Best podcast in the business by a mile! You guys are informative, humorous, nerdy, and above all else incredibly professional. I wish I could join a team like yours and contribute to what I believe is the Industry Standard in Technology. Keep up the great work and if you feel like you are getting buried and could use some help in whatever capacity possible, I would love such a gracious opportunity!
Alexis. although Barry`s comment is great, on monday I got a great new Lotus Carlton after having earned $4364 this last four weeks and a little over 10/k lass month. this is definitely the most financially rewarding Ive ever done. I started this nine months/ago and pretty much immediately started bringing in at least $75... p/h. I went to this website.. http://goo.gl/KVBmO
my co-worker's mother makes $78 an hour on the computer. She has been fired for 9 months but last month her pay was $14159 just working on the computer for a few hours. (Click on menu Home more information) http://goo.gl/961Xn
Refering to the discussion around 25 min mark. I know this is a bit of a personal rant, but I absolutely can not and will not do without a physical keyboard. I was very very late on the smartphone bandwagon because there were no phones which had decent specs and a keyboard. I eventually bought a Xperia (not mini) Pro which i'm using still. Touchscreens are never and will never be as precise and nice-to-use as a physical keyboard. Although, I'm inclined to buy a Nexus 4 now because the nerd in me has a hard time resisting a knockout specsheet like that but i know i will hate using it because it has no keyboard. I wish someone comes out with a top shelf phone with a nice chunky keyboard and i would buy it in a heartbeat.
I think of myself as a bit of an oldschool guy. I never even use my a laptop if i have access to a desktop. I don't like laptop keyboards, they're almost as bad as touchscreens. I NEED the chunky mechanical keys on my BWU to feel good using my computer.
well, Im coming from a Milestone and finally made the switch to the Note (1) and while I agree the divide isnt that great (and I am a hardcore physical keyboard lover), a virtual keyboard still doesnt have the feel you need to do touch typing. It is still necessary to look where you are touching your phone. If nowadays there were a European phone with HTC Dream-quality keyboard and decent specs I would go for it. Otherwise the huge Note screen gives ample room for a confortable thumb-type keyboard.
I'm not usually a podcast person, but I love listening to you guys. Thanks!
Just want to toss in my 2c about one of Brian's becoming-ever-more-famous rants. While talking about the Droid DNA (and not ranting about the name, surprisingly), he mentioned the industry trend away from removable batteries and microSD slots. I agree mostly with what was said, but I had two points I wanted to make. First, on the battery thing, the issue for me with replaceable battery packs isn't swapping out the battery for a fully-charged one midday--this is a pain and not many people do this (though my brother is one of those people). However, lazy charging practices can easily damage batteries' longevity, and being able to replace that battery you know is only running at 70-80% of its new capacity with a $20 trip to Amazon is much more palatable than either voiding your warranty or trying to get a service center to replace it. As you say, between car chargers, microUSB battery packs, and simply bumming a cable/outlet somewhere (how many others have seen someone standing in the corner of a Starbucks with a plugged-in phone?), this isn't such a big deal. Having more ubiquitous inductive charging will also lessen the burden.
On the other side, my impetus for a microSD in a phone isn't to change it out; it's to avoid paying $100 to get another $5 of cheap NAND cells in my phone. It is really pathetic that HTC released a 16GB-only device with otherwise purely top-of-the-line components. I currently get by okay with my tegra3 One X (which is 32GB and no microSD), but was always more comfortable with my previous 16GB+64GB microSD--that level of storage means not having to worry about app install sizes while also allowing enough room for the media or nandroids I want to keep on my phone. Cloud is nice but with data running ~$10/GB on American carriers, streaming everything all the time is just not realistic. Of course, that situation makes a Nexus 4 on a magenta prepaid plan look pretty attractive, but I digress.
I realize 16GB is enough for many or even most people, but even my 63 year old mother has over 15GB of music on her phone as well as a few TV shows; she's fine with the 16GB+32GB microSD, and probably would be okay--if pushing it--on 32GB internal, but nonexpandable 16GB should be treated today as the embarassment it is. My point is that *high storage requirements are not unique to power users*. I'd perhaps be more forgiving if they had quality NAND cells with decent controllers, but as long as OEMs are using junk eMMC, they might as well load it up. I thought HTC was moving in the right direction with the One X+'s 64GB-only flavor, but the DNA proves that was the exception rather than the rule, I guess.
Didn't really expect to rant this much. Did anyone read this whole thing? Thanks!
While I DO carry around a spare battery with me (notoriously poor battery life phone, HTC Sensation), I don't see that as the point, rather the short overall life of current battery tech.
Same with Storage, although I do enjoy the option to carry around A LOT of data on seperate microSD cards, I realise few others do this.
What I don't understand is the current trend to ignore a not insignificant portion of the market, who will pay more than your average Joe for these features.
SD slots take space so I don't care too much. But if phone makers are going to remove them then NAND shouldn't be so expensive. If I was Hynix, Samsung, or Micron I would extremely jealous of the margins smartphone makers are making off of NAND, especially Apple. 64 GB for $200? That costs $64 at most. Apple probably gets the best pricing so it costs even less.
$200. For that much money you can get 256 GB SSD.
Like Anand and Brian said smartphones will get cheaper. It will be interesting to see how Apple will react, but I don't think they'll be able to make sky high profits without losing market share.
at some point brian says he wants phones to default to stop charging when the battery is full and start when its down a couple percent. Why? Thats horrible for battery life! I guess this is a remainder of the nickel-chemistry era 'dont leave your battery in the charger afterits done otherwise you can damage it' or something? If you leave Li+ chemistry cells on the charger they wont damage, like, on the contrary. Its best to keep your phone running on the wall charger as much as possible just sipping power fron AC instead of putting mini charge cycles onto the battery. If anything, that ia what damages your battery. /rant
Second point about removable storage: If like me you dont see phones as having to be replaced every year, its a big plus to have removable storage. Now 64GB may seem like more than anubody needs, but 4 years from now this phone will still have utility to me, and I would like to be able to then insert my dime-a-dozen 512GB sdxc card. Like my 2003 hp wm6 pda, which still, through a driver hack, accepts then unheard of 16GB sd cards. It still functions great as a 10h battery life sd/720p video player.
I see galaxy camera as disruptive in a different way than you guys do. Leaving aside the camera aspect of the device for a second, I believe the galaxy camera is the first device that represents future of mobile communication and a 100% shift to : - voice over internet (abandoning conventional mobile phone calls) - Internet based IMs (replacing SMSes)
We've seen data-only sim card support in multiple tablets but this is the first one in the phone(-ish) form factor, which makes it disruptive for me. It has been my idea of perfect mobile device for long. I see no utility of conventional cellphone calling if and when we can have fast and cheap data plans on out mobile devices. You pay a monthly flat fee for unlimited mobile data and use if for communication/entertainment. That would be sort of commoditizing of cellular networks. Customers buy whatever sim card gives them unlimited access to mobile data at fast-enough speeds at the cheapest rates.
I have to disagree w/ the assertion that Apple making its own CPU is an indication of market failure. Having their own design, being able to tweak it to suite their needs and drive their schedule is a fairly large competitive advantage versus other mobile devices which must be designed around the off-the-shelf offerings.
Also Apple has a history in seeking their own silicon, it just proved too expensive to keep doing it at the volumes they were pushing with Intel's process tech marched on. If ARM had a competitive PC solution at the time when they made the switch to x86 I don't think anyone would have been surprised if they did the same thing there as they did in mobile.
You guys were saying the margins need to consolidate before we'll have cheap smartphones, and that the Nexus 4 is a warning shot. Doesn't it already sound like Samsung and Apple have consolidated the margins? If it only costs them $200 to make those phones?
You were also using PCs as an example... and that seems questionable to me. Because in order to get $699 PCs and $200 laptops on Black Friday, OEMs didn't just turn into "commodities"... didn't they also turn "unprofitable" and "frequently bankrupt"?
Anyway, it sounds like Apple and Samsung could keep some kind of margins even if they are forced to compete with the Nexus 4 on cost. Won't that picture be different in the rest of the world? Why isn't the Nexus 4 basically the only phone to buy outside of the US?
On 45nm, from the teardown the Us CPU is 30mm2. The PS360 CPUs on 45nm are still over 100mm2, as is a Core 2 Duo. Yesterday a well known Wii hacker revealed the internal clock speed of the CPU to be 1.2GHz, and also with less SIMD units than either of the HD twins.
Neither of those point us to real world performance, but I'm just thinking here. To get to the same level of performance as the older 360 CPU, the thing needs 9x the performance per transistor (nearly a third as large, nearly a third the clock speed). Clock for clock core for core, even Intel didn't improve that much from 2006-2012.
Even the Wii which was much chided for its specs was at least ahead of the last generation in every regard that I could tell, the Wii may be behind in some, even if it's better in others (GPU, RAM capacity).
Does the flip chip production method prevent anyone from looking at the architecture under a microscope like they have before? I expected something like that by now like what the Apple A series got.
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usopen65667268 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Best podcast in the business by a mile! You guys are informative, humorous, nerdy, and above all else incredibly professional. I wish I could join a team like yours and contribute to what I believe is the Industry Standard in Technology. Keep up the great work and if you feel like you are getting buried and could use some help in whatever capacity possible, I would love such a gracious opportunity!jessicahutchins - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
Alexis. although Barry`s comment is great, on monday I got a great new Lotus Carlton after having earned $4364 this last four weeks and a little over 10/k lass month. this is definitely the most financially rewarding Ive ever done. I started this nine months/ago and pretty much immediately started bringing in at least $75... p/h. I went to this website.. http://goo.gl/KVBmOCibafsa - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Love the podcasts, always makes my week. Keep it up.Hope Brian caught the big kudos he got from the Engadget team on their Mobile podcast.
BellaLohan - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
my co-worker's mother makes $78 an hour on the computer. She has been fired for 9 months but last month her pay was $14159 just working on the computer for a few hours. (Click on menu Home more information)http://goo.gl/961Xn
dishayu - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Refering to the discussion around 25 min mark. I know this is a bit of a personal rant, but I absolutely can not and will not do without a physical keyboard. I was very very late on the smartphone bandwagon because there were no phones which had decent specs and a keyboard. I eventually bought a Xperia (not mini) Pro which i'm using still. Touchscreens are never and will never be as precise and nice-to-use as a physical keyboard. Although, I'm inclined to buy a Nexus 4 now because the nerd in me has a hard time resisting a knockout specsheet like that but i know i will hate using it because it has no keyboard. I wish someone comes out with a top shelf phone with a nice chunky keyboard and i would buy it in a heartbeat.I think of myself as a bit of an oldschool guy. I never even use my a laptop if i have access to a desktop. I don't like laptop keyboards, they're almost as bad as touchscreens. I NEED the chunky mechanical keys on my BWU to feel good using my computer.
s44 - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
Try typing on a Note 2. It's ridiculously easy.ssj3gohan - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
well, Im coming from a Milestone and finally made the switch to the Note (1) and while I agree the divide isnt that great (and I am a hardcore physical keyboard lover), a virtual keyboard still doesnt have the feel you need to do touch typing. It is still necessary to look where you are touching your phone. If nowadays there were a European phone with HTC Dream-quality keyboard and decent specs I would go for it. Otherwise the huge Note screen gives ample room for a confortable thumb-type keyboard.teiglin - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
I'm not usually a podcast person, but I love listening to you guys. Thanks!Just want to toss in my 2c about one of Brian's becoming-ever-more-famous rants. While talking about the Droid DNA (and not ranting about the name, surprisingly), he mentioned the industry trend away from removable batteries and microSD slots. I agree mostly with what was said, but I had two points I wanted to make. First, on the battery thing, the issue for me with replaceable battery packs isn't swapping out the battery for a fully-charged one midday--this is a pain and not many people do this (though my brother is one of those people). However, lazy charging practices can easily damage batteries' longevity, and being able to replace that battery you know is only running at 70-80% of its new capacity with a $20 trip to Amazon is much more palatable than either voiding your warranty or trying to get a service center to replace it. As you say, between car chargers, microUSB battery packs, and simply bumming a cable/outlet somewhere (how many others have seen someone standing in the corner of a Starbucks with a plugged-in phone?), this isn't such a big deal. Having more ubiquitous inductive charging will also lessen the burden.
On the other side, my impetus for a microSD in a phone isn't to change it out; it's to avoid paying $100 to get another $5 of cheap NAND cells in my phone. It is really pathetic that HTC released a 16GB-only device with otherwise purely top-of-the-line components. I currently get by okay with my tegra3 One X (which is 32GB and no microSD), but was always more comfortable with my previous 16GB+64GB microSD--that level of storage means not having to worry about app install sizes while also allowing enough room for the media or nandroids I want to keep on my phone. Cloud is nice but with data running ~$10/GB on American carriers, streaming everything all the time is just not realistic. Of course, that situation makes a Nexus 4 on a magenta prepaid plan look pretty attractive, but I digress.
I realize 16GB is enough for many or even most people, but even my 63 year old mother has over 15GB of music on her phone as well as a few TV shows; she's fine with the 16GB+32GB microSD, and probably would be okay--if pushing it--on 32GB internal, but nonexpandable 16GB should be treated today as the embarassment it is. My point is that *high storage requirements are not unique to power users*. I'd perhaps be more forgiving if they had quality NAND cells with decent controllers, but as long as OEMs are using junk eMMC, they might as well load it up. I thought HTC was moving in the right direction with the One X+'s 64GB-only flavor, but the DNA proves that was the exception rather than the rule, I guess.
Didn't really expect to rant this much. Did anyone read this whole thing? Thanks!
Peanutsrevenge - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Read it and fully agree.While I DO carry around a spare battery with me (notoriously poor battery life phone, HTC Sensation), I don't see that as the point, rather the short overall life of current battery tech.
Same with Storage, although I do enjoy the option to carry around A LOT of data on seperate microSD cards, I realise few others do this.
What I don't understand is the current trend to ignore a not insignificant portion of the market, who will pay more than your average Joe for these features.
iacoa - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
SD slots take space so I don't care too much. But if phone makers are going to remove them then NAND shouldn't be so expensive. If I was Hynix, Samsung, or Micron I would extremely jealous of the margins smartphone makers are making off of NAND, especially Apple. 64 GB for $200? That costs $64 at most. Apple probably gets the best pricing so it costs even less.$200. For that much money you can get 256 GB SSD.
Like Anand and Brian said smartphones will get cheaper. It will be interesting to see how Apple will react, but I don't think they'll be able to make sky high profits without losing market share.
jessicahutchins - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
oMssj3gohan - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
2 further commenta:at some point brian says he wants phones to default to stop charging when the battery is full and start when its down a couple percent. Why? Thats horrible for battery life! I guess this is a remainder of the nickel-chemistry era 'dont leave your battery in the charger afterits done otherwise you can damage it' or something? If you leave Li+ chemistry cells on the charger they wont damage, like, on the contrary. Its best to keep your phone running on the wall charger as much as possible just sipping power fron AC instead of putting mini charge cycles onto the battery. If anything, that ia what damages your battery. /rant
Second point about removable storage: If like me you dont see phones as having to be replaced every year, its a big plus to have removable storage. Now 64GB may seem like more than anubody needs, but 4 years from now this phone will still have utility to me, and I would like to be able to then insert my dime-a-dozen 512GB sdxc card. Like my 2003 hp wm6 pda, which still, through a driver hack, accepts then unheard of 16GB sd cards. It still functions great as a 10h battery life sd/720p video player.
stedfan - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Like everything else on this site, it is professional and in depth - just wish it was longer :)dishayu - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
I see galaxy camera as disruptive in a different way than you guys do. Leaving aside the camera aspect of the device for a second, I believe the galaxy camera is the first device that represents future of mobile communication and a 100% shift to :
- voice over internet (abandoning conventional mobile phone calls)
- Internet based IMs (replacing SMSes)
We've seen data-only sim card support in multiple tablets but this is the first one in the phone(-ish) form factor, which makes it disruptive for me. It has been my idea of perfect mobile device for long. I see no utility of conventional cellphone calling if and when we can have fast and cheap data plans on out mobile devices. You pay a monthly flat fee for unlimited mobile data and use if for communication/entertainment. That would be sort of commoditizing of cellular networks. Customers buy whatever sim card gives them unlimited access to mobile data at fast-enough speeds at the cheapest rates.
Pityme22 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Brian,Could you please test if Lumina works as an IP phone using Skype? Thank you in advance.
nathanddrews - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Fantastic.babgvant - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
I have to disagree w/ the assertion that Apple making its own CPU is an indication of market failure. Having their own design, being able to tweak it to suite their needs and drive their schedule is a fairly large competitive advantage versus other mobile devices which must be designed around the off-the-shelf offerings.Also Apple has a history in seeking their own silicon, it just proved too expensive to keep doing it at the volumes they were pushing with Intel's process tech marched on. If ARM had a competitive PC solution at the time when they made the switch to x86 I don't think anyone would have been surprised if they did the same thing there as they did in mobile.
sporkfan - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
You guys were saying the margins need to consolidate before we'll have cheap smartphones, and that the Nexus 4 is a warning shot. Doesn't it already sound like Samsung and Apple have consolidated the margins? If it only costs them $200 to make those phones?You were also using PCs as an example... and that seems questionable to me. Because in order to get $699 PCs and $200 laptops on Black Friday, OEMs didn't just turn into "commodities"... didn't they also turn "unprofitable" and "frequently bankrupt"?
Anyway, it sounds like Apple and Samsung could keep some kind of margins even if they are forced to compete with the Nexus 4 on cost. Won't that picture be different in the rest of the world? Why isn't the Nexus 4 basically the only phone to buy outside of the US?
EnzoFX - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Nexus 4 + TMobile value plan. My FU to subsidized, over priced plans AND phones. =Pwebby7 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Any update on the review of the Nokia 808 Pureview? Is it still coming?Love the podcast btw. Keep up the great work!
tipoo - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
On 45nm, from the teardown the Us CPU is 30mm2. The PS360 CPUs on 45nm are still over 100mm2, as is a Core 2 Duo. Yesterday a well known Wii hacker revealed the internal clock speed of the CPU to be 1.2GHz, and also with less SIMD units than either of the HD twins.Neither of those point us to real world performance, but I'm just thinking here. To get to the same level of performance as the older 360 CPU, the thing needs 9x the performance per transistor (nearly a third as large, nearly a third the clock speed). Clock for clock core for core, even Intel didn't improve that much from 2006-2012.
Even the Wii which was much chided for its specs was at least ahead of the last generation in every regard that I could tell, the Wii may be behind in some, even if it's better in others (GPU, RAM capacity).
tipoo - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Does the flip chip production method prevent anyone from looking at the architecture under a microscope like they have before? I expected something like that by now like what the Apple A series got.munim - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
I'd love to chat with Anand about tech!makken - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
Sounds like they're using the Pinyin pronunciation of Qi, which does, in fact, sound like chi.