best iphone 6 clone you have ever seen right down to the speaker grill on the bottom that is in the same placement as the iphone 6 one now the difference is between the two and i wish i had my camera to show you um are that the edges of the metal on the sides are very much like the note fours where there's just that tapered lift yeah that's nice the corner buttress it has its own tropes it has its own tiny little design languages but when you put them side by side with the slight curve on the side the 2.5 d glass as if you will it is definitely it's going that's the vitriol it's going to get is that it's too much like it and it felt to me that samsung said we know exactly why people love the iphone 6. we don't have that in android yet we'll do it it's like an android iphone 6 no but like to be fair the iphone 6 is a is an amazing phone yes right like ergonomically to me that's one of my favorites the hardware feels great the camera yeah how's the camera okay so the camera yeah we have a now i'm i'm blinking i'm blanking on the i'm blinking on the front cameras megapixels i want to say it's eight okay and then the rear is 16. and what we have what we have there yeah you can i don't have the info here i think my phone died actually but um 1.9 aperture which is nice and low auto live hdr on both sides on both cameras with smart ois on the rear what else and what makes it smart yeah well it wasn't something that they iterated but i think it's the uh uh it's it's it's the same oas that was on the note 4 that's what i want to say which is an amazing camera yeah like straight up that's an amazing if if i would carry a phablet i would be carrying the note four the front is five megapixels five not eight sorry yeah i thought eight sounded like too much uh the interface on the camera allows you to uh to get into a manual mode that includes manual focus nice yes and um the uh the various elements are just buttons on the screen it does look a little bit nicer though once you hit like the pro mode it gets a little cluttered uh the various modes are still in there like you know the pro mode is nice and then the uh selective focus is there obviously too and whatnot it felt like a samsung camera still just somewhat different but uh obviously the claims of super great picture quality is something we're going to figure out later yeah i mean like i can only imagine that it would be better than what they're doing on the note 4 right yeah i absolutely think so too and especially at a sub 2.0 aperture so the 1.9 the metal styling like how did like you were saying it feels good but like how does the actual metal feel that's that's that's where the analogy to the iphone 6 comes in because it is as thin it has the glass back so it feels a little bit like an xperia in that way but really when you have it in your hand the metal feels cold to your touch and it's just narrow enough that you're able to have a grip on it that's super great and it's also very light phone it's a very light phone so once i did my comparison video with the iphone 6 it felt like i was holding the same phone how many milliamperes is this uh the battery yeah it's something like 26 80. they brought it down in size didn't they yes because the uh the the operating the uh the processor and this is the part that i wanted to get to um because i need to talk to you about the software um yeah i need to ask you about this yeah you need to talk about the software the um the processor yeah worldwide globally exynos no more qualcomm right and um a bit of a precedent i have to say um that makes me hella nervous because we get the exynos versions in taiwan and they are nowhere near as good no they're not okay but they were not compared to the crate snapdragons and that is not what they ate 810 but it's the ui experience no i know but the yeah well anyway well the ui has been uh updated to the lollipop edition obviously and there are a lot of aesthetic changes to it um it actually kind of feels like uh they've minimized it a little bit a little bit a little bit i won't say a lot um there there are certain elements to it that have been optimized for this particular experience and the one that will get that wow factor from you is the double tap the home button to launch the camera now what you're going to do is you're going to double tap that thing and within a fraction of a second and what happens then that the camera just sort of slides up from the bottom in a fraction of a second cool and the best way for me to describe it is that most if not all the interface feels like that and cool super surprised i was i was floored okay this is why i keep bringing up the idea that this is where we're scrutinizing performance so much because these processors are supposed to be amazing right you know there's really no excuse for them yeah and if you can't nail moving around your your home screens like how like what hope do you have of doing anything i do obviously we will when we're doing our actual reviews these opinions might change or in the think of like you know sure but i honestly i i was floored by what what that software performance was like now the most important question about the software experience is when you tap on interface elements does the phone make a sound like you're dripping water in a cup no oh thank god see that's what i'm saying minimize a little bit you know and it just feels like yeah i mean briefing is still there which yeah the flip floor you can take it out though you can take it out yeah uh but i i don't know i i i did i hit the the recent apps button and i kept going through the cards and i went everywhere else and then i brought down the notification drop down and i just really didn't feel like i was being slowed down at all that's great okay that is great okay that's great okay i think that though is the experience i had in the note 4. the note 4 didn't didn't bog down on me almost ever the s5 even was speedy when i when i reviewed it better though the the excellence s5 was a disaster no the exodus versions of all those were tuition yeah no totally that was always the case but the the snapdragon ones were good but almost but it's so it hasn't been about speed so much i mean touchwiz still is heavy and it feels heavier over time and that's a problem that all they all have but it's just ugly as sin so have they fixed that like do the is it at all modern it's still colorful and bubbly and you know but but it to me it didn't feel anything like the note 4 touchwiz i have to say it didn't feel like it while it still punched you in the face with color and some of its features are still in your face because of the notification drop down it somehow felt very different it's transitions when you hit an application it sort of like floats in from the bottom and then comes up and then when you hit the home button it slides down as if you're putting it away and you know very very i hate to say it but very ios like movements in in and out of applications and menus and because of how smooth they were because of how it felt like there wasn't much keeping it from doing what it had to do it was a very interesting experience um samsung made it very clear to us at our briefing that uh they wanted to go back to fundamentals to create a phone that focused on what they knew was right and what they knew was going to work and just refine on those things so from a design standpoint i think they succeeded despite where their inspirations came from it feels great it looks pretty great because the the backings on these are all translucent so it's not just like a solid color but because it's glass it had that reflection you could almost feel like you could see right through the back um so design actually is pretty good already the software experience and and and the the performance to me it's i don't know they might have hit it out of the park at this point how are they doing the waterproofing now that wasn't really presented and i know darcy asked that question but i don't have that information right now and um because if they remove that that's going to be a huge i think they did remove it that's that's terrible that's terrible it's a requirement for you um now that i have it yeah like after having it on the s5 having it on the z3 um i think all phones should just be waterproof i mean i don't i don't see like after having it i don't see why i wouldn't have that like as like a protective option of just against accident accidents if i'm gonna keep this expensive device for this long how many times have has someone spilled a drink on my phone sure i mean i maybe hang out at the bar too much i don't know but you know what i mean like it's just one of those things and like condoms i live in a country that's quite hot yeah and you put your humidity you put your phone down beside a drink and then suddenly it's sitting in a puddle yeah you know it's just like and i've had phones that i've taken in there like you dropped it or it's it's wet inside i'm just like that's just the humidity of this country i'm sorry i brought this phone from a dry land to a wetland right right so i for for me it is really important that that it has that okay i think yeah good i don't think that's that's representative said because i i spend half the year on it on the beach or on a boat so it's very important to me too yeah okay but i think we are a huge minority of people i've never had someone ask me like it's like oh man i need a waterproof phone really bad unless this was like someone who worked on a boat so like i think it's a it's a regionally specific thing i get that from women yeah yeah i i've started tracking that actually um yeah i've actually started tracking that among among my friends when we go through features that we want and i'll throw it out there i'm like what what about waterproof women more than men say yes to that yeah i just feel like they maybe put it into the s5 thinking that a lot of people were going to hail this as a great is a great thing and i feel like no one really talked about it afterwards you know it wasn't it wasn't covered very well in our little section of the impression no fair i guess i guess so but i think it's a great feature okay i i i don't remember uh if it certainly wasn't um explicitly uh articulated in the presentation well i mean if they've gone that thin um the waterproofing is one of the things that will stop it from being that thin and samsung did do the seals on it so that would add to the thickness and if this is a really thin phone then it may not be in there well going deeper into the specs it was uh yes the exynos and it's going to be a was it it's a 14 nanometer processor which was going to help it with its power consumption given the smaller battery ish smaller h battery um ddr4 ram uh let me see here what else is there oh uh fast charging um in uh half an hour will get you like something like a lot okay i believe it was uh fast charging is also becoming something that's more important yeah wireless charging over 50 return wireless charging built in for both standards for all the standards i should say yes and they are going to push the rate yeah they are going to push their samsung pay with this their version of it but it's via nfc the second standard and barcodes so they're they're trying to cover every single spectrum so that you will always have an option when you're using the samsung phone i'll never be excited about that yeah i wasn't too sure about either like it's like i i tried google wallet when it first came out on the galaxy nexus and i had a great time then the carriers got in and started saying certain effing with the secure element then they had to dick around and do that and then now apple pay is the thing and i was like well it's only supported half the war about the which retail establishments have it and i was like it's just a big morass and now you have samsung say no no look we can do it too well they're saying that they could do all of the standards but the thing but the thing about samsung they they they sell the fingerprint maybe yes it's a it's a press type now no longer swipe that is good news yes but that's the thing about apple pay is that it's frictionless right because because of the fingerprint reader when you just bring it near it's frictionless right the screen lights up and you decide if that's what you want and then you swipe right with google with you enter your passcode yeah open it up yeah right and then sometimes the system will recognize as a card so you have to sign or put in your pin right so i mean like the the levels of friction for google wallet are still quite high whereas on apple pay it's friction less i'm quite certain that samsung pay right so if if there is an android version on on a phone that is frictionless then that could be quite interesting yeah and i'm quite certain that that that is what it is because they made a big deal about how their version of pay will cover 90 of all of the um places available in terminals and stuff okay all right um i didn't get to the the other like obvious spec uh 5.1 inch screen quad hd oh likes well over 500 pixels per inch stupid yeah waste waste of resources total waste of resources yeah i'm trying to think of what is it like yeah like the screen points gonna like blow my mind it screams at you yeah it absolutely screams that you super amoled like i said it jumps out of the screen and punches you in the face yeah uh and yeah those that is what it's you know it's feeling like and it's it just constantly felt like you know they're packing in a lot of these specs that if you're into the spec wars you're going to be satisfied no but not not one specific subset of people you know what i'm talking about the people who have bought samsung phones for generation after generation because they have two things removable battery and expandable memory yes these are the yes thank you for reminding me oh my god right but this is also about me but yeah this is this this is also a this is also what they were saying is you know going back to just the fundamentals just like what is in there is what you get and it should work already and if they succeed in that then sure 32 16 32 128 64. uh all of those still available actually not 16 i think that's not a thing anymore but um the so you know the hope is obviously that you know this phone will be able to deliver on all fronts and it did really feel like it might because you have such a lightweight package and an attractive package and a metal package that has all of yeah that has all of the features that at one point or another you tried and you said i want this minus those two obviously right yeah but those are two really big ones yeah right they're certainly the ones people get vocal about yeah i mean oh oh but well no micro sd card slot no expandable storage but you get two years of 100 gigabytes of if onedrive were here right now he'd be throwing a table i don't want that i don't know what i don't want to be uploading all the time it's true oh you're abusing my connections yeah so that that's the story of the uh the samsung galaxy s6 thus far yeah that wireless charging thing is admirable i just wish they had fully leveraged that opportunity to do something no other oem has done and put the wireless charger in the box you're pitching something accessories it's an accessory that's going to cost them more money and it's never going to see the adoption that they could yeah and from some manufacturer didn't decide to eat some money and just try and push this this thing i just really look forward to when you get that phone in your hands and to see what your reaction your your first very visceral reaction is because the first thing you're going to feel is how light it is how comfortably it sits if you thought that the iphone 6 was a greatly designed phone then this comes very close honestly and and i'm saying that on the android authority podcast so yes i have now lost all credibility as i'm sure all the youtube comments will say horrible fanboy i i don't know if i'm ready to live in a world with a beautiful samsung phone that's not a note or an alpha you know i think it's about time though it's beyond time yes well and and if we if we kind of look at what the rest of the landscape looks like for flagship phones in that space this is this this is it for like basically for mwc right oh you mean like it has to be the headliner well i mean it's just timing-wise and everything else like everyone's kind of like so it's basically the m8 right and that's not that's not a enough of a design change because like the s6 is a huge design change oh yeah like a huge design change taking a huge risk on that and i'm sad that samsung's gonna steal the show again and really they they are and it and it's also sad in the sense that they're doing it with so so few things it's just a one phone we're not getting any tablets we're not getting any wearables we're not getting any mid-range phones well thank god they're stopping that because they honestly weren't very good at wearables i'm glad they may be taking a break yeah we're like well hold on let's maybe go back to the driveway okay fair enough but it's just crazy that you know i was standing in that room and there were only two tables with three of each of either phone and i said and i said to myself yeah this is going to be the one everyone talks about this is the one everyone's going to love you know because i i'm having a weird reaction to it right now like i'm actually holding an s-line phone and i love it it's great that's what i mean that's what's recent apps recent apps app recent apps app recent apps no slow down like i've had no problems that's impressive so yes that's the other thing that i wanted to say earlier suspicious what did it make sense though that they would be able to fully optimize their operating system on their own processor well that would make sense but if you'd heard joshua hope there's a second name drop in the second podcast talking about how those things run like they're just apparently there are some laughable oversights and how and how those those processors operate and they're not as efficient as they could be if they were designed better i see um but if who cares if the operating system flows like that yeah and it's and it happens when you take home a production device yes and it's not in the demo room um then that's awesome you have some inefficiency i'll sacrifice seven percent of battery life just you know because they wanted to get it on the market now instead of six months from now so they're fine if it runs great then good food use your own chips and oh yeah absolutely all right wonderful well then you still get to you know have your phones be a showcase for your products and like a just a destination point for your assembly lines of components like this yeah hey cool absolutely and then who knows if this version of exynos will prove itself to the point where it's something that's put into other phones other other manufacturer's phones samsung probably won't happen i know they finally love it well i mean i i'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys think of it afterwards you know because given we were given such a small amount of time to mess around with it but i was i was satisfied with every little bit of it aside from you know versus iphone 6. that's good to hear though i mean at the at the same time i'm i'm glad that we've got like a phone that's not disappointing from samsung yeah yeah yeah you know what i mean like two generations yeah yeah and finally an s to be excited yeah and and and the fact that you know that everyone's gonna go and buy it or it's gonna be the benchmark for your comparisons and all the other flagships are gonna come out and if it's a legitimately a great product then i'm excited to try to take it down yeah right i mean it'll be great to do comparisons to it not because we want the key word but because it's a legitimate comparison yeah yeah so i mean that that that maybe makes 2015 more exciting it definitely does yeah yeah i i i'm still not convinced that touchwiz is is going to be great it's not going to look the way you want it to i'm sure but i i just couldn't get over just how nice it was and and i understood where they they cut corn not cut corners but where they sort of changed it up to make it seem uh as faster than it might be might or might not be in production units again iphone 6 in one hand galaxy s6 in the other certain elements look exactly the same from one to the other like two alike really two alike open uh open uh a folder when you get the chance on that thing background blurs and it floats into your face really really i love that they still get away with like that open and close applications and you'll see that while it's a different type of animation it's the same speed um when you lock the phone it fades out in a very nice way you know there's certain things to it that i guess they all do we just got done on the last show talking about htc stealing stuff from av-8 right yeah and you know everybody steals from each other i get it it's just samsung did it so you know because the question is always what do you guys never give anybody else about it samsung always takes crap from you guys like samsung did it blatantly for a long time and got their assets sued for it and that legal battle still continues and you know what no one at the briefing i was at despite there being a small group but still no one said anything even when i was right in front of the design uh the person who gave us the presentation yeah doing the comparison because they're worried about losing access i wonder what that's like never mind well i i felt like i felt a little weird doing my comparison in front of them because i i wasn't sure if anyone was going to say anything but it almost felt like they were they almost felt like samsung knew what they were doing they know what they're going one spots they're going to get in terms of that comparison and they're just like yeah it's fine but in any case uh stay tuned to android authority for when we get our hands on the galaxy s6 and all of the other phones from mwc 2015 but also tune into the pocket now with michael fisher over here on my left and of course two mobile geeks whether or not it's dot com or that day with nicole scott on my right thank you so much for listening to the android authority friday debate podcast on monday and thank you for for being very understanding as to why that is it is now 2 41 in the morning we have a very big day ahead of us this is the first podcast that i've gone to 90 minutes instead of just the usual 60. so i want to really thank you guys for being here and for for for indulging you know we this is probably what how long is this like three hours worth of podcasting now that's yeah we're having like professionals tonight yeah we're sledding it up yeah are you sleeping right after this i don't think i can i'm so jazzed about the samsung go to sleep you'll dream and you're probably going to bed um yeah i may edit a video but thank you for uh for for for having me on i had a good time i uh i i really appreciate it i'm super happy that i'm you know this is kind of a dream of mine to have a podcast and now i have guests and guests like i said we are every time we come to a show together we should call it the trifecta of collaboration um nicole tell us where we can find you on the internet uh i'm on the twitter at nicole underscore scooter and i like google plus a lot so i'm there nicole scott no comment but you guys can have twitter and instagram i'll take google plus okay we michael where can we find you in the iot uh in the meat space you can probably find a fast food restaurant shortly after this i just i didn't have dinner twitter.com slash captain two phones that's captain the number two phones i'm not on google plus he won't let me wear his holster he let me wear his holster learn something i honestly think it would look weird on me yeah no you'd rip it out you should carry it off well really not rip it off yeah i would rip it yeah i totally don't know with my bulging torso pad this is the ld west original oh instagram same same handle captain two phones i like instagram yeah you know so i found you on instagram and i followed you and then i had to unfollow you because it was weird because you had 5 000 followers exactly and i didn't want to be five thousand and one oh i forgot you told me so then i had to come back like a half a day later to be like five thousand and three i'm gonna get three followers in two days oh no get on that it was later that day instagram.com slash captain two phones very nice and of course you can find me at the android authority website and youtube channel and of course josh vergara from android authority what's going on everybody it's great to see that at the end of the show instead of the beginning of it that's weird it's weird right yeah but in any case i am josh salutes on twitter and on instagram and you can find me on google plus as well but if you message me on there you may not get a response also if you keep friending me on facebook i will not friend you back if i do not know you so please find me on twitter instead because i will respond to you on twitter if it's a good day so remember to keep it tuned to android authority and our youtube channel and if you're watching the friday debate podcast right now on youtube please remember you can find our podcast on all of the various channels including pocketcast stitcher and itunes and once again thank you for the last week or two putting us on one of the top 100 for the podcast networks make sure you keep listening to our podcast so we can continue to hopefully get that kind of recognition and don't forget to review us on all of them whether it's positive or negative we will take all that you say because thank you for listening anyway so keep it tuned here and drop us some likes on our videos on youtube subscribe if you haven't already and remember to stay tuned for all of our coverage of mobile world congress 2015 here in beautiful barcelona spain which took up 25 minutes of our podcast because it's that amazing over the city yes all right everybody thank you guys very much and don't forget to listen next week or actually in the next five days for the next friday debate podcast discussing topics in android every single week nicole michael thank you guys very much once again and i want you guys to join me i'm going to make you do this okay i want you to say the final word at the end all right android it is okay remember to stay tuned to this and all future coverage of android authority and mobile geeks and pocket now because we collectively are all your source for all things android\n"