**The Verge's Dan Seifert on Twitter and Social Media**

Dan Seifert is a well-known figure in the tech world, often seen sharing his thoughts on various gadgets and mobile devices. However, he has also become somewhat infamous for his reliance on social media platforms like Twitter to communicate with his audience.

For Seifert, Twitter has become an essential tool for staying connected with fans and industry experts alike. He is well aware of the importance of having a strong online presence, particularly when it comes to networking and engaging with potential followers. In fact, he often uses Twitter as a way to share updates about his latest projects and interests.

One of Seifert's most notable Twitter habits is his tendency to DM (direct message) people, including industry experts and influencers. He has stated that this approach allows him to quickly connect with like-minded individuals who share similar interests. However, he also recognizes the importance of building meaningful relationships online, particularly when it comes to establishing trust and credibility.

Seifert's Twitter feed is a testament to his ability to engage with his audience in real-time. He actively seeks out and responds to comments and messages from fans, often using humor and wit to inject some personality into his interactions. At the same time, he is not afraid to use Twitter as a platform for self-promotion, occasionally sharing updates about his own projects and initiatives.

**Chili's and Four Square**

In a bizarre turn of events, Seifert recently discovered that one of his video producers, Jordan Oblinger, had been checking in at Chili's restaurants across the country on Four Square all the time. This unexpected discovery led to an amusing exchange between the producer and Seifert, with Oblinger revealing that he had initially favored Seifert on Four Square before being followed by him 20 minutes later.

Seifert was amused by this revelation, acknowledging the humor in the situation and showing appreciation for Oblinger's creativity. This lighthearted moment highlights the human side of social media, where even the most mundane interactions can become unexpected and entertaining.

**The Release of T-Mobile 10.2 Stable**

A relatively recent development in the world of mobile technology is the release of the T-Mobile 10.2 stable version for the LG G2. According to Seifert, this update has brought stability to the device, making it a more reliable option for users.

Seifert's enthusiasm for the 10.2 stable release is evident, and he takes the opportunity to share his thoughts on the significance of this development in the mobile ecosystem. He also mentions that Evan Rogers was nodding in agreement with his comments, although it's unclear whether Rogers was simply acknowledging Seifert's points or reacting to his tone.

**Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410 Announcement**

In a surprise move, Qualcomm recently announced the Snapdragon 410, its first 64-bit processor designed specifically for sub-$150 devices. This new processor is expected to target emerging markets in China and other regions, with a focus on affordability and performance.

Seifert is intrigued by this announcement, acknowledging that it represents an interesting development in the world of mobile processors. He also notes that the Snapdragon 410 shares similarities with the Moto G processor, highlighting the growing importance of affordable devices with decent specifications.

**The Tegra Process**

When asked if the Tegra process still matters in modern times, Seifert expressed some skepticism about its relevance. According to him, Qualcomm has largely become the dominant player in mobile processors, with many devices opting for their chips instead of those from other manufacturers.

Seifert's views on the Tegra process are echoed by NVIDIA, which is reportedly working on an integrated LTE and Tegra 4 chip for next year's flagship devices. However, Seifert notes that even this development may not be a direct result of the company's efforts to revive the Tegra brand.

**The Verge Team**

Finally, Seifert briefly acknowledges his own involvement with The Verge, stating that he is part of the team behind the popular tech publication. He also invites readers to follow The Verge on Twitter, emphasizing the importance of staying connected with the community and industry experts.

As the episode comes to a close, Seifert takes a moment to express gratitude for his audience's engagement and enthusiasm. He invites listeners to continue following him on social media, where they can expect more insights, updates, and humor about the world of tech.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGRE greetings mobile accomplishers Welcome to The Verge mobile show this is episode number 72 and uh we've put it together with string and uh duct tape wire and gum couple of safety pins I'm deer bone I am flat SE I'm Dan Seer and I'm Chris Ziggler and as you can see the three of us are here together in a beautiful room in York Vlad is not uh but that's okay it's actually all a beautiful illusion I am not here I'm in Chicago I'm being holographically projected into the room which you can do because there's internet in Chicago it's true yeah we do have internet there we we invented it there in fact A Mir Tech yeah so we're only a couple minutes late which I'm really proud of given uh given how much effort went into to making this happen but uh you know welcome and uh I I have no other banter to speak of uh well we're coming to you from a uh a secret I I don't know if I'd call it like a bomb shelter or what but uh let's just say that this is a a room inside of our office that is not known I mean if you tell them it's the secret room it's really no longer a secret no but they still don't know where it is like if you walked into our office you would not be able to find this room let's just put it that way this is true and I don't know that we're going to get out it's true we're going to die in here another thing that's strange about this room literally Xbox Ones and PS4s piled they're just like scattered side to side apparently polygon use this room quite extensively for their reviews and testing yes and after what we've done to it they are never going to be able to use it um so actually like we've got news big mobile news just today just a couple hours before the mobile show started uh we've got new Google Play edition devices we've got a white Nexus 7 we've gots Awesome by way white Google Play edition uh LG tablet what's it called the LG G g-pad g-pad 8.3 and like the g-pad it's just like kind of a big ugly Nexus I don't know is no we we actually have a I have the the non gooogle Edition g-pad back on my desk it's Sleek it's metal it's kind of like it's not as nice of a build quality as you get an iPad mini but it's a lot nicer than an XS 7 kind of in between and it's got an 8.3 in screen so it's a little bit bigger than Nexus 7 uh it's fairly lightweight I guess but the biggest problem with the g-pad was the fact that it ran LG's god- awful software so the fact that they are coming out with a a Google edition is kind of exciting if you ask me the price isn't bad it's I think yeah yeah I wish there was an option for LTE though if they had an LTE model for like 50 bucks more I'd be like way excited about that so the question is why would you buy this over an Nexus 7 yeah well that's the problem like because for the same price you can get an LTE Nexus 7 and I think honestly not having used the Google Play edition gPad I I I think that you're better off spending the 350 bucks on the LTE nexus7 I'm on board with you but uh if I'm gonna get an LTE Nexus 7 I want a Verizon LTE Nexus 7 and God knows when that thing is actually going to be released if ever yeah okay no no no this is completely acceptable you guys are complaining yeah if you have seen my it's the wait hang on hang onad it's The Verge mobile show lad there's going to be a whole lot more complaining coming up over the next hour or whatever so I mean I I spent a half an hour like mock complaining about visco cam like we enjoyed doing it that's true I I just feel like uh I'm just looking at my calendar now and it is actually December like I went into my local mall recently uh which is a terrify fine experience for me uh and I saw the Christmasy stuff and I was like oh God they've brought out early again and then I realized well actually it's December I should stop complaining it's kind of acceptable by this point for them to bring out Christmas trees and stuff but um to the point about us people complaining about any of these Google Play edition devices just don't stop because if you look at my Twitter feed it is so depressing because everybody is like not available in your country this Google Play edition device not aailable able in your country so all of us European folks UK folks maybe it will get to us eventually but to Google Play edition gPad .3 no so have any of the Google Play editions been available in the UK um well previous ones I believe so but like the brand new announcements I went and checked and it's just not available in your country which just you know annoys a lot of people because these are Global Brands Global News global announcements everybody gets psyched up everybody's like hey it's Christmas I'll go and buy myself something or whatever uh you know it's a new year for the atheists out there who want to celebrate some sort of uh novelty or excuse to buy themselves a new thing festiv us yeah the festiv US and and then it's just not available we just I was telling uh I was talking to derer about this this morning there's this huge and really like kind of frustrating annoying Arbitrage opportunity for Nexus 5es and I think this was true for Nexus 4S before where you you buy them for 350 on the Google Play Store in the US and then you sell them for 500 anywhere else and it's just like a fre $150 and I'm I'm assuming that a large percentage of that that that Gap comes from moving the devices to other markets like the UK I mean there are international tax and customs duties that people not the way I do it Wing oh my god um so there's also a third Google well okay a second Google Play edition device the xeria Z Ultra yeah which is if you don't recall it's got a 6.4 inch screen not big enough for me I like a bigger phone I I honestly I don't know what a Google Play edition of the Z Ultra brings to the table uh no not that doesn't have Sony skin plus you get the worst camera interface ever like that's I mean trage Evan so Evan Rogers is our producer is the biggest Sony phone Fanboy on the planet and I'm trying to gauge his direction to the Z1 Ultra GP no I think I think Evan is on my side here because you know these you know crossover fablet devices the one thing that redeems them is that they have software customized for their size at least especially in the case of like the Note 3 you there's software that takes advantage of the bigger screen it's got the stylus input Etc uh and when you strip all of that away and have a Google Play edition you just have stock Android on a bigger screen and it doesn't run tablet app apps it still runs phone apps so it's just big Ganky phone apps it's not like having a Nexus 7 or a gPad or whatever so I I just don't exactly know what this brings to the table I mean what it brings to the table is um you know if you're if you don't want an S4 and the you don't want the camera on the HTC1 and you don't want the camera on the Nexus 5 which we're going to talk about at length um you can get a Google Play Pure you know Android experience the camera no the camera is terrible really yeah it is it is a crappy 8 megapixel one it's not it's not like the Z Z1 which is the what it brings to the table then is um clearing out stock from Sony's warehouses I guess and you you can actually draw with a real pencil on the Z Ultra it's not available in the UK plad it's a Z Ultra wait a second wait wait rewind you can draw on it with a real like graphite pencil yes yeah what does that mean why would you why would why would you do that well I mean it's what you have in your pocket boom instant stylus but won't you like just end up I I'm confused won't you draw physically on the device if you do that probably is L is so bitter that these aren't coming to the UK that everything is a one word answer point is you can do it man it's like the device will register it that was one of the things um that Sony did they didn't give you a good stylus didn't give you a stylos silo or anything like that in the device but they made it really uh yeah compatible with anything you want to poke at it I bet if you apply fire to the Z1 Ultra it'll get hot that's another wow another feure deep insights more you know from Chris Z power so we did so there's this white Nexus 7 too yes which is awes cares I mean I don't Carew because look at the white Nexus 5 is a POS exctly and if they the plastic on the regular Nexus 7 is fine no one has given me like a thorough and proper explanation for why the white Nexus 5 is a if I had a white X5 here it there is yeah I've been using it for day bring it up here it's not it's not a POS until you compare it to the black one that's when it's like oh wait the black is so much better yeah this plastic it's it's just it's glossy it's very badly textured it looks great then the rails on the sides are uh glossy and flat exactly like the 1X the white 1X which was great except it got dirty the black the black is the awesome that's what I was gonna say with the plus it has the zit on the for the speaker yes the zit I I am going to get you your phone has acne is what I'm saying for for Christmas I'm getting you both white Nexus sevens and white Nexus fives okay uh I could do worse it is not a it that that actually the little AP speak phone thing happening in white Nexus 5 is really quite handy because it's quite a symmetrical device so the so-called zit actually tells you where the top is so I actually like that flipping my phone around it just it makes me feel like a ninja to you know I'm black one looks so much better you can still do that but um I mean I've been using the W and I've been happy with it obviously a bad idea for me would be to go and check out the black one and then feel like I'm losing out but I don't think many people are missing out and that my friends is an awesome transition to the Nexus 5 camera which we absolutely need to talk about because I just managed to Sid load the update today to Android 4.4.1 thanks no two isn't it no no it's 441 and then 442 followed hard upon and so now it's 442 I've actually got the update waiting on my Nexus 5 and I got to say the fact that we're on 442 on Android means that until they bring us 443 I'm going to have Jerry Was a Race Car Driver in my head non-stop is a fine automobile yeah you know because the the line is to 442 you'll enjoy it for like four days and then 443 will be up and there is no car called to 443 right um I have no opinion on the C really I think it's great like okay I think the update is great I think that it's still I think that uh you know a lot of people are debating between a Moto X and an xus 5 uh I think that like we're still easy we're still in a world where like we do not have a Nexus with a great camera like yeah it's better they fixed the shutter lag problem which was the biggest problem yeah they've fixed uh mostly the problem where it uh was just completely inconsistent in Bonkers in dim light so anything other than ideal conditions you just had no idea what it was going to do and it would take forever to find focus and snap the picture so in terms of like straight usability and getting a shot like radically improved uh in terms of like actual picture quality it's you know I don't know I honestly think it's it's kind of a wash it's not that much better but um I prefer the Nexus 5 screen and the overall like feel of the device to the Moto X enough that I uh am with our updated review go check out that I this is the Android phone that I recommend people who are looking for Android phone you cannot beat the feel of the Moto X yes doing it right I disagree I think that I think the Moto X has a has a better feel in the hand I think the software that motorol has actually put on top of Android is genuinely useful yeah no you're right and I think for the vast majority of the consumers who do not buy $350 unlocked phones from a website uh powered by Google uh that they walk into a carrier store and they buy the phone on contract when it's time for their upgrade I think the MotoX is a better and you can get whatever color you want Dan's got it the more time I spent with the Moto X the cheaper it feels to me that's because you feels kind of plasticky you are a a a trite man I want say hang on hang on back back back back up how much did your shoes cost the these were Dirt Cheap these were like $40 oh okay but Chris did have some gold gold shoes in his uh shopping cart there did I almost bought how many hundreds gold Co Hans but I just want to say about the the Nexus Five camera I I I fully agree that you know it's it's overall greatly improved from uh when it launched it launches faster which is huge uh but I found a lot of times it would just miss focus and then go ahead and take a picture with even after the update in good lighting I would be trying to take a picture of something that's sitting still and it would like focus focus focus misfocus take the picture and it's just a blurry mess and like I've never had another smartphone camera do that as often and like just make me be like I don't know if this is going to be in Focus or not better take 15 shots isn't it funny that both the Moto X and the Nexus 5 which are the consensus best Android phones on the market right now have required like urgent camera updates I think it's I mean I I don't know if this is the same with them I don't think I could say this for the Motorola but it feels like with the Nexus 5 that it's just like an example of a beta product that Google pushed to Market and they're like we know this isn't great we know this is broken and I mean if if any of them tested the Nexus 5 as it launched they would realize how bad the camera experience was and they were hinging so much on this is great for taking photos this is great for capturing images it was like a really big pitch of the Nexus 5 and then the Nexus 5 takes really bad photos and then they hurry out a software update that corrects atast at least 50% of them it's like well why didn't they wait two weeks and launch it with the the better software Dan I I have to disagree with you they did test this because if you recall the very first leak pictures of the Nexus 5 were on the Google campus of people holding the phone up no that's yeah obviously they but like the fact that they tested it obvious I mean like unless they're just incompetent testers these these issues would have come up pretty quickly when testing and they still pushed it to Market right but I also I also feel and you're just like you buy it and then you're waiting for them to fix it I also feel like these uh particular camera decisions fluctuate a lot and ultimately somebody makes them very near the release and that's what doesn't get tested so they might have been testing the camera preset to a different standard to a different shutter speed whatever whatever uh and then just change it right near the end it just that's exactly what none of them or like no camera engineers at Google or they didn't talk to any camera Engineers that would have been like you know what do people take pictures of with their smartphones oh they take their assumption that they camera engineer so maybe there aren't any but they take pictures of their pets and they take pictures of their kids and they're always running around indoors you can't lock the shutter speed at 115th of a second it's going to like any camera engineer is gonna be like that's GNA result in a blurry picture every single time and like I want to get to what what Chris like mentioned that the Moto X and the Nexus 5 both had like dire camera updates that had to be issued right away like I went on this rant a month ago that like everybody who works on Android phones needs to stop everything and and focus on nothing but the camera for a year like yes still apply why why is nobody except for Samsung making a good truly great camera on an Android phone you know what's better than everything we've talked about the iPhone 5S right none of this angst applies to the iPhone 5S or the iPhone 5 I will say that Sony finally did with the Z1 uh but it's had very limited availability it's kind of expensive and obscure and it's a Sony which doesn't have like widespread adoption well in the US anyway yeah right uh the issue with a zed1 is also that Sony overcooks the processing so they have a very good sensor but then they also overdo it so their decisions aren't universally to the good but actually to to bring it back to Nexus 5 um I mean I I feel the same way with uh Nokia had that similar issue when it launched Lumia 920 I believe which was the first PV branded device after the 808 if I'm not mistaken and it had amazing performance in low light but also Nokia went a bit too aggressive and slow down the shadow speed because he had optical image stabilization and it was like we we'll take we'll open up the shadow for longer we'll take uh yeah longer exposures we'll get more light into the pictures we'll blow everybody's mind and then what happened is that you couldn't get steady Focus because it was opening up for too long and that's how I feel with an xs5 you know I I mess around with it today and what I'm seeing is a heck of a lot of noise much more so than before the update um so it seems like Google has cranked up the iso a bit but I'm also seeing a ton of the out of focus photos whether it be because of motion or because of the camera fading to focus just being fixed and actually focusing okay like Dan says I don't think it's being fixed alog together but what used to be a disaster doesn't stink anymore right so the I wonder if like testing camera and doing last minute tweaks the people that you need to actually test and like use the camera and verify that it is good and what you should be releasing to a mass consumer Market are the people that know the least about how to describe what's wrong with the camera the people that actually know how to use a camera are the people that like maybe are unconsciously adjusting for the camera's limitations and so they like they're like oh yeah it's you know this is what this camera is and I know how to take picture they could send it to me and I'll tell them I'll try to take a picture of my toddler as she runs around the room and it fails and I'll be like this doesn't work right that's like that's if smartphones are the most popular cameras in the world there people take more pictures with smartphones than any other device ever and you know they take pictures of family and pets and things that move around and it's like and in bad lighting or you know selfies in a bar and it's like these are not easy situations for any camera company to take good pictures in even the best cameras can have trouble but uh a lot of it has to do with how they approach it and and what they prioritize so I'm installing 442 right now right you know the other thing is what I've been comparing the iPhone cameras what Apple does is what Google has just done with its update so what Apple tends to prefer to do is pick up a lot of noise but have the shutter speed right so you you're not out of focus because honestly if you're out of focus with a photo it doesn't matter if it's Noise free it doesn't matter if it has a lot of light in it it's it's not a good photo so what happens with the iPhone when things get bad you get a lot of noise in the picture but that's kind of okay because nobody's really using them at 8 megapixels and they look decent when they shrunken down and they instagramed they like garbage resolution um and I think that's kind of the direction that go has gone with an Nexus but also I think these guys know exactly how we use smartphone cameras to which to D's Point really gives them no excuse for why they're not fixing it um there was this um advertising compaign with Ed Norton for Verizon uh where he's having this misadventure for 48 hours and one of the sequences in it uh he's at a doctor and there's a key in his stomach and he's like I've got to take a picture of it and he does this flipping the phone around it's Droid Max it's a massive F but he does this flipping a phone around his hand like dto was just doing I'm not as skilled to demonstrate that but he just flips the phone around and he's like Snap took a really quick picture boom and he's got a photo of the ultrasound of the key in his stomach it's like that's what people want they want to whip out the phone take the photo not worry about it I'll be like was that quick enough did I Focus did the camera Focus do I want to take a redundant shot like d was saying you just want to take one but rewind for a second we still need to acknowledge the fact that that gesture for taking a photo is stupid and should be ashamed of dodg it's the worst I think once you once you nail it yeah just it's just yeah but I mean in that case it was just him showing up he was like the guy flipping a coin on his knuckles or whatever he showing off there's been Samsung years ago had one where that you would like turn the screen on and then hold the camera up and or hold the phone up and then rotate it uh horizontally and it would supposedly launch a camera and that was so much more ridiculous and cumbersome compared to just pulling it out of your pocket going like this and taking a picture you can do it in the same move boom how about just a button or better what the iPhone does which is just slide up from the bottom of the lock screen boom slide up from the bottom yeah that's all you do isn't that bring up command center no uh not if you do the lower right corner oh from the from the one corner you can do that on Android there's the there's on the there's which is why you don't need the gesture never but you can do it from any app with the with the MotoX it never works for me anyway I sit there going like this and nothing happens they're just trolling You it works for everybody but you um I need you guys to send me a Moto X I've never had one for you guys have the G over there same thing yeah but looks the same shut up you I got a funny story about my Moto X cuz I I I broke down and I bought one during that sale last week when when Motorola finally got it sale right and uh they were supposed to deliver it to me yesterday but because of this massive winter storm that's been sweeping across the country it's delayed and they said that it would be guaranteed by 8800 p.m. tonight at my door and it was in Memphis Tennessee at noon which is like an 18-hour drive from my door or a 5 hour flight in what is still a winter storm so I I don't know if I'm gonna get it or not but that that's my really funny Moto X story well if if you uh if you don't and you no longer want it because it took too long let me know and I'll buy it off you for hundred bucks it's a good deal I'm just I'm people are just side chatting me like madman um you held up a phone earlier and I think we should talk about it yeah sure this is the LG Flex Flex G Flex and LG is not a phone unless it's got a g in its name LG G Flex and it is you guys see that I know I'm kind of far from the camera but I think you can see Banana Phone Banana Phone going on here I jealous H don't be listen Vlad we'll send you one of these can we make it self live on the air so the glex is the one of the their first phones on the market with a curved display uh and it's got a 6-inch AMOLED display it's 720p resolution but this one has a we said banana phone earlier and that's really the easiest way to describe it it's got a curve Somebody explain this to me because it's a this is a Korean model and so it's got an antenna for Korean TV this would not be in the US version when it comes no no I like I like to think of this as being a a cell you know a selling an aeriel yeah uh but yeah so it's got a curved display and it actually is legitimately curved uh it looks like to me it looks like the original Galaxy Nexus just like more so like the curve is more more more defined and the curve is bigger you can actually Flex the device uh a couple of millimeters and it will bounce back uh but because of the other components in there you can you can break it you can go too far um and so you know the curve display is like it LG says that it minimizes Reflections which actually does happen um and it it aids in when you're watching video and things like that because you have a fewer Reflections but otherwise it really feels like a gimmick at this point point and it's not a great display it's really big and not as high resolution as others um and then the other thing is this the back of the phone which Chris is desperately trying to break um I just want to get the battery out yeah so oh the flexible battery yeah the battery inside is curved uh to match the curve here which which LG developed but the back of the phone has this finish on it that's supposed to be like a selfhealing thing they call it uh so everyone's been calling it The Wolverine phone and it will recover from from light scratches so if your keys Bang into it if you scratch it while uh putting it down on a rough surface it will heal pretty quickly but we tested it with a pocket knife I think uh and I think we put some permanent damage in it well nice oh yeah I can feel it and no no amount of time has has recovered the the scratch on that one actually to to that point that uh s repairing thing might be helpful because on my LG2 I've managed to get a whole series of small scratches on the screen on what's stupid is like you know the the camera lens is still exposed so that's got to be like a hardened sapphire glass to prevent scratches that I mean I guess you only get that from man hard and sa go you get from nobody else does it the when are we gonna get a curved virtue yes when is a curved virt coming you know it's a very good question because uh I was just looking at um I had to do a witty tweet about the downfall of noia and how it was predicted by The Matrix when uh Neo drops his awesome Nokia banana phone and I understand um the device that Nokia released alongside the Banana Phone that was in the movie was like the first series 40 device am I accurate there Chris I think that's too old to be series 40 that would have been I don't know the pred I don't think it was called series 40 back did you get the back off no I can't get it off um I mean it was was probably related uh Vlad but I don't think it was called series 40 at that time fair enough but but that just got me thinking if VTO would actually do one of those banana phones I would just love it yeah I don't care series 40 yeah absolutely well modern series 40 I mean like if you look at the very latest series 40 ashop phones that no you just said modern series 40 ultimate oy no like it's a very different thing than like it's been so long since I've used a series 4 phone that and like what what's in my mind's eye of what series 40 is is very different from what NOK is actually selling right like they they're selling like a a phone that looks and feels from no selling but not from what virt is selling those guys are using anient stuff no isn't the isn't the latest signature a touchcreen with a keypad below it no oh I'm pretty sure it's not I don't want a signature anymore I was I was about to spend 10gs on a signature but no I'm not the scit is so SM if you put your thumb on it to try to use it as a touch screen you'll cover the entire thing uh by the way I was telling people in the office yesterday Vlad um that when I do get my virtue I'm going to have them custom make it out of human skin wow I I I think that's the plan because you know you can get custom uh Leathers on it right just make sure that they put the lotion on before you yeah put the lotion on first God LG skin is so bad LG skin is the worst if you have not used a skinned LG phone uh you're in a world of her how do I get to that's how I get to multi oh my God it really does feel like a scaled up Galaxy Nexus though in the hand yeah that's exactly what it feels like to uh so you know this is different than the uh what's the Samsung one called I'm like totally blank the gxy Galaxy Round right is the is the other one and that curves the other way so instead of a banana phone I don't know what you'd call that Taco phone uh and so that's exactly well I don't know I think that we can't we can't because of the the engage yeah we can't call anything the Taco phone unless it's the end gauge right but it's got a curve along that axis which is which is the opposite of the the LG's axis and I haven't used the round yet so I don't know if that's a better curve or not no I haven't used it yet and I can tell you that it's not well it just doesn't match the face like unless you never use it for calling I mean it's so big though that I don't think the curve really presents much of an issue when you put it up to your face like because it's like this why right yeah honestly guys I really feel like both of these devices Samsung and LG they're not doing Justice to the idea of a cur phone because when then picked up the 6 inch glex the first thing that struck me is just that it's a massive fo not that it's a curved one and and that's the annoying thing if you have a curve on something like the G2 uh and by the way the antenna isn't unique to the glex the LG G2 for Korea also has an antenna yeah they just have different priorities to us um if you have that curve but on a ergonomically sound device something that's actually a phone curve like the glex I I mean I don't want to pay a massive premium for it but it just appeals to me I like it and particularly if it does actually flex and it has all those selfhealing properties and whatnot I think that's a step in the right direction well like I said before the real endgame the holy grail for what they're trying to do with these devices is not these devices but it's the it's the ultimate goal of creating flexible phones right which are still a few years out off but the Step One in that is making flexible displays and flexible batteries you need a flexible glass layer like where is this plastic on top I think I don't even know yeah no I mean they have a lot of work to do but and flexible cameras and I mean there's so much more before you have a phone that you can roll up in your pocket right yeah like Nokia had that Pro we talked about before no had that prototype a couple years ago TST it yeah so can we talk about AT&T's new plan uh I'd like to but I I have no idea or like it's a complete mystery to me no literally I mean this happens every time any carrier any carrier comes out with a new set of plans deer myself and Dante Daio who wrote our our post on this yeah get on the phone for a full 24 hours and try to figure out what the is going on yeah no it's so I mean like the short version that AT&T wants you to hear is they're finally uh not charging you the subsidy once you've paid off your two-year contract on your did you hear what I said yes you're right you're right this is a message at AT&T and in theory that's great because yeah why should I be paying you an extra however many bucks a month uh if I'm not under contract and I want that separated out and then I mean I think you've got to give T-Mobile credit for like getting that idea more widespread acceptance an appeal in the US and so not digging too far into the details uh like just on like the face of it of is AT&T doing the right thing by trying to separate out subsidy cost from like device cost I think if you look at it on the very surface level uh yeah that that idea is the right thing to do yeah but if you actually kud AT&T Next topic but if you if you look at what H AT&T actually did uh a they're not discounting near as much as T-Mobile so T-Mobile gives you $20 off per phone whereas 18 gives you 15 and if you do the math on that that's not the subsidy discount um and B they've made it more expensive for other people who are still in contract so they kind of just move this money around and then the other thing that's really stut out to me is that 80% of AT&T smartphon sold are iPhones right I would bet probably 10 bucks that or more that 95% of those iPhones sold on AT&T are on contract yep so the amount that this affects atd's actual bottom line is so infantes small that they can just do this as PR Goodwill and not see a blip on their on their earning statement if anything it'll make people like them more and they'll earn more money from and and by the way you're not actually getting $15 offc per month because in in doing this they quietly also raised the monthly payment plan price on the iPhone yeah uh by 650 I think so really you get half of that yeah if you if that is that with the 750 the um the next plan y yeah so that's if you're part of the next plan but the thing is like even if like so for me for example I've been I'm an AT&T customer I've got one of their Mobile Share Plans and I've got three smartphones on it with six gigabytes of data my plan is going up because they've raised the cost of D of of each smartphone on on my they lowered the cost of the six G data bucket but they rais the cost to have each smartphone and so it works out in AT&T's favor and if I got 8 gigabytes or if I got if I added another smartphone it would work out further in AT&T's favor uh so it's like they just kind of moved this money around they didn't really advertise any of that of course uh and it's just it's it's all I mean let's be very clear AT&T for for every quarter that AT&T makes you know makes it rain on its investors basically they are they are not going to make any moves that jeopardize that profit margin so every like well when AT&T comes out with a series of plans that seem to suggest that you're just going to magically save more money than you used to you really need to ask yourself well where is that money coming from and there are there are people that will save money it's just the number of those people is so incredibly small if you bought an Nexus 5 and you're out of contract and you're an AT&T customer a why are you an at customer B you'll save a little bit of money right but you're the other people that are paying more per month are paying for that money that you're saving so it's like right can I offer an analogy here which I think is really fitting by all means uh it's when you get a message from your ISP or your bro band provider saying we are conducting upgrades in your area what that means to you is you're going to get downgrades outages etc etc for at least a short period of time so this is exactly the same thing it's AT&T announces opportunity to lower your price plan your price cost whatever and then guys like Dan are like well actually my Bild just rops yeah so it's exactly the same thing we're doing upgrades which actually means downgrade to your service at least for the interim but honestly I I totally agree with you guys anytime I hear one of these announcements other than T-Mobile my my eyes just started glazing over because I know you're going to a need to do enough research for PhD to really understand what the hell is going on with these supposedly simplifying plans that like I I've actually coined a term for this it's the science of obfuscation of value like they want to make it as unclear as possible what is happening to you and they they succeed every single time unless people like deer and I and Dante spend an entire day trying to disambiguate the plans and sometimes even we fail like we find out that there's a math error somewhere so like I me marketing is the obfuscation of value that's the whole indust that that's that's absolutely true but then you know so the the bottom line is that the average consumer especially if they haven't done their research and I don't blame them if they haven't doesn't stand a chance they're just gonna see like I'm sure AT&T is gonna have an ad campaign for this and they're and as Dan pointed out they're there are people who are going to save money on this it's just not a very very large demographic so here's an alternative and you're going to have to hear me out here why don't you guys Americans in general so like all 300 million of you uprise uh yeah partially you know Rebel go against the system's why AT&T can turn the screws like this I thought you were going to say here's why there's not going to be a revolution I was like the reason the reason that AT&T can turn the screws and it's not going to affect its bottom line is because at the end of the day I get better service that's more reliable and faster and AT&T than I do from T-Mobile or Sprint or any other whatever carrier that I can save money with and unfortunately for me that means I'm stuck with AT&T and they keep raising the prices and I just kind of have to keep forking the money over uh because it is a significant step down in service at least for where I live and where I use my phone it's a significant set down to move to T-Mobile we should clarify you don't you're not they didn't force you to the new plan they didn't force me to the new plan but I don't know what's going to happen the next time I get a new phone or add a line or something like that uh that's always kind of the big mystery or whatever essentially the plans that they're offering now are more expensive than the plans they offered last week right uh and that's that's the bot you know I've said it before like to be very clear no one is arguing that AT&T should match uh T-Mobile's pricing dollar for dollar because AT&T does does have a significantly larger footprint and offers LTE in way more places so it's just not an Apples to Apples comparison like you're paying more to get a a more ubiquitous service and that makes sense the problem is is that AT&T is playing uh 10 times as many pricing games as T-Mobile is and that's the frustrating thing if they would just be straight with people and say yes you're paying a little bit more for a higher quality product then everyone would be fine I think uh including us and we would not be going nuts over it but the fact that they intentionally make it difficult to figure out what's going on is what upset or or when their their profits are like record-breaking every quarter and then they raise prices right so nobody's interested in my alternative proposition re let's hear it yeah no yeah I said it's a rebellion I didn't say it's a revolution what you want to do is come over to the UK okay get yourself a contract with free right okay get yourself a ton of data voice minutes whatever I I guarantee you it's going to be less than half the price you pay with AT&T then Jil back over to the United States where you'll be able to roam with your UK data on free oh the the problem arises when and and I'm like oh well just dial plus 44144 9263 do I get LTE does does LTE work in the US I don't although Google Voice charges for international calls yeah you can't do that yeah yeah I'm not sure that it does then but I I will have a very detailed breakdown of this come CES in January because myself and Aaron from our London team we're already on three and we'll bringing our allowances with us I mean this is this is my really really roundabout way just to congratulate free on letting people use their data and their allowance uh outside of the UK they've already done it with quite a few European countries uh Denmark and Italy I think are on the list um and recently They just added the United States Hong Kong and uh some is this is this like what T-Mobile offers with the international roaming no it's not 2G it's it's it should be 3G at least cool uh I I don't know about does three have LTE in the UK it just turned it on apparently I haven't seen it yet uh which is saddening for me but you know it's it's going to roll out uh things are looking up also on a plus side in the UK is Tom Warren he's he's a vone and he has had pretty atrocious signal at his house for ages we vote for um but Dave recently also turned on 4G and now that he can get 4G signal at home that actually improves the signal dramatically yeah but is things are picking up but but he's not using volti right so that doesn't affect no of course so that doesn't affect call Quality just data quality yeah but then again I like guys like myself and Tom we only really call our mothers and grandmothers on occasion everything else is data man that's true that's very true um I don't know do you guys want to talk about the iPhone stuff they've got ibeacon they signed to do a China mobile finally uh well so the the ibeacon thing yeah uh the interesting Yeah Yeah Chris Welch went to a couple Apple Stores here in in New York City uh on Friday when it launched to check it out and the the concept is you know they have these uh low power Bluetooth beacons installed around the score the store and as you approach those areas uh you'll get notifications or popups on your phone saying hey check this out or check that out um which you can see you know if you're at an unfamiliar store especially a big store like Macy's where they're traling this it it maybe Mak I mean it's pretty awesome you never actually have to talk to a human being right if you can go into an app store you can go into an Apple Store walk around get notified on your phone of what cool things are to look at then you can pick the item up pay for it with your phone and walk out of the store without ever having I did that with my with my case for my 5s and it definitely felt like shoplifting even though I paid for it like it cuz nobody was available and I I wanted to talk to somebody to buy it and finally like screw it I'm just gonna pay for it with my phone and I just walked out I'm like I I consider running you walk out it's in your hand you got no bag it's like I I was like waiting for the security agent to tackle me but nobody did um I mean how do you think they track that like they must have they must looking at the cameras to see if you're using the app I don't know it's the only way I I don't yeah I mean I don't know but uh but so anyway ibeacon uh Chris went to uh the Grand Central store first which is a huge sprawling one Lev store in Grand Central Station and um it didn't work and he he he talked to the agents and they were saying yes it should be working he couldn't get it to work so then he went over to the cube the iconic Cube on Fifth Avenue and um he kind of got it working I think um and he found one yes yeah and he he found the actual unit and it's this like metal box underneath mounted underneath the Shelf but they can so they can just put it wherever they want to like attract um customers attention and so you know you can totally see how this would be valuable in a big store that you've never been in before it's a you're not into it no yeah but you're also but you're also not into commercialism capitalism spending money materialism buying things items objects you're not into any of that so of course you're not wait wait wait wait wait I was I was with you all all along until you said items and object object you don't like any of those things glad disagrees with the concept of physicality yeah I mean there's a distinction between not liking materialism and not liking the material world concept like look I I'll just keep it very simple it's like I like the idea of a chair but then I dislike the idea of like a golden Ruby you know encrusted Throne you would you would rather you would prefer to you would prefer to handcraft the chair out of found materials yeah yeah well okay then we I I'll probably use the rinds of like winter squash to make it really rustic I'm sorry I I had I had a thing you wait until they were dry just squishy squash no that's the point winter squash is really hard Ry that's why it's winter rather than summer squishy stuff is Summer squash can you put marshmallow on would it actually have legs or would it just be like a Sol B like a plug or that would depend that would depend on the you know design and development process I mean I would have to iterate obviously I can't tell you in advance I would be just guessing that's that would be foolish just need some if you had to eat that much squash in order to like not only make a chair but be able to design and iterate on the your design of that chair over and over again you I gotta think that would that would play Havoc with h your you know digestive system yeah but but you'd feed you'd feed the squash to your livestock which you're gonna Slaughter for for protein good point Chris yeah I haven't figured out some it yeah some of it I mean I I I feel like if I have a squash a cabbage patch and a few chickens that would be it that and a broadband connection it may and a broadband connection it may be L I'm really eat the chickens you won't have a few chickens for very long okay more than a few I'll go more than a few I go for the eggs primarily yeah but they would be reproducing chickens like they would have they would have smaller chickens yeah I would have to have a as well that that would be mandatory um it's the word bringing it back to shopping no comment yes back to shopping ibeacon please shopping somebody talk about ibeacon it's it's t to me with know when you walked in the Bluetooth thing when the egg goes through be like heyy yes and I a Bluetooth low energy enabled egg yeah no as as a person who hates going retail into retail stores to buy things which I occasionally have to do despite Amazon existence I think ibeacon is a great thing yeah no if they Implement properly let's stop talking about it as ibeacon as if Apple just invented this I mean these are Bluetooth yeah this is just using Bluetooth and um Qualcomm has just announced pretty much the exact same thing with uh I don't know what they call them Gumball beacons or whatever it is so they doing the same process to me what I don't like is um all this kind of unnecessary technology that is coming into the retail process um I don't know like I said I'm just not a fan these aren't really things that you need and I can see totally the benefit to Apple and anybody else who's using that technology because they can track the hell out of you um and there was a few months back some controversy about uh a US Mall tracking people by their cell phone tracking people's location without letting them know and you know you start using ey beacons and whatnot if and if they get popular enough then everybody will know exactly in which store you're going which aisles you're shopping through the fact that you might have an unhealthy obsession with vegetables etc etc I mean it's it's kind of circumstantial information that people can pick up about you no you're right but I've said for a long time and I understand many people won't agree with me on this I want to be I want companies to track the hell out of me like I I want to be targeted I want I want to see only the ads for products that are going to appeal to me I want to get coupons and special offers for companies that that these that these marketers know that I'm going to shop at like I don't want to get ads that that like are of no interest to me like track please track the crap out of me Chris no matter what no matter how much you get tracked I'm still going to send you Dunkin' Donuts coupons so still going to get coupons that you don't want damn it you know what else is kind of depressing to me about tracking and things like Google Now is uh the issue that most of the time I'm actually just at home so looking at Google now and it's location tracking of me and just seeing this big growing dot where I keep staying and up moving instead of like a varied map with my varied life and whatnot it's kind of pressing also so you're that's just you're basically just saying that you're not an ibeacon fan uh no not much of one though okay well it's I I think that this kind of technology is here to stay you know uh shopkick which I believe Macy's is partnering with for their ibeacon implementation shopkick has been doing a variation of this for a long time but using audio sorry uh those of you listening to the podcast Edition not watching the video I just banged my microphone with my beer and then called out in the middle of it it's not going to get edited and post because I've called it out here I've interrupted you where are you going with this deer's a couple beers deep I look I'm saying that shopkick uh had been doing this using audio where they had a oh yeah I was going to tell you that nobody cares about shopkick and why you please I'm too far into the story to abandon at this point uh that had implementation going back at least like four or five years maybe less I don't know but but a while with with Best Buy where um if you installed the shopkick or Best Buy app one or the other like when you walked into a store like the Best Buy stores actually like uh had this like silent audio playing that the phone could pick up it is really creepy it's like a dog whistle basically and then using that tone the phone knows which store you're in it's like really messed up actually yeah I mean so that you find that creepy because there's a silent audio tone that only the phone can hear yeah because they could be reprogramming my brain but like the actual tracking of you you're totally cool through silent radio waves and GPS I'm already like I've already been tracked enough in my life so that like the the special offers I get via email and like the ads I see on sites are like pretty on point like I I see at least one ad for a BMW a day and I'm totally okay wow like please just track me how many gold shoe ads do you see uh actually there's an uptick in that since I went to Gohan site yeah um so yeah I'm just not creeped out by it I think uh if it if it you know there are probably gonna be implementations of this that aren't helpful if you read Chris's report uh he didn't find it necessarily too helpful at the cube but it was day one this is still considered a trial they don't have like the final imp implementation of it could get better um but so but you can imagine there are situations where it could be helpful it's all I'm saying we've talked about iacon for way too long fair enough let let me just point out that Chris you just presented yourself as a completely unreliable witness in this in so far as information coming into your phone is creepy but everything about you and where you're going and what you're doing coming out of your phone to some disembodied corporation that might do whatever it wants with that information perfectly fine but yes right see see this is great this is great if if you going to like jury elction this would be like yeah I I don't think we're gonna have this guy on well good I don't want to do jury 2y anyway that's what I'm saying it's really instructive to to like show people that you have no internal logic whatsoever I I have no logic I have no no sense of like you know what is right and what is wrong I have yeah I have none of that so you're never going to install Cyanogen MOD because you don't want to deal with their by default encrypted text messaging to other Sage mod users because you want to be tracked transition alert was really good right so it wasn't bad so I mean it's funny deer framed it as deal with it I mean there's nothing to deal with I think this is actually like one of the best implementations I mean just to to set this up uh Sage mod announced that it's in by default encrypted text messaging between cyen mod users is coming to its platform so if and it's it's using uh open whisper I yes I believe yeah that's the name of it and if somebody sends if somebody's using cyan mod and they send a text message to another cyan mod User it's automatically encrypted it's using really high level single use encryption and stuff like that so really great stuff but the thing that makes it so good and smart is the fact that the user doesn't have to do anything to set it up they turn on their phone they set up their phone like they normally would and boom all their texts encrypted the analogy for me is iMessage like overnight Apple had like in insane saturation with imessage this is going to be the same situation but for Cogen users like you don't have to think about it it's just there now of course if you're using Cogen to begin with the odds of you like seeking this out are naturally higher anyway but uh it's still cool that this is going to be the default option and and it just it's like a first step in maybe something that you know more mainstream platforms could adopt in the future y so it's cool I guess if you're wored about encrypted text messaging yeah I guess actually speaking of messaging like did you guys see Ellis's report on this uh this startup called layer yes yes so if you're not familiar the guy who like created xmpp and jabber the guy who created Google Voice uh apparently have the same bug up their ass that I do which is like I'm tired of iMessage and hangouts and WhatsApp and kick and whatever else and they're they're trying to create a universal messaging uh call and they're going to let anybody who wants to like embed it into their app so you can add messaging to your app that's like you know the candy for developers and then like the the vegetables are like if they can get enough adoption of it maybe they can replace or get other people to plug into that we could actually have interoperability again see it's a beautiful beautiful totally going to fail Impossible Dream you you realize that Vlad interpreted what you just said the opposite of way the way you intended because he likes the vegetables and not the candy right I was experiencing a bit of confusion yes um I mean so but you know like everything on paper here sounds pretty good they're not going through like the standards bodies because they're all completely seized up uh and unable to like move a standard forward because they have you know no power and there's too much too much politics it's being put together the the protocol and the the spec for it by people who like understood xmpp and made that moderately successful in its time and know what the problems were with it and are fixing them um and I just have no faith that it's G to work yeah so like the pro the big hurdle that they have is developers adopting this and baking it into their apps right yes have WhatsApp existed so you could you could build a WhatsApp competitor in like a weekend is the idea or you could like write an email app and be like you know I'd like to add messaging to this plunk and you've added messaging to it pretty easily uh and then it will talk to all of those other apps so like it's possible we could see a Snowball Effect here um but one they actually have to execute on their plans they haven't you know released anything yet um and two they you know we need to actually see if people will adopt it in a meaningful way and critically none of the incumbents are obviously going to adopt it so yeah so like the question is like not only not only does this have to take off but it has to take off in such a way that it becomes like inevitable and we will start yelling at Apple and Google and Microsoft for not interoperating with it right FaceTime is gonna be an open standard dude but I mean like think about think about a player like WhatsApp which controls an enormous percentage of the market if if they got to the point where there was pressure on them to adopt this they would literally no longer have a business model right yeah yeah so they won't ever so we're still screwed yes this this this problem is never going to be fixed I look no like tell me how it's gonna be fixed Vlad it's gonna be fixed by what how like an open spec gets created like we're gonna have a new spec for messaging interoperability it's coming out this summer from these guys from lir from the new to invented xmpp he's putting it out there an open spec and it's like we're just we just talked amongst ourselves and decided it's not going to get fixed so then it how will it get fixed maybe you know Microsoft will win with Skype or apple will win with imessage or Google will win with Hangouts like okay that makes things slightly better because at least we can all talk to each other but it's through this protocol that is controlled by a single company and depending on the company it is accessible to the NSA like there are problems here none of those examples that you gave really offer everything that you'd want in a chat protocol right and they don't need to for whatever reasons for for their own personal reasons even if you want them there so like you use Google Hangouts for its specific reasons use Skype for its specific reasons iMessage is baked into the iPhone so it's used for those reasons but like in some ways Hangouts is a lot better than iMessage and Skype is a lot better than Hangouts etc etc it's just like you're not getting the best of all of the options together everything that's broken about Hangouts could be fixed by uh just taking it away from goog plus I'm try decide I'm trying to decide if I want to respond or just give daa another ramp up line so he can keep ranting no I mean I've ranted about this so many times that it's I like I don't even have the the heart for it but you you like expressed a a glimmer of hope that we would have a way to talk to each other that wasn't controlled by corporations and I wanted to make sure I smashed that down CU I do not want there to be a beautiful little flower growing out of the cracks of the concrete in the desolate Wasteland of our messaging future because it's not going to happen really the only one that we have right now that even comes close to that is email which is like so depressing no yeah email's great you know to to it was the 70s we knew how to you know build things yeah it's true what I expressed was like the hint of a glimmer of a distant Shimmer of a hope in somebody's twinkling eye yeah that's that's I I wanted I wanted to burn that to the ground but here's the point I I feel like this this is issue which we can solve on a individual basis so you know you and your friends your actual friends can just decide you're like using Hangouts use Hangouts you know coordinate a little bit do a little bit of actual social uh well engineering is kind of a terrible word it has bad associations but yeah engineer your Social Circle do that yeah the problem is while you're going out to engineer your Social Circle to get everybody to standardize on Hangouts somebody else is doing that for iMessage and uh WhatsApp is spending money to promote WhatsApp and I don't know man no sure but but okay but come on you can still tolerate a couple of messaging apps on your device I just feel like this is an issue which no I cannot toate a couple messaging apps I might if I want to send you a message I want to think about you Vlad the handsome handsome man that I want to type something at I don't want to think about what messaging app does that handsome man use I want to picture your face not an icon because it's a pretty face well my face is an icon well you know what that has become for me is Twitter because I know everybody's Twitter handle a very point and I know that I can get a hold of them by are you that guy that app messages people oh you DM so but if they don't follow you you're hooped I only talk to people that I that I follow of course follow you back and follow me back and I only read the verified list yeah so can you talk to the FCC for us find out I I can DM the FCC right now yeah get get my my boy wheeler on the line yeah Wheels I call him no you don't and this is where the FCC unfollow uh if anybody wants to communicate with mercedesbenz USA I I can get you in there if anybody's interested in talking to Chili's restaurant chili let me know Dam really that's that's a that's a good hookup right there that that's at least one cl so I just have to share how this happened because it's really funny one of our video producers Jordan oblinger uh I don't know if he's trolling or if he legitimately loves Chili's but he checks in at areas Chili's across the country on Four Square all the time and I favored one and then like 20 minutes later Chile follow me that's amazing well I don't I don't know who my most influential follower is I have no idea presid Barack Obama it's it's probably uh Z power for me it's Wheels is it is it Wheels god Tommy Wheels ladies and gentlemen that is the viral no no we got W man two things two very quick things no on the SI m point I just want to say the 10.2 stable version for the LG G2 got released recently uh and it's very nice I've been using the nightly build it became stable it's been stable for Evan Rogers Evan Rogers is is nodding yeah here's the thing though I can't tell if he's nodding that he wants you to finish your two points or if he's nodding at me saying no no cut him off we're ending the show I have no idea I'm pretty sure he's nodding at the fact that Cogen mod is out for the G2 well and it's it's yeah and it's good it's good things yeah and second Point 20 seconds uh Qualcomm just announced a Snapdragon 410 which is his his first 64-bit processor which doesn't matter at all but it has LTE and it's targeting sub $150 bones it's primarily for China in virgin markets but basically it's the Moto G processor or system one chip with LTE uh and it's coming somewhere around the middle of next year so good news I mean were you were you not expecting there to be a a Qualcomm chip that was cheap that supported LTE next year is this a shock to you no okay oh D just on the war path that was a sck bird I'm really sorry that's why it's a tech on at the very end I mean I mean heck we could talk about Alie if you want no but I do want to talk about something related to the Snapdragon 410 okay is Tegra like does Terra even matter anymore is it just so it's just Qualcomm at this point quc I can't think of a significant device that has been both uh like impressive to us and commercially successful that runs the TGA process yeah I like Qualcomm is the Intel of mobile now like fully wow oh Intel of mobile I thought you meant like Intel like the way Intel is a mobile no Texas is the Intel of mobile the surface 2un is the Intel of Mobile in the way that Intel is successful in Mobile yes right yes you got it I was going to saying the Surface 2 runs tiger 4 I can't think of a single phone off the top of my head that runs tiger four Shield runs tiger four shield shield not a pH not a phone no but it you should be able to Taco talk on the side talk on the uh on the shield well in in nvidia's defense next year they are going to have an integrated LT and Terra 4 chip only two and a half years late yeah so wait there there won't be a Tigra 5 in 2014 no there probably will be but I'm I'm just saying tgra 4 n l is coming next year they probably have a Integra 5 without LTE for you know how well they're doing they really got to solve that LTE problem it's embarrassing I'm embarrassed I'm I'm embarrassed too I'm embarrassed for the way this show is just going on you want to follow us on tter you certainly can I'm back on this is DC seford Dan Chris is Z power Vlad is Vlad savov we are all at Verge and um next week are we back probably we hope you are too thanks for watching ciaoGRE greetings mobile accomplishers Welcome to The Verge mobile show this is episode number 72 and uh we've put it together with string and uh duct tape wire and gum couple of safety pins I'm deer bone I am flat SE I'm Dan Seer and I'm Chris Ziggler and as you can see the three of us are here together in a beautiful room in York Vlad is not uh but that's okay it's actually all a beautiful illusion I am not here I'm in Chicago I'm being holographically projected into the room which you can do because there's internet in Chicago it's true yeah we do have internet there we we invented it there in fact A Mir Tech yeah so we're only a couple minutes late which I'm really proud of given uh given how much effort went into to making this happen but uh you know welcome and uh I I have no other banter to speak of uh well we're coming to you from a uh a secret I I don't know if I'd call it like a bomb shelter or what but uh let's just say that this is a a room inside of our office that is not known I mean if you tell them it's the secret room it's really no longer a secret no but they still don't know where it is like if you walked into our office you would not be able to find this room let's just put it that way this is true and I don't know that we're going to get out it's true we're going to die in here another thing that's strange about this room literally Xbox Ones and PS4s piled they're just like scattered side to side apparently polygon use this room quite extensively for their reviews and testing yes and after what we've done to it they are never going to be able to use it um so actually like we've got news big mobile news just today just a couple hours before the mobile show started uh we've got new Google Play edition devices we've got a white Nexus 7 we've gots Awesome by way white Google Play edition uh LG tablet what's it called the LG G g-pad g-pad 8.3 and like the g-pad it's just like kind of a big ugly Nexus I don't know is no we we actually have a I have the the non gooogle Edition g-pad back on my desk it's Sleek it's metal it's kind of like it's not as nice of a build quality as you get an iPad mini but it's a lot nicer than an XS 7 kind of in between and it's got an 8.3 in screen so it's a little bit bigger than Nexus 7 uh it's fairly lightweight I guess but the biggest problem with the g-pad was the fact that it ran LG's god- awful software so the fact that they are coming out with a a Google edition is kind of exciting if you ask me the price isn't bad it's I think yeah yeah I wish there was an option for LTE though if they had an LTE model for like 50 bucks more I'd be like way excited about that so the question is why would you buy this over an Nexus 7 yeah well that's the problem like because for the same price you can get an LTE Nexus 7 and I think honestly not having used the Google Play edition gPad I I I think that you're better off spending the 350 bucks on the LTE nexus7 I'm on board with you but uh if I'm gonna get an LTE Nexus 7 I want a Verizon LTE Nexus 7 and God knows when that thing is actually going to be released if ever yeah okay no no no this is completely acceptable you guys are complaining yeah if you have seen my it's the wait hang on hang onad it's The Verge mobile show lad there's going to be a whole lot more complaining coming up over the next hour or whatever so I mean I I spent a half an hour like mock complaining about visco cam like we enjoyed doing it that's true I I just feel like uh I'm just looking at my calendar now and it is actually December like I went into my local mall recently uh which is a terrify fine experience for me uh and I saw the Christmasy stuff and I was like oh God they've brought out early again and then I realized well actually it's December I should stop complaining it's kind of acceptable by this point for them to bring out Christmas trees and stuff but um to the point about us people complaining about any of these Google Play edition devices just don't stop because if you look at my Twitter feed it is so depressing because everybody is like not available in your country this Google Play edition device not aailable able in your country so all of us European folks UK folks maybe it will get to us eventually but to Google Play edition gPad .3 no so have any of the Google Play editions been available in the UK um well previous ones I believe so but like the brand new announcements I went and checked and it's just not available in your country which just you know annoys a lot of people because these are Global Brands Global News global announcements everybody gets psyched up everybody's like hey it's Christmas I'll go and buy myself something or whatever uh you know it's a new year for the atheists out there who want to celebrate some sort of uh novelty or excuse to buy themselves a new thing festiv us yeah the festiv US and and then it's just not available we just I was telling uh I was talking to derer about this this morning there's this huge and really like kind of frustrating annoying Arbitrage opportunity for Nexus 5es and I think this was true for Nexus 4S before where you you buy them for 350 on the Google Play Store in the US and then you sell them for 500 anywhere else and it's just like a fre $150 and I'm I'm assuming that a large percentage of that that that Gap comes from moving the devices to other markets like the UK I mean there are international tax and customs duties that people not the way I do it Wing oh my god um so there's also a third Google well okay a second Google Play edition device the xeria Z Ultra yeah which is if you don't recall it's got a 6.4 inch screen not big enough for me I like a bigger phone I I honestly I don't know what a Google Play edition of the Z Ultra brings to the table uh no not that doesn't have Sony skin plus you get the worst camera interface ever like that's I mean trage Evan so Evan Rogers is our producer is the biggest Sony phone Fanboy on the planet and I'm trying to gauge his direction to the Z1 Ultra GP no I think I think Evan is on my side here because you know these you know crossover fablet devices the one thing that redeems them is that they have software customized for their size at least especially in the case of like the Note 3 you there's software that takes advantage of the bigger screen it's got the stylus input Etc uh and when you strip all of that away and have a Google Play edition you just have stock Android on a bigger screen and it doesn't run tablet app apps it still runs phone apps so it's just big Ganky phone apps it's not like having a Nexus 7 or a gPad or whatever so I I just don't exactly know what this brings to the table I mean what it brings to the table is um you know if you're if you don't want an S4 and the you don't want the camera on the HTC1 and you don't want the camera on the Nexus 5 which we're going to talk about at length um you can get a Google Play Pure you know Android experience the camera no the camera is terrible really yeah it is it is a crappy 8 megapixel one it's not it's not like the Z Z1 which is the what it brings to the table then is um clearing out stock from Sony's warehouses I guess and you you can actually draw with a real pencil on the Z Ultra it's not available in the UK plad it's a Z Ultra wait a second wait wait rewind you can draw on it with a real like graphite pencil yes yeah what does that mean why would you why would why would you do that well I mean it's what you have in your pocket boom instant stylus but won't you like just end up I I'm confused won't you draw physically on the device if you do that probably is L is so bitter that these aren't coming to the UK that everything is a one word answer point is you can do it man it's like the device will register it that was one of the things um that Sony did they didn't give you a good stylus didn't give you a stylos silo or anything like that in the device but they made it really uh yeah compatible with anything you want to poke at it I bet if you apply fire to the Z1 Ultra it'll get hot that's another wow another feure deep insights more you know from Chris Z power so we did so there's this white Nexus 7 too yes which is awes cares I mean I don't Carew because look at the white Nexus 5 is a POS exctly and if they the plastic on the regular Nexus 7 is fine no one has given me like a thorough and proper explanation for why the white Nexus 5 is a if I had a white X5 here it there is yeah I've been using it for day bring it up here it's not it's not a POS until you compare it to the black one that's when it's like oh wait the black is so much better yeah this plastic it's it's just it's glossy it's very badly textured it looks great then the rails on the sides are uh glossy and flat exactly like the 1X the white 1X which was great except it got dirty the black the black is the awesome that's what I was gonna say with the plus it has the zit on the for the speaker yes the zit I I am going to get you your phone has acne is what I'm saying for for Christmas I'm getting you both white Nexus sevens and white Nexus fives okay uh I could do worse it is not a it that that actually the little AP speak phone thing happening in white Nexus 5 is really quite handy because it's quite a symmetrical device so the so-called zit actually tells you where the top is so I actually like that flipping my phone around it just it makes me feel like a ninja to you know I'm black one looks so much better you can still do that but um I mean I've been using the W and I've been happy with it obviously a bad idea for me would be to go and check out the black one and then feel like I'm losing out but I don't think many people are missing out and that my friends is an awesome transition to the Nexus 5 camera which we absolutely need to talk about because I just managed to Sid load the update today to Android 4.4.1 thanks no two isn't it no no it's 441 and then 442 followed hard upon and so now it's 442 I've actually got the update waiting on my Nexus 5 and I got to say the fact that we're on 442 on Android means that until they bring us 443 I'm going to have Jerry Was a Race Car Driver in my head non-stop is a fine automobile yeah you know because the the line is to 442 you'll enjoy it for like four days and then 443 will be up and there is no car called to 443 right um I have no opinion on the C really I think it's great like okay I think the update is great I think that it's still I think that uh you know a lot of people are debating between a Moto X and an xus 5 uh I think that like we're still easy we're still in a world where like we do not have a Nexus with a great camera like yeah it's better they fixed the shutter lag problem which was the biggest problem yeah they've fixed uh mostly the problem where it uh was just completely inconsistent in Bonkers in dim light so anything other than ideal conditions you just had no idea what it was going to do and it would take forever to find focus and snap the picture so in terms of like straight usability and getting a shot like radically improved uh in terms of like actual picture quality it's you know I don't know I honestly think it's it's kind of a wash it's not that much better but um I prefer the Nexus 5 screen and the overall like feel of the device to the Moto X enough that I uh am with our updated review go check out that I this is the Android phone that I recommend people who are looking for Android phone you cannot beat the feel of the Moto X yes doing it right I disagree I think that I think the Moto X has a has a better feel in the hand I think the software that motorol has actually put on top of Android is genuinely useful yeah no you're right and I think for the vast majority of the consumers who do not buy $350 unlocked phones from a website uh powered by Google uh that they walk into a carrier store and they buy the phone on contract when it's time for their upgrade I think the MotoX is a better and you can get whatever color you want Dan's got it the more time I spent with the Moto X the cheaper it feels to me that's because you feels kind of plasticky you are a a a trite man I want say hang on hang on back back back back up how much did your shoes cost the these were Dirt Cheap these were like $40 oh okay but Chris did have some gold gold shoes in his uh shopping cart there did I almost bought how many hundreds gold Co Hans but I just want to say about the the Nexus Five camera I I I fully agree that you know it's it's overall greatly improved from uh when it launched it launches faster which is huge uh but I found a lot of times it would just miss focus and then go ahead and take a picture with even after the update in good lighting I would be trying to take a picture of something that's sitting still and it would like focus focus focus misfocus take the picture and it's just a blurry mess and like I've never had another smartphone camera do that as often and like just make me be like I don't know if this is going to be in Focus or not better take 15 shots isn't it funny that both the Moto X and the Nexus 5 which are the consensus best Android phones on the market right now have required like urgent camera updates I think it's I mean I I don't know if this is the same with them I don't think I could say this for the Motorola but it feels like with the Nexus 5 that it's just like an example of a beta product that Google pushed to Market and they're like we know this isn't great we know this is broken and I mean if if any of them tested the Nexus 5 as it launched they would realize how bad the camera experience was and they were hinging so much on this is great for taking photos this is great for capturing images it was like a really big pitch of the Nexus 5 and then the Nexus 5 takes really bad photos and then they hurry out a software update that corrects atast at least 50% of them it's like well why didn't they wait two weeks and launch it with the the better software Dan I I have to disagree with you they did test this because if you recall the very first leak pictures of the Nexus 5 were on the Google campus of people holding the phone up no that's yeah obviously they but like the fact that they tested it obvious I mean like unless they're just incompetent testers these these issues would have come up pretty quickly when testing and they still pushed it to Market right but I also I also feel and you're just like you buy it and then you're waiting for them to fix it I also feel like these uh particular camera decisions fluctuate a lot and ultimately somebody makes them very near the release and that's what doesn't get tested so they might have been testing the camera preset to a different standard to a different shutter speed whatever whatever uh and then just change it right near the end it just that's exactly what none of them or like no camera engineers at Google or they didn't talk to any camera Engineers that would have been like you know what do people take pictures of with their smartphones oh they take their assumption that they camera engineer so maybe there aren't any but they take pictures of their pets and they take pictures of their kids and they're always running around indoors you can't lock the shutter speed at 115th of a second it's going to like any camera engineer is gonna be like that's GNA result in a blurry picture every single time and like I want to get to what what Chris like mentioned that the Moto X and the Nexus 5 both had like dire camera updates that had to be issued right away like I went on this rant a month ago that like everybody who works on Android phones needs to stop everything and and focus on nothing but the camera for a year like yes still apply why why is nobody except for Samsung making a good truly great camera on an Android phone you know what's better than everything we've talked about the iPhone 5S right none of this angst applies to the iPhone 5S or the iPhone 5 I will say that Sony finally did with the Z1 uh but it's had very limited availability it's kind of expensive and obscure and it's a Sony which doesn't have like widespread adoption well in the US anyway yeah right uh the issue with a zed1 is also that Sony overcooks the processing so they have a very good sensor but then they also overdo it so their decisions aren't universally to the good but actually to to bring it back to Nexus 5 um I mean I I feel the same way with uh Nokia had that similar issue when it launched Lumia 920 I believe which was the first PV branded device after the 808 if I'm not mistaken and it had amazing performance in low light but also Nokia went a bit too aggressive and slow down the shadow speed because he had optical image stabilization and it was like we we'll take we'll open up the shadow for longer we'll take uh yeah longer exposures we'll get more light into the pictures we'll blow everybody's mind and then what happened is that you couldn't get steady Focus because it was opening up for too long and that's how I feel with an xs5 you know I I mess around with it today and what I'm seeing is a heck of a lot of noise much more so than before the update um so it seems like Google has cranked up the iso a bit but I'm also seeing a ton of the out of focus photos whether it be because of motion or because of the camera fading to focus just being fixed and actually focusing okay like Dan says I don't think it's being fixed alog together but what used to be a disaster doesn't stink anymore right so the I wonder if like testing camera and doing last minute tweaks the people that you need to actually test and like use the camera and verify that it is good and what you should be releasing to a mass consumer Market are the people that know the least about how to describe what's wrong with the camera the people that actually know how to use a camera are the people that like maybe are unconsciously adjusting for the camera's limitations and so they like they're like oh yeah it's you know this is what this camera is and I know how to take picture they could send it to me and I'll tell them I'll try to take a picture of my toddler as she runs around the room and it fails and I'll be like this doesn't work right that's like that's if smartphones are the most popular cameras in the world there people take more pictures with smartphones than any other device ever and you know they take pictures of family and pets and things that move around and it's like and in bad lighting or you know selfies in a bar and it's like these are not easy situations for any camera company to take good pictures in even the best cameras can have trouble but uh a lot of it has to do with how they approach it and and what they prioritize so I'm installing 442 right now right you know the other thing is what I've been comparing the iPhone cameras what Apple does is what Google has just done with its update so what Apple tends to prefer to do is pick up a lot of noise but have the shutter speed right so you you're not out of focus because honestly if you're out of focus with a photo it doesn't matter if it's Noise free it doesn't matter if it has a lot of light in it it's it's not a good photo so what happens with the iPhone when things get bad you get a lot of noise in the picture but that's kind of okay because nobody's really using them at 8 megapixels and they look decent when they shrunken down and they instagramed they like garbage resolution um and I think that's kind of the direction that go has gone with an Nexus but also I think these guys know exactly how we use smartphone cameras to which to D's Point really gives them no excuse for why they're not fixing it um there was this um advertising compaign with Ed Norton for Verizon uh where he's having this misadventure for 48 hours and one of the sequences in it uh he's at a doctor and there's a key in his stomach and he's like I've got to take a picture of it and he does this flipping the phone around it's Droid Max it's a massive F but he does this flipping a phone around his hand like dto was just doing I'm not as skilled to demonstrate that but he just flips the phone around and he's like Snap took a really quick picture boom and he's got a photo of the ultrasound of the key in his stomach it's like that's what people want they want to whip out the phone take the photo not worry about it I'll be like was that quick enough did I Focus did the camera Focus do I want to take a redundant shot like d was saying you just want to take one but rewind for a second we still need to acknowledge the fact that that gesture for taking a photo is stupid and should be ashamed of dodg it's the worst I think once you once you nail it yeah just it's just yeah but I mean in that case it was just him showing up he was like the guy flipping a coin on his knuckles or whatever he showing off there's been Samsung years ago had one where that you would like turn the screen on and then hold the camera up and or hold the phone up and then rotate it uh horizontally and it would supposedly launch a camera and that was so much more ridiculous and cumbersome compared to just pulling it out of your pocket going like this and taking a picture you can do it in the same move boom how about just a button or better what the iPhone does which is just slide up from the bottom of the lock screen boom slide up from the bottom yeah that's all you do isn't that bring up command center no uh not if you do the lower right corner oh from the from the one corner you can do that on Android there's the there's on the there's which is why you don't need the gesture never but you can do it from any app with the with the MotoX it never works for me anyway I sit there going like this and nothing happens they're just trolling You it works for everybody but you um I need you guys to send me a Moto X I've never had one for you guys have the G over there same thing yeah but looks the same shut up you I got a funny story about my Moto X cuz I I I broke down and I bought one during that sale last week when when Motorola finally got it sale right and uh they were supposed to deliver it to me yesterday but because of this massive winter storm that's been sweeping across the country it's delayed and they said that it would be guaranteed by 8800 p.m. tonight at my door and it was in Memphis Tennessee at noon which is like an 18-hour drive from my door or a 5 hour flight in what is still a winter storm so I I don't know if I'm gonna get it or not but that that's my really funny Moto X story well if if you uh if you don't and you no longer want it because it took too long let me know and I'll buy it off you for hundred bucks it's a good deal I'm just I'm people are just side chatting me like madman um you held up a phone earlier and I think we should talk about it yeah sure this is the LG Flex Flex G Flex and LG is not a phone unless it's got a g in its name LG G Flex and it is you guys see that I know I'm kind of far from the camera but I think you can see Banana Phone Banana Phone going on here I jealous H don't be listen Vlad we'll send you one of these can we make it self live on the air so the glex is the one of the their first phones on the market with a curved display uh and it's got a 6-inch AMOLED display it's 720p resolution but this one has a we said banana phone earlier and that's really the easiest way to describe it it's got a curve Somebody explain this to me because it's a this is a Korean model and so it's got an antenna for Korean TV this would not be in the US version when it comes no no I like I like to think of this as being a a cell you know a selling an aeriel yeah uh but yeah so it's got a curved display and it actually is legitimately curved uh it looks like to me it looks like the original Galaxy Nexus just like more so like the curve is more more more defined and the curve is bigger you can actually Flex the device uh a couple of millimeters and it will bounce back uh but because of the other components in there you can you can break it you can go too far um and so you know the curve display is like it LG says that it minimizes Reflections which actually does happen um and it it aids in when you're watching video and things like that because you have a fewer Reflections but otherwise it really feels like a gimmick at this point point and it's not a great display it's really big and not as high resolution as others um and then the other thing is this the back of the phone which Chris is desperately trying to break um I just want to get the battery out yeah so oh the flexible battery yeah the battery inside is curved uh to match the curve here which which LG developed but the back of the phone has this finish on it that's supposed to be like a selfhealing thing they call it uh so everyone's been calling it The Wolverine phone and it will recover from from light scratches so if your keys Bang into it if you scratch it while uh putting it down on a rough surface it will heal pretty quickly but we tested it with a pocket knife I think uh and I think we put some permanent damage in it well nice oh yeah I can feel it and no no amount of time has has recovered the the scratch on that one actually to to that point that uh s repairing thing might be helpful because on my LG2 I've managed to get a whole series of small scratches on the screen on what's stupid is like you know the the camera lens is still exposed so that's got to be like a hardened sapphire glass to prevent scratches that I mean I guess you only get that from man hard and sa go you get from nobody else does it the when are we gonna get a curved virtue yes when is a curved virt coming you know it's a very good question because uh I was just looking at um I had to do a witty tweet about the downfall of noia and how it was predicted by The Matrix when uh Neo drops his awesome Nokia banana phone and I understand um the device that Nokia released alongside the Banana Phone that was in the movie was like the first series 40 device am I accurate there Chris I think that's too old to be series 40 that would have been I don't know the pred I don't think it was called series 40 back did you get the back off no I can't get it off um I mean it was was probably related uh Vlad but I don't think it was called series 40 at that time fair enough but but that just got me thinking if VTO would actually do one of those banana phones I would just love it yeah I don't care series 40 yeah absolutely well modern series 40 I mean like if you look at the very latest series 40 ashop phones that no you just said modern series 40 ultimate oy no like it's a very different thing than like it's been so long since I've used a series 4 phone that and like what what's in my mind's eye of what series 40 is is very different from what NOK is actually selling right like they they're selling like a a phone that looks and feels from no selling but not from what virt is selling those guys are using anient stuff no isn't the isn't the latest signature a touchcreen with a keypad below it no oh I'm pretty sure it's not I don't want a signature anymore I was I was about to spend 10gs on a signature but no I'm not the scit is so SM if you put your thumb on it to try to use it as a touch screen you'll cover the entire thing uh by the way I was telling people in the office yesterday Vlad um that when I do get my virtue I'm going to have them custom make it out of human skin wow I I I think that's the plan because you know you can get custom uh Leathers on it right just make sure that they put the lotion on before you yeah put the lotion on first God LG skin is so bad LG skin is the worst if you have not used a skinned LG phone uh you're in a world of her how do I get to that's how I get to multi oh my God it really does feel like a scaled up Galaxy Nexus though in the hand yeah that's exactly what it feels like to uh so you know this is different than the uh what's the Samsung one called I'm like totally blank the gxy Galaxy Round right is the is the other one and that curves the other way so instead of a banana phone I don't know what you'd call that Taco phone uh and so that's exactly well I don't know I think that we can't we can't because of the the engage yeah we can't call anything the Taco phone unless it's the end gauge right but it's got a curve along that axis which is which is the opposite of the the LG's axis and I haven't used the round yet so I don't know if that's a better curve or not no I haven't used it yet and I can tell you that it's not well it just doesn't match the face like unless you never use it for calling I mean it's so big though that I don't think the curve really presents much of an issue when you put it up to your face like because it's like this why right yeah honestly guys I really feel like both of these devices Samsung and LG they're not doing Justice to the idea of a cur phone because when then picked up the 6 inch glex the first thing that struck me is just that it's a massive fo not that it's a curved one and and that's the annoying thing if you have a curve on something like the G2 uh and by the way the antenna isn't unique to the glex the LG G2 for Korea also has an antenna yeah they just have different priorities to us um if you have that curve but on a ergonomically sound device something that's actually a phone curve like the glex I I mean I don't want to pay a massive premium for it but it just appeals to me I like it and particularly if it does actually flex and it has all those selfhealing properties and whatnot I think that's a step in the right direction well like I said before the real endgame the holy grail for what they're trying to do with these devices is not these devices but it's the it's the ultimate goal of creating flexible phones right which are still a few years out off but the Step One in that is making flexible displays and flexible batteries you need a flexible glass layer like where is this plastic on top I think I don't even know yeah no I mean they have a lot of work to do but and flexible cameras and I mean there's so much more before you have a phone that you can roll up in your pocket right yeah like Nokia had that Pro we talked about before no had that prototype a couple years ago TST it yeah so can we talk about AT&T's new plan uh I'd like to but I I have no idea or like it's a complete mystery to me no literally I mean this happens every time any carrier any carrier comes out with a new set of plans deer myself and Dante Daio who wrote our our post on this yeah get on the phone for a full 24 hours and try to figure out what the is going on yeah no it's so I mean like the short version that AT&T wants you to hear is they're finally uh not charging you the subsidy once you've paid off your two-year contract on your did you hear what I said yes you're right you're right this is a message at AT&T and in theory that's great because yeah why should I be paying you an extra however many bucks a month uh if I'm not under contract and I want that separated out and then I mean I think you've got to give T-Mobile credit for like getting that idea more widespread acceptance an appeal in the US and so not digging too far into the details uh like just on like the face of it of is AT&T doing the right thing by trying to separate out subsidy cost from like device cost I think if you look at it on the very surface level uh yeah that that idea is the right thing to do yeah but if you actually kud AT&T Next topic but if you if you look at what H AT&T actually did uh a they're not discounting near as much as T-Mobile so T-Mobile gives you $20 off per phone whereas 18 gives you 15 and if you do the math on that that's not the subsidy discount um and B they've made it more expensive for other people who are still in contract so they kind of just move this money around and then the other thing that's really stut out to me is that 80% of AT&T smartphon sold are iPhones right I would bet probably 10 bucks that or more that 95% of those iPhones sold on AT&T are on contract yep so the amount that this affects atd's actual bottom line is so infantes small that they can just do this as PR Goodwill and not see a blip on their on their earning statement if anything it'll make people like them more and they'll earn more money from and and by the way you're not actually getting $15 offc per month because in in doing this they quietly also raised the monthly payment plan price on the iPhone yeah uh by 650 I think so really you get half of that yeah if you if that is that with the 750 the um the next plan y yeah so that's if you're part of the next plan but the thing is like even if like so for me for example I've been I'm an AT&T customer I've got one of their Mobile Share Plans and I've got three smartphones on it with six gigabytes of data my plan is going up because they've raised the cost of D of of each smartphone on on my they lowered the cost of the six G data bucket but they rais the cost to have each smartphone and so it works out in AT&T's favor and if I got 8 gigabytes or if I got if I added another smartphone it would work out further in AT&T's favor uh so it's like they just kind of moved this money around they didn't really advertise any of that of course uh and it's just it's it's all I mean let's be very clear AT&T for for every quarter that AT&T makes you know makes it rain on its investors basically they are they are not going to make any moves that jeopardize that profit margin so every like well when AT&T comes out with a series of plans that seem to suggest that you're just going to magically save more money than you used to you really need to ask yourself well where is that money coming from and there are there are people that will save money it's just the number of those people is so incredibly small if you bought an Nexus 5 and you're out of contract and you're an AT&T customer a why are you an at customer B you'll save a little bit of money right but you're the other people that are paying more per month are paying for that money that you're saving so it's like right can I offer an analogy here which I think is really fitting by all means uh it's when you get a message from your ISP or your bro band provider saying we are conducting upgrades in your area what that means to you is you're going to get downgrades outages etc etc for at least a short period of time so this is exactly the same thing it's AT&T announces opportunity to lower your price plan your price cost whatever and then guys like Dan are like well actually my Bild just rops yeah so it's exactly the same thing we're doing upgrades which actually means downgrade to your service at least for the interim but honestly I I totally agree with you guys anytime I hear one of these announcements other than T-Mobile my my eyes just started glazing over because I know you're going to a need to do enough research for PhD to really understand what the hell is going on with these supposedly simplifying plans that like I I've actually coined a term for this it's the science of obfuscation of value like they want to make it as unclear as possible what is happening to you and they they succeed every single time unless people like deer and I and Dante spend an entire day trying to disambiguate the plans and sometimes even we fail like we find out that there's a math error somewhere so like I me marketing is the obfuscation of value that's the whole indust that that's that's absolutely true but then you know so the the bottom line is that the average consumer especially if they haven't done their research and I don't blame them if they haven't doesn't stand a chance they're just gonna see like I'm sure AT&T is gonna have an ad campaign for this and they're and as Dan pointed out they're there are people who are going to save money on this it's just not a very very large demographic so here's an alternative and you're going to have to hear me out here why don't you guys Americans in general so like all 300 million of you uprise uh yeah partially you know Rebel go against the system's why AT&T can turn the screws like this I thought you were going to say here's why there's not going to be a revolution I was like the reason the reason that AT&T can turn the screws and it's not going to affect its bottom line is because at the end of the day I get better service that's more reliable and faster and AT&T than I do from T-Mobile or Sprint or any other whatever carrier that I can save money with and unfortunately for me that means I'm stuck with AT&T and they keep raising the prices and I just kind of have to keep forking the money over uh because it is a significant step down in service at least for where I live and where I use my phone it's a significant set down to move to T-Mobile we should clarify you don't you're not they didn't force you to the new plan they didn't force me to the new plan but I don't know what's going to happen the next time I get a new phone or add a line or something like that uh that's always kind of the big mystery or whatever essentially the plans that they're offering now are more expensive than the plans they offered last week right uh and that's that's the bot you know I've said it before like to be very clear no one is arguing that AT&T should match uh T-Mobile's pricing dollar for dollar because AT&T does does have a significantly larger footprint and offers LTE in way more places so it's just not an Apples to Apples comparison like you're paying more to get a a more ubiquitous service and that makes sense the problem is is that AT&T is playing uh 10 times as many pricing games as T-Mobile is and that's the frustrating thing if they would just be straight with people and say yes you're paying a little bit more for a higher quality product then everyone would be fine I think uh including us and we would not be going nuts over it but the fact that they intentionally make it difficult to figure out what's going on is what upset or or when their their profits are like record-breaking every quarter and then they raise prices right so nobody's interested in my alternative proposition re let's hear it yeah no yeah I said it's a rebellion I didn't say it's a revolution what you want to do is come over to the UK okay get yourself a contract with free right okay get yourself a ton of data voice minutes whatever I I guarantee you it's going to be less than half the price you pay with AT&T then Jil back over to the United States where you'll be able to roam with your UK data on free oh the the problem arises when and and I'm like oh well just dial plus 44144 9263 do I get LTE does does LTE work in the US I don't although Google Voice charges for international calls yeah you can't do that yeah yeah I'm not sure that it does then but I I will have a very detailed breakdown of this come CES in January because myself and Aaron from our London team we're already on three and we'll bringing our allowances with us I mean this is this is my really really roundabout way just to congratulate free on letting people use their data and their allowance uh outside of the UK they've already done it with quite a few European countries uh Denmark and Italy I think are on the list um and recently They just added the United States Hong Kong and uh some is this is this like what T-Mobile offers with the international roaming no it's not 2G it's it's it should be 3G at least cool uh I I don't know about does three have LTE in the UK it just turned it on apparently I haven't seen it yet uh which is saddening for me but you know it's it's going to roll out uh things are looking up also on a plus side in the UK is Tom Warren he's he's a vone and he has had pretty atrocious signal at his house for ages we vote for um but Dave recently also turned on 4G and now that he can get 4G signal at home that actually improves the signal dramatically yeah but is things are picking up but but he's not using volti right so that doesn't affect no of course so that doesn't affect call Quality just data quality yeah but then again I like guys like myself and Tom we only really call our mothers and grandmothers on occasion everything else is data man that's true that's very true um I don't know do you guys want to talk about the iPhone stuff they've got ibeacon they signed to do a China mobile finally uh well so the the ibeacon thing yeah uh the interesting Yeah Yeah Chris Welch went to a couple Apple Stores here in in New York City uh on Friday when it launched to check it out and the the concept is you know they have these uh low power Bluetooth beacons installed around the score the store and as you approach those areas uh you'll get notifications or popups on your phone saying hey check this out or check that out um which you can see you know if you're at an unfamiliar store especially a big store like Macy's where they're traling this it it maybe Mak I mean it's pretty awesome you never actually have to talk to a human being right if you can go into an app store you can go into an Apple Store walk around get notified on your phone of what cool things are to look at then you can pick the item up pay for it with your phone and walk out of the store without ever having I did that with my with my case for my 5s and it definitely felt like shoplifting even though I paid for it like it cuz nobody was available and I I wanted to talk to somebody to buy it and finally like screw it I'm just gonna pay for it with my phone and I just walked out I'm like I I consider running you walk out it's in your hand you got no bag it's like I I was like waiting for the security agent to tackle me but nobody did um I mean how do you think they track that like they must have they must looking at the cameras to see if you're using the app I don't know it's the only way I I don't yeah I mean I don't know but uh but so anyway ibeacon uh Chris went to uh the Grand Central store first which is a huge sprawling one Lev store in Grand Central Station and um it didn't work and he he he talked to the agents and they were saying yes it should be working he couldn't get it to work so then he went over to the cube the iconic Cube on Fifth Avenue and um he kind of got it working I think um and he found one yes yeah and he he found the actual unit and it's this like metal box underneath mounted underneath the Shelf but they can so they can just put it wherever they want to like attract um customers attention and so you know you can totally see how this would be valuable in a big store that you've never been in before it's a you're not into it no yeah but you're also but you're also not into commercialism capitalism spending money materialism buying things items objects you're not into any of that so of course you're not wait wait wait wait wait I was I was with you all all along until you said items and object object you don't like any of those things glad disagrees with the concept of physicality yeah I mean there's a distinction between not liking materialism and not liking the material world concept like look I I'll just keep it very simple it's like I like the idea of a chair but then I dislike the idea of like a golden Ruby you know encrusted Throne you would you would rather you would prefer to you would prefer to handcraft the chair out of found materials yeah yeah well okay then we I I'll probably use the rinds of like winter squash to make it really rustic I'm sorry I I had I had a thing you wait until they were dry just squishy squash no that's the point winter squash is really hard Ry that's why it's winter rather than summer squishy stuff is Summer squash can you put marshmallow on would it actually have legs or would it just be like a Sol B like a plug or that would depend that would depend on the you know design and development process I mean I would have to iterate obviously I can't tell you in advance I would be just guessing that's that would be foolish just need some if you had to eat that much squash in order to like not only make a chair but be able to design and iterate on the your design of that chair over and over again you I gotta think that would that would play Havoc with h your you know digestive system yeah but but you'd feed you'd feed the squash to your livestock which you're gonna Slaughter for for protein good point Chris yeah I haven't figured out some it yeah some of it I mean I I I feel like if I have a squash a cabbage patch and a few chickens that would be it that and a broadband connection it may and a broadband connection it may be L I'm really eat the chickens you won't have a few chickens for very long okay more than a few I'll go more than a few I go for the eggs primarily yeah but they would be reproducing chickens like they would have they would have smaller chickens yeah I would have to have a as well that that would be mandatory um it's the word bringing it back to shopping no comment yes back to shopping ibeacon please shopping somebody talk about ibeacon it's it's t to me with know when you walked in the Bluetooth thing when the egg goes through be like heyy yes and I a Bluetooth low energy enabled egg yeah no as as a person who hates going retail into retail stores to buy things which I occasionally have to do despite Amazon existence I think ibeacon is a great thing yeah no if they Implement properly let's stop talking about it as ibeacon as if Apple just invented this I mean these are Bluetooth yeah this is just using Bluetooth and um Qualcomm has just announced pretty much the exact same thing with uh I don't know what they call them Gumball beacons or whatever it is so they doing the same process to me what I don't like is um all this kind of unnecessary technology that is coming into the retail process um I don't know like I said I'm just not a fan these aren't really things that you need and I can see totally the benefit to Apple and anybody else who's using that technology because they can track the hell out of you um and there was a few months back some controversy about uh a US Mall tracking people by their cell phone tracking people's location without letting them know and you know you start using ey beacons and whatnot if and if they get popular enough then everybody will know exactly in which store you're going which aisles you're shopping through the fact that you might have an unhealthy obsession with vegetables etc etc I mean it's it's kind of circumstantial information that people can pick up about you no you're right but I've said for a long time and I understand many people won't agree with me on this I want to be I want companies to track the hell out of me like I I want to be targeted I want I want to see only the ads for products that are going to appeal to me I want to get coupons and special offers for companies that that these that these marketers know that I'm going to shop at like I don't want to get ads that that like are of no interest to me like track please track the crap out of me Chris no matter what no matter how much you get tracked I'm still going to send you Dunkin' Donuts coupons so still going to get coupons that you don't want damn it you know what else is kind of depressing to me about tracking and things like Google Now is uh the issue that most of the time I'm actually just at home so looking at Google now and it's location tracking of me and just seeing this big growing dot where I keep staying and up moving instead of like a varied map with my varied life and whatnot it's kind of pressing also so you're that's just you're basically just saying that you're not an ibeacon fan uh no not much of one though okay well it's I I think that this kind of technology is here to stay you know uh shopkick which I believe Macy's is partnering with for their ibeacon implementation shopkick has been doing a variation of this for a long time but using audio sorry uh those of you listening to the podcast Edition not watching the video I just banged my microphone with my beer and then called out in the middle of it it's not going to get edited and post because I've called it out here I've interrupted you where are you going with this deer's a couple beers deep I look I'm saying that shopkick uh had been doing this using audio where they had a oh yeah I was going to tell you that nobody cares about shopkick and why you please I'm too far into the story to abandon at this point uh that had implementation going back at least like four or five years maybe less I don't know but but a while with with Best Buy where um if you installed the shopkick or Best Buy app one or the other like when you walked into a store like the Best Buy stores actually like uh had this like silent audio playing that the phone could pick up it is really creepy it's like a dog whistle basically and then using that tone the phone knows which store you're in it's like really messed up actually yeah I mean so that you find that creepy because there's a silent audio tone that only the phone can hear yeah because they could be reprogramming my brain but like the actual tracking of you you're totally cool through silent radio waves and GPS I'm already like I've already been tracked enough in my life so that like the the special offers I get via email and like the ads I see on sites are like pretty on point like I I see at least one ad for a BMW a day and I'm totally okay wow like please just track me how many gold shoe ads do you see uh actually there's an uptick in that since I went to Gohan site yeah um so yeah I'm just not creeped out by it I think uh if it if it you know there are probably gonna be implementations of this that aren't helpful if you read Chris's report uh he didn't find it necessarily too helpful at the cube but it was day one this is still considered a trial they don't have like the final imp implementation of it could get better um but so but you can imagine there are situations where it could be helpful it's all I'm saying we've talked about iacon for way too long fair enough let let me just point out that Chris you just presented yourself as a completely unreliable witness in this in so far as information coming into your phone is creepy but everything about you and where you're going and what you're doing coming out of your phone to some disembodied corporation that might do whatever it wants with that information perfectly fine but yes right see see this is great this is great if if you going to like jury elction this would be like yeah I I don't think we're gonna have this guy on well good I don't want to do jury 2y anyway that's what I'm saying it's really instructive to to like show people that you have no internal logic whatsoever I I have no logic I have no no sense of like you know what is right and what is wrong I have yeah I have none of that so you're never going to install Cyanogen MOD because you don't want to deal with their by default encrypted text messaging to other Sage mod users because you want to be tracked transition alert was really good right so it wasn't bad so I mean it's funny deer framed it as deal with it I mean there's nothing to deal with I think this is actually like one of the best implementations I mean just to to set this up uh Sage mod announced that it's in by default encrypted text messaging between cyen mod users is coming to its platform so if and it's it's using uh open whisper I yes I believe yeah that's the name of it and if somebody sends if somebody's using cyan mod and they send a text message to another cyan mod User it's automatically encrypted it's using really high level single use encryption and stuff like that so really great stuff but the thing that makes it so good and smart is the fact that the user doesn't have to do anything to set it up they turn on their phone they set up their phone like they normally would and boom all their texts encrypted the analogy for me is iMessage like overnight Apple had like in insane saturation with imessage this is going to be the same situation but for Cogen users like you don't have to think about it it's just there now of course if you're using Cogen to begin with the odds of you like seeking this out are naturally higher anyway but uh it's still cool that this is going to be the default option and and it just it's like a first step in maybe something that you know more mainstream platforms could adopt in the future y so it's cool I guess if you're wored about encrypted text messaging yeah I guess actually speaking of messaging like did you guys see Ellis's report on this uh this startup called layer yes yes so if you're not familiar the guy who like created xmpp and jabber the guy who created Google Voice uh apparently have the same bug up their ass that I do which is like I'm tired of iMessage and hangouts and WhatsApp and kick and whatever else and they're they're trying to create a universal messaging uh call and they're going to let anybody who wants to like embed it into their app so you can add messaging to your app that's like you know the candy for developers and then like the the vegetables are like if they can get enough adoption of it maybe they can replace or get other people to plug into that we could actually have interoperability again see it's a beautiful beautiful totally going to fail Impossible Dream you you realize that Vlad interpreted what you just said the opposite of way the way you intended because he likes the vegetables and not the candy right I was experiencing a bit of confusion yes um I mean so but you know like everything on paper here sounds pretty good they're not going through like the standards bodies because they're all completely seized up uh and unable to like move a standard forward because they have you know no power and there's too much too much politics it's being put together the the protocol and the the spec for it by people who like understood xmpp and made that moderately successful in its time and know what the problems were with it and are fixing them um and I just have no faith that it's G to work yeah so like the pro the big hurdle that they have is developers adopting this and baking it into their apps right yes have WhatsApp existed so you could you could build a WhatsApp competitor in like a weekend is the idea or you could like write an email app and be like you know I'd like to add messaging to this plunk and you've added messaging to it pretty easily uh and then it will talk to all of those other apps so like it's possible we could see a Snowball Effect here um but one they actually have to execute on their plans they haven't you know released anything yet um and two they you know we need to actually see if people will adopt it in a meaningful way and critically none of the incumbents are obviously going to adopt it so yeah so like the question is like not only not only does this have to take off but it has to take off in such a way that it becomes like inevitable and we will start yelling at Apple and Google and Microsoft for not interoperating with it right FaceTime is gonna be an open standard dude but I mean like think about think about a player like WhatsApp which controls an enormous percentage of the market if if they got to the point where there was pressure on them to adopt this they would literally no longer have a business model right yeah yeah so they won't ever so we're still screwed yes this this this problem is never going to be fixed I look no like tell me how it's gonna be fixed Vlad it's gonna be fixed by what how like an open spec gets created like we're gonna have a new spec for messaging interoperability it's coming out this summer from these guys from lir from the new to invented xmpp he's putting it out there an open spec and it's like we're just we just talked amongst ourselves and decided it's not going to get fixed so then it how will it get fixed maybe you know Microsoft will win with Skype or apple will win with imessage or Google will win with Hangouts like okay that makes things slightly better because at least we can all talk to each other but it's through this protocol that is controlled by a single company and depending on the company it is accessible to the NSA like there are problems here none of those examples that you gave really offer everything that you'd want in a chat protocol right and they don't need to for whatever reasons for for their own personal reasons even if you want them there so like you use Google Hangouts for its specific reasons use Skype for its specific reasons iMessage is baked into the iPhone so it's used for those reasons but like in some ways Hangouts is a lot better than iMessage and Skype is a lot better than Hangouts etc etc it's just like you're not getting the best of all of the options together everything that's broken about Hangouts could be fixed by uh just taking it away from goog plus I'm try decide I'm trying to decide if I want to respond or just give daa another ramp up line so he can keep ranting no I mean I've ranted about this so many times that it's I like I don't even have the the heart for it but you you like expressed a a glimmer of hope that we would have a way to talk to each other that wasn't controlled by corporations and I wanted to make sure I smashed that down CU I do not want there to be a beautiful little flower growing out of the cracks of the concrete in the desolate Wasteland of our messaging future because it's not going to happen really the only one that we have right now that even comes close to that is email which is like so depressing no yeah email's great you know to to it was the 70s we knew how to you know build things yeah it's true what I expressed was like the hint of a glimmer of a distant Shimmer of a hope in somebody's twinkling eye yeah that's that's I I wanted I wanted to burn that to the ground but here's the point I I feel like this this is issue which we can solve on a individual basis so you know you and your friends your actual friends can just decide you're like using Hangouts use Hangouts you know coordinate a little bit do a little bit of actual social uh well engineering is kind of a terrible word it has bad associations but yeah engineer your Social Circle do that yeah the problem is while you're going out to engineer your Social Circle to get everybody to standardize on Hangouts somebody else is doing that for iMessage and uh WhatsApp is spending money to promote WhatsApp and I don't know man no sure but but okay but come on you can still tolerate a couple of messaging apps on your device I just feel like this is an issue which no I cannot toate a couple messaging apps I might if I want to send you a message I want to think about you Vlad the handsome handsome man that I want to type something at I don't want to think about what messaging app does that handsome man use I want to picture your face not an icon because it's a pretty face well my face is an icon well you know what that has become for me is Twitter because I know everybody's Twitter handle a very point and I know that I can get a hold of them by are you that guy that app messages people oh you DM so but if they don't follow you you're hooped I only talk to people that I that I follow of course follow you back and follow me back and I only read the verified list yeah so can you talk to the FCC for us find out I I can DM the FCC right now yeah get get my my boy wheeler on the line yeah Wheels I call him no you don't and this is where the FCC unfollow uh if anybody wants to communicate with mercedesbenz USA I I can get you in there if anybody's interested in talking to Chili's restaurant chili let me know Dam really that's that's a that's a good hookup right there that that's at least one cl so I just have to share how this happened because it's really funny one of our video producers Jordan oblinger uh I don't know if he's trolling or if he legitimately loves Chili's but he checks in at areas Chili's across the country on Four Square all the time and I favored one and then like 20 minutes later Chile follow me that's amazing well I don't I don't know who my most influential follower is I have no idea presid Barack Obama it's it's probably uh Z power for me it's Wheels is it is it Wheels god Tommy Wheels ladies and gentlemen that is the viral no no we got W man two things two very quick things no on the SI m point I just want to say the 10.2 stable version for the LG G2 got released recently uh and it's very nice I've been using the nightly build it became stable it's been stable for Evan Rogers Evan Rogers is is nodding yeah here's the thing though I can't tell if he's nodding that he wants you to finish your two points or if he's nodding at me saying no no cut him off we're ending the show I have no idea I'm pretty sure he's nodding at the fact that Cogen mod is out for the G2 well and it's it's yeah and it's good it's good things yeah and second Point 20 seconds uh Qualcomm just announced a Snapdragon 410 which is his his first 64-bit processor which doesn't matter at all but it has LTE and it's targeting sub $150 bones it's primarily for China in virgin markets but basically it's the Moto G processor or system one chip with LTE uh and it's coming somewhere around the middle of next year so good news I mean were you were you not expecting there to be a a Qualcomm chip that was cheap that supported LTE next year is this a shock to you no okay oh D just on the war path that was a sck bird I'm really sorry that's why it's a tech on at the very end I mean I mean heck we could talk about Alie if you want no but I do want to talk about something related to the Snapdragon 410 okay is Tegra like does Terra even matter anymore is it just so it's just Qualcomm at this point quc I can't think of a significant device that has been both uh like impressive to us and commercially successful that runs the TGA process yeah I like Qualcomm is the Intel of mobile now like fully wow oh Intel of mobile I thought you meant like Intel like the way Intel is a mobile no Texas is the Intel of mobile the surface 2un is the Intel of Mobile in the way that Intel is successful in Mobile yes right yes you got it I was going to saying the Surface 2 runs tiger 4 I can't think of a single phone off the top of my head that runs tiger four Shield runs tiger four shield shield not a pH not a phone no but it you should be able to Taco talk on the side talk on the uh on the shield well in in nvidia's defense next year they are going to have an integrated LT and Terra 4 chip only two and a half years late yeah so wait there there won't be a Tigra 5 in 2014 no there probably will be but I'm I'm just saying tgra 4 n l is coming next year they probably have a Integra 5 without LTE for you know how well they're doing they really got to solve that LTE problem it's embarrassing I'm embarrassed I'm I'm embarrassed too I'm embarrassed for the way this show is just going on you want to follow us on tter you certainly can I'm back on this is DC seford Dan Chris is Z power Vlad is Vlad savov we are all at Verge and um next week are we back probably we hope you are too thanks for watching ciao\n"