Windows Weekly 350 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for Windows Weekly! Paul Thurrott has the day off. We've got two great guest hosts, Peter Bright and Daniel Rubino. We're going to talk a lot about Windows Phone 8.1, the new Nokia Icon, Android on Windows Phone, and a whole lot more. Windows Weekly is up next.

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Leo: Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cachefly at cachefly.com. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, episode 350, recorded February 19, 2014

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It's time for Windows Weekly, the show that covers Microsoft and all your Microsoft stories. And boy, there's always a lot to talk about. That's why Paul Thurrott has left us.

Mary Jo Foley: (Laughs)

Leo: He'll be back — he'll be back next week. He's on vacation. Mary Jo Foley is here. Hi, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo: Hi, Leo.

Leo: From allaboutmicrosoft.com. And as usual, when Paul is gone, it takes two to fill his ample shoes. Would you introduce our guests?

Mary Jo: I would be happy to. We have a return guest who is a favorite among the viewers: Dr. Pizza, AKA Peter Bright from Ars Technica.

Leo: He's in the pizzeria right now.

Mary Jo: He is.

Peter Bright: I wish.

Leo and Mary Jo: (Laugh)

Leo: And who's this new guy?

Mary Jo: I know. We have a new guy.

Leo: He looks kind of like a young Paul Thurrott.

Mary Jo: Yes. We have Daniel Rubino, who is the editor-in-chief of WP Central. A very knowledgeable figure in the Windows Phone community.

Leo: Great to have you, Daniel. Thank you for joining us.

Daniel Rubino: Well, thank you for allowing me to be on here. It's an honor.

Leo: Oh, no, not at all. I mean, this is just what we — I love doing this show because it's just — we kind of get together and we just talk about what's going on with Windows 8 and Satya Nadella and all that stuff. And I'm glad you're here today because, of course, we're talking Icon. The Nokia —

Daniel: Sure.

Leo: Well, now, is Icon Nokia X? No, that's the Android. I'm confused.

Mary Jo: Yes.

Leo: Which is which?

Mary Jo: X is the Nokia phone with the Android in it, and the Icon is the Lumia. And so we're going to talk Nokia first, then Icon later.

Leo: Okay.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: The Nokia X. Ev leaks once again with a tweet showing a picture of an Android-based phone. I think we have successfully debunked — ironically, it was a Google employee who debunked Peter's article. You wrote a great article, I thought, Peter Bright, on Ars Technica.

Peter: Well, you see, I don't think —

Leo: Defend yourself, Bright!

Peter: If — if you look at, like, Google's current marketing, they've got a really nice page, I think, on android.com that's talking about KitKat, and it says — you know, this is Android 4.4, and it's got all these shiny new features. And every new feature that they list is part of the Google Play, Mobile Services, close-source, non-open —

Leo: Right.

Peter: — portion. The one that taps into Google Services, and so on and so forth. And this is how Google is promoting Android. This is what Android is, both in Google's eyes and, I think, in most consumers' eyes. You know, if you got a Samsung Galaxy 5 when that's shown next week, and it didn't have any of the Google bits and pieces, you'd be really bummed out. You'd say, "Where's my Play Store? How do I get apps?"

Leo: So just to — and you described this really well in your article on Ars, in which you posit, "Neither Microsoft, Nokia, or anyone else should fork Android because it's unforkable." And you talk about the two parts to Android. One is the AOSP, the open handset alliance, open-source version of Android; and then you speak about the Google services part of Android, which is Google Play. But it includes more than just the apps. It's not just Gmail, Google Play —

Peter: Right. And that —

Leo: It's also location services, which apps depend on.

Peter: Yeah. They put a few API's and things there. Now, some of the API's are fairly Google-specific. So in-app purchasing. If you're writing an app and you're setting up in-app purchasing, then obviously you've got to set up bank accounts and have it authorize with Google somehow. So that's Google-specific.

Leo: That's fine. Nobody would expect that.

Peter: So we can sort of understand that.

Leo: Right.

Peter: But stuff like the — so AOSP has got a location API, but the Google Play stuff has got a better location API, and there's no real reason for it to be not in AOSP, it's just — they've chosen not to do that. So if you have an app that uses the better location API, then you're going to be dependent on having these non-open Google apps. And what I can imagine happening is that they'll push a few more API's into the closed, proprietary bits to make it a bit more encouraging to — sort of enticing to developers to write their apps so that they won't just work on AOSP, so that they have to have the Google stack available. We already see it occasionally with apps that, for no obvious reason, need the Google stack.

Daniel: I will say, though, isn't the numbers in China showing that forked Android devices have been increasing rapidly? Because I think it's a noticeably emerging market.

Peter: Well, I think China is really a special case. The Google name doesn't have the influence and importance it does in China, because Chinese market has — Chinese society has lots of restrictions and limitations, so Google isn't a big search engine there. So tapping into those services, I think, is a lot less important in that market. And there are a couple of others that are similar. So in Russia, Google is not a big player because everyone uses Yandex for their searching. I presume that's how to pronounce it, I don't speak Russian. So yes, it's —

Leo: So there was a response to — there was actually a very lengthy response to your post by Diane Hackborn, who is a — I think she's a Googler, she's on the AOSP team.

Peter: Yeah, she's a long-time Android developer.

Leo: Contributor, yeah. And she, I think, rebuts it quite — in a quite detailed fashion. What is your rebuttal?

Peter: I see —

Leo: Her position is AOSP is a complete, open-source system. It's complete.

Peter: It is, in the sense — if people are looking at smartphones in 2007, then yes, it would be a complete operating system. But now users expect the level of service and integration that they see now.

Leo: Well, and then —

Peter: In some markets, it may not come from Google, so in Chinese markets it may come from — what are they called?

Daniel: Senoweb. They're kind of —

Leo: Yeah.

Daniel: Yeah.

Peter: So it may come from someone else, but —

Leo: If anybody were in a position to provide those kinds of services in the Western world, it would be Nokia.

Daniel: It would be Nokia. Absolutely.

Leo: They have so many of their services. So isn't — I mean —

Peter: Well —

Leo: Daniel, doesn't that seem like, if anybody's going to fork Android, it should be Nokia? And if anybody has a credible shot at it. Now, the one thing missing is a Play store duplicate. They don't have a lot of Android apps, but —

Daniel: Right.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: — I presume they're working on that, right?

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, so I think Nokia is definitely positioned here. They have the Here mapping services, and they have, obviously, a strong connection with Microsoft, which is sort of the whole irony of the situation.

Leo: I think they are Microsoft. The phone part, anyway.

Daniel: (Laughs) Yeah. Right. So I mean —

Peter: Well, yeah, that's the problem.

Leo: Yeah. We're still waiting for China.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Daniel: But they still have the ability to make deals. I mean, so presumably, this device will have the Here mapping system, Here API's, and Bing services on board, Skype, and — so between Microsoft and Nokia services, I think they can fill in quite a bit here.

Peter, No, they can't. I don't think either can on their own. Because Here is staying with Nokia, and that's a big chunk of it.

Leo: Did not Microsoft license that, though?

Peter: They got a — I think they got a license, but they don't own it.

Leo: Okay.

Daniel: Right. They have a — but yeah, I mean, Here Maps is in all Microsoft's products now. It powers what used to be known as Bing Maps. So I think they're — you know, this could definitely pull off — and we have to remember, this device, this Nokia X, is sort of an emerging market device. It is pretty low-end. I don't think it's meant to be, like, a Samsung Galaxy. Having said that — you know, look at Samsung. I believe they have something like around 1100 API's that they wrote themselves for Android, which goes to show you — yeah, I think Peter's right, Google is pulling a lot out of the open-source and putting it into their sort of closed repository, but —

Leo: And didn't — yeah, hasn't Amazon already done this? I mean, they took a long time. They had an Amazon Android app store for a year before they released the Kindle Fire, but this seems like a successful port.

Daniel: Yeah. I mean, you can write API.

Mary Jo: I think the most interesting thing to look for is what they're going to do with the store, right? I mean, they're going to, supposedly, have the Nokia store on these devices, but then there are other reports saying they're going to have something called the Asha on Linux Store, which makes me think they may have multiple stores on these devices or access to multiple stores somehow. And then it'll be interesting to see what kind of apps are in the Nokia store. Will there actually be any Android apps in there, or will all the Android apps be in a separate marketplace that's called Asha on Linux or called something like that?

Leo: Hmmmm.

Mary Jo: Right? That, to me, is the key. Like, I think we can say pretty definitively now, this device is going to be announced. Whatever — if you want to call it a fork or not a fork, it's coming.

Daniel: Oh, yeah.

Peter, Unless regulator approval comes in by the end of the week.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Daniel: (Laughs) But that would be pretty interesting if that happened on the weekend, and they just canceled Monday's press conference.

Mary Jo: I don't think Microsoft wants to stop this.

Leo: Well, would they — you think Microsoft doesn't want Nokia to do this?

Mary Jo: No. I think they totally want this. I don't think — I —

Peter: I don't think it — I don't think it serves their goals in any way.

Leo: Huh.

Peter: I think it's — and that's the bit that's so mysterious about it because the specs that have leaked about this alleged device are not low-end specs. I mean —

Leo: Yeah, they are.

Peter: No, no, no. Compared to an Asha phone, they are way, way up.

Leo: Well —

Peter: They are specs that would run Windows Phone.

Leo: Is specs what counts or price, or unsubsidized price?

Daniel: Unsubsidized price tier.

Leo: Right. So is it — so what is the price point, do you think?

Daniel: Ninety bucks.

Peter: Plus [unintelligible]

Mary Jo: A hundred dollars, which is high, right? That's a pretty high price.

Leo:

Peter: That's still too much. It needs to be 35 bucks, right?

Mary Jo: Yeah. Right.

Daniel: Yeah.

Peter: It — the costs are driven by the building materials.

Leo: Right, right.

Peter: It's — and that's —

Daniel: There is a little bit less memory.

Peter: It's — well, isn't it 512 megs and 4 gigs?

Daniel: Right, yeah.

Peter: Which is the same as the 8S —

Daniel: And the 520 has 8 gigs.

Peter: — which was, I think, 512 and 4 gigs.

Daniel: Yeah.

Peter: So Windows Phone would run on it, and that's why it's mysterious. If it was, like, Asha 11 specs, then I think it would make a lot more sense to do, because then you could say, yes, they're clearly saving a lot of money on the hardware. I assume they're going to make some savings on the screen, or something like that.

Daniel: So one alternate theory of this whole Nokia X thing that I've heard — and there's no evidence for it — but was that when Nokia was looking to sell their hardware and devices division, they wanted to obviously offload Lumia. Microsoft was interested in that, but not interested in the Asha line.

Peter: Yeah.

Daniel: Because the Asha line is sort of dying. I mean, it is — it's still profitable, but it's definitely declining. In order to sweeten the deal, Nokia basically made this device so that Microsoft would have to buy the Asha division because Nokia, on their own, would not be able to sell just Asha to anyone going forward in 2015.

Peter: So you think they made this device so that Microsoft would have to buy the division so they could kill the device off?

Daniel: I've heard crazier things, but -

Mary Jo: Wow.

Daniel: — as an issue of leverage and negotiations, I think it's — because they did buy Asha, and now the question is: What's Microsoft even going to do with that whole line? And so I think that's an interesting theory. I'm not sure if there's anything to back it up, but it's definitely interesting.

Mary Jo: But you know —

Leo: Peter it's — oh, go ahead, Mary Jo. Sorry.

Mary Jo: I was just going to say, you know why I think they aren't going to kill this is I — you guys have probably seen this, too — there are rumors that Microsoft's Windows division and the Windows Phone division are both looking at ways to get Android apps on those platforms. That's a pretty well-sourced rumor, too, so if you get this phone, this low-end phone, with Android apps, this could be kind of like the gateway into that whole strategy of putting Android apps on the other platforms.

Leo: Sure.

Mary Jo: I know it sounds crazy, but it's — both Tom Warren and I have heard it from our sources.

Peter: That is — that is not a strategy. That is —

Leo: That's capitulation.

Mary Jo: They're talking about it. They're talking about it.

Leo: That's giving up.

Peter: Yeah.

Daniel: I don't know if it's — you know what it is, though? It's co-opting. Because if you look what Samsung did to Android — I mean, Samsung and Google —

Leo: It's barely Android, is it? (Laughs)

Daniel: — I would say, until recently they didn't get along in the sense that — Samsung was very dominant.

Leo: Right.

Daniel: And when you spoke to Samsung off the record, they were like, "That's our OS." And so they, basically, were taking it over, which is why I think you've seen this deal between them recently.

Leo: Right.

Daniel: I think maybe Microsoft may be able to see a way in doing that as well — just replace all the Google services with Microsoft Nokia services and sort of flood the market with those kind of devices and undercut Android. I don't know if that's a strategy that could work, but definitely one that's possible.

Peter: I don't know. I have problems with this rumor for so many reasons.

Leo: (Laughs)

Peter: Apart from anything else, is Microsoft even allowed to do that? Because way back in the, I guess 2000's — seems so long ago now — Microsoft had a very long and protracted legal dispute with Sun over shipping Java that wasn't quite Java. And one of the — we don't know the terms of their settlement because ultimately, it was a privately-negotiated settlement rather than a court verdict in the end, I think. But one of the outcomes of that was that Microsoft no longer distributed its not-actually-Java implementation. And I think they could probably ship real Java, not fake Java.

Leo: Well, remember that Sun and Google don't like — oh, I see what you're saying. So you're saying —

Peter: And Oracle has no real love for Google.

Leo: Yeah. Oracle, remember, went after Google for Dalvik, which was their just-in-time implementation of —

Peter: Yeah.

Leo: — Java on Android. Google's response was to do an alternative runtime, or ART — that is available on many Google phones at this point — which they believe is unencumbered.

Peter: Yeah, but they —

Leo: But I think that's not — that's probably GMS, not AOSP.

Peter, I think that's AOSP as well.

Leo: It is? ART is AOSP?

Peter: I may be wrong, but I think it is.

Leo: That would be important to this conversation.

Peter: But my — I mean, maybe the settlement has expired or the terms didn't sort of cover this kind of thing, but it would surprise me to see Microsoft shipping a Java stack that wasn't proper Java.

Leo: So they're not allowed to do an ART or a Dalvik, you're saying?

Peter: Well, that's — I don't know that they're not allowed to do, but —

Leo: Might be.

Peter: — it would surprise me if they were allowed to do it because there was a whole legal fight about, not quite the same thing, but very similar.

Mary Jo: Yeah. And I think the — Hal Berenson — who used to work at Microsoft, who writes a blog, Hal 20/20 — he talked about the fact that maybe their way around it is, Microsoft has a third party do this work, and they don't do it themselves.

Peter: Yeah, that would — that would be —

Mary Jo: So kind of like the loophole, right?

Leo: Maybe that's what Nokia is, at least for now.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Or, you know, there's other companies that — like BlueStacks and others who do this kind of thing — and maybe they do a deal with somebody like that.

Peter: If they worked the BlueStacks to make it integrate a bit better and be a little less heavy on the system resources and that kind of thing, then, yeah, you can sort of see that.

Leo: My experience with BlueStacks is its compatibility's very limited, and probably that's because of the lack of Google Mobile Services.

Peter, You can install Google Play onto BlueStacks.

Leo: Ah. Then you can run anything?

Peter: It's — not everything, but you get more stuff.

Leo: More, yeah.

Peter: Problem is, Android apps don't look like Windows or Windows Phone apps.

Leo: That's another issue.

Peter: They don't work like them. There are lots of integration points where they don't quite fit at the moment, so — obviously, they have no Live Tile concept, they handle things like sharing a little bit differently. And maybe some of these gaps can be filled, and maybe that's part of what the work would be for Microsoft in this sort of space: have some way of bridging from the Android way of thinking about things to the Windows/Windows Phone way of doing things.

Leo: So — but why do this? I guess — have we answered that question? Why?

Mary Jo: Yeah, why?

Leo: If your bill in materials is over a hundred bucks, it's not for a cheap phone. And you do have Asha for that purpose. Why would they want to do this? Is it capitulation? Is it saying, "Nobody's going to buy Windows phone, so we have to do — no, that's crazy talk.

Daniel: No. I mean, there's also other talk that this was a plan B, in case something happened with Nokia that they — there's always rumors that they had Android working in the back room, sort of in case anything happened. Just like the same rumors that Microsoft was working on their own Windows Phone, the Surface Phone. Because Nokia was becoming so dominant, had anyone snatched up Nokia, or the board decided to go Android to do something else, Microsoft would be left without something. So I think everybody had sort of a Plan B, and that's maybe what this still is. I don't know if Nokia anticipated this actually getting this far into its release cycle.

Leo: (Laughs)

Daniel: Because obviously, they can't go, "Oh, we're being bought by Microsoft. We'll kill it." Because you can't do that until the deal's actually finalized. So they have to —

Leo: But you don't have to have a big announcement at Mobile World Congress, either.

Mary Jo: Right. (Laughs)

Daniel: (Laughs) That's true, too. Yeah.

Leo: That's kind of saying — I mean, that's a big announcement.

Mary Jo: Yeah. That's another reason I don't think that Microsoft's hating this. I mean — or that there's a chance that it's going to go on. Because —

Leo: Are they — well, wait a minute, though. During an acquisition, isn't there —

Mary Jo: You can't collude.

Leo: You can't.

Mary Jo: Right. But —

Leo: You can't go to them and say, "Hey, go ahead and do that. That's a good idea. We like it."

Mary Jo: You can't, but they're talking to each other, obviously, because they're working together on Windows Phone. So I'm sure they're not allowed to say to them, "You guys need to kill this," but they also could kind of drop into a conversation, I would think. Like, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" (Laughs) You know? Because they're working with them.

Daniel: (Laughs) Don't go to Mobile World Congress. Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah. (Laughs)

Leo: Boy. You know, given Microsoft's previous experiences with the Department of Justice, I would guess —

Mary Jo: They're going to be careful.

Leo: Very, very careful.

Mary Jo: Yes, I agree. I'm joking about this —

Leo: They don't have a monitor anymore in there, do they?

Peter: No.

Mary Jo: No.

Leo: No compliance monitor? That's over?

Peter: Yep.

Mary Jo: So yeah. It's going to be interesting — it's going to be really interesting to watch how much —

Leo: See if Satya Nadella is at the announcement. That's what you want to do, right?

Mary Jo: Oh, yeah. I know, right?

Daniel: He gets onstage —

Mary Jo: It's going to — I want to see how many times they say the word "Android" during the announcement.

Daniel: Yeah. That's going to be real interesting to see how much they acknowledge it. I mean, I think the bigger story here is going to be how the media covers this, because I think this is going to be a real sensational story. When there really — there's a couple ways this can go, right? I mean, Nokia X could just hit the market, comes out, it's there, it's not a bad — even — it's a good experience. I mean, it is from Nokia, so I would expect that. But who knows? Microsoft could be like, "All right, it's dead, and what's the point of this? It was a one-generation device." Or, like Mary Jo Foley said, this could continue on down the path. So what happens going further could be interesting, but I think it's going to be more sensational headlines than anything of substance, to be honest.

Leo: Well, Dr. Pizza, do you want to retract your Ars article? Is it unforkable?

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Peter: No. I think it is still unforkable, particularly as Microsoft really has its eye on the U.S. and E.U.

Leo: It would be a sub-par experience compared to the other phone choices.

Peter: It would be troublesome.

Leo: Yeah. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul is on vacation, up on the slopes in New Hampshire, and he's skiing his little heart out. But we've got some great replacements. Dr. Pizza is here, Peter Bright from Ars Technica. From Windows Phone Central, editor-in-chief Daniel Rubino. And we will continue in a moment, talking about all things Microsoft, but first, a word from something Microsoft probably doesn't want to hear from: ShareFile from Citrix. So yeah, you could use that other product, but you know what? ShareFile is designed from the ground up to be for business. I think a lot of us have the experience of sending email attachments. Pretty much every business email today has an attachment, whether it's a contract, a spreadsheet, a presentation, a resume. You've heard me say many times: Don't send attachments. There are lots of reasons not to send attachments. Of course, security's one. Everything sent through email is — it's like a postcard. 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Mary Jo Foley is here. Paul Thurrott has the day off, but she's brought in the troops: Peter Bright from Ars Technica; Daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief of Windows Phone Central. And we are talking Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Phone, Android phones for Nokia. You know the works.

Mary Jo: Just another day. (Laughs)

Leo: Just another day.

Daniel: Right.

Leo: What did we — we talked a little bit about this, but it seems credible that this would be — if this is something Microsoft likes, part of this rumored putting Android on Windows Phone itself. Android apps, I should say, on Windows Phone itself. Does that seem credible? Does that seem doable?

Mary Jo: I don't really know how they're going to do it. Like I keep saying, maybe it's a third party, maybe there's some other way. But I can tell you, the rumor is credible, based on who told me.

Leo: Because of — yeah. Wow.

Mary Jo: Yeah. So it's definitely not just some idle talk.

Daniel: Blackberry did this.

Leo: Blackberry did it with mixed success, I think.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Daniel: Right.

Leo: Hmmm.

Mary Jo: I know. It's going to be really interesting to see how this goes and how they position it and how they explain it, right? Because that, to me, is key. It's not — they can't go out there and say, "Hey, guys. You know what? It didn't work out, and we're putting Android apps on the phone." They can't go at it like that. But — I don't know — position yourself as the uber-platform that runs everything, maybe? I don't know how I would do it.

Leo: (Laughs) One platform to rule them all.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Daniel: In one way, giving users an option isn't a bad thing, but it is the message, right, that you're sending to developers on Windows Phone and the market in general, that'd be —

Leo: That's what you really don't want to do, right?

Daniel: Right.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Because they're already kind of seemingly reluctant to develop for Windows Phone. If they suddenly can say, "Well, I can just take my Android app and import it over," that kind of — you're never going to get —

Peter: Mary Jo, surely you remember the 1990s.

Mary Jo: I do.

Peter: When IBM —

Leo: She's not old enough, but I do, Peter. I was there.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) I'm not old enough, but I do.

Peter: "Better Windows than Windows."

Leo: Ah, OSX.

Peter: OS 2.

Leo: I mean, Mac — what am I saying? — OS 2. It was 8 before OSX. Yeah.

Peter: Was that a resounding success, that whole strategy of, Hey, we'll run your DOS apps and your WIN 16 apps better than the competition? I'm pretty sure that crashed and burned.

Mary Jo: It did.

Leo: It was in certain markets. You know what? Banks used OS 2 for a long time.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Peter: Yeah. and I think it's big in Germany or something crazy.

Leo: (Laughs)

Peter: But —

Mary Jo: I know. Yeah.

Leo: But, you know, that's a very different story because that was a cooperation between IBM and Microsoft —

Mary Jo: It was.

Leo: They — you know, Dave Cutler traded over and Ed Iaccobucci traded over, and this was a very much unified effort. I don't think you could say that —

Mary Jo: And then Microsoft pulled —

Peter: It started that way.

Leo: Anyway, it started that way.

Peter: It didn't finish that way.

Leo: No.

Mary Jo: Yeah, no.

Leo: But your resulting product was truly — you know, it might have been a better Windows than Windows. I mean, it was truly successful. This would not be that. This would be a beast with two backs. This is not going to be a good thing.

Peter: (Laughs)

Leo: Peter got that one. He's a Shakespearian scholar, my friends.

Daniel: (Laughs)

Peter: Yeah. I don't see it.

Leo: All right.

Peter: I don't see how they can sell it and not just shoot themselves in the foot.

Leo: So Microsoft's also going to be at Mobile World Congress, yes?

Mary Jo: They are.

Daniel: Kind of.

Mary Jo: Not in a big way, right?

Leo: (Laughs) Kind of? Are they going to take a back seat to Nokia?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Daniel: Well, there's — they don't have any announcements. They just have — on Sunday, they have, like, a press analyst meeting that they're going to kind of talk about strategy —

Peter: Sunday? I don't think I got an invitation to that.

Leo: Are you going to Barcelona?

Peter: I am. And I'm meeting a bunch of people on Monday.

Leo: Uh oh.

Peter: Uh oh?

Leo: Uh oh.

Daniel: Uh oh.

Mary Jo: (Laughs) It's just a little drink thing.

Leo: This is when Dr. Pizza goes ballistic. It's just a drink?

Mary Jo: It's a little drink meet-and-greet.

Leo: Oh.

Peter: Oh, it probably clashes with something else. Maybe — you sign up for one of these conferences —

Leo: I know.

Peter: — it just ruins your inbox for the month.

Leo: Infinite emails, yeah.

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Peter: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Are you going, Daniel?

Peter: Normally I'm really good about reading my emails, and just — in the last few weeks, I've just gone, ugh!

Leo: Monday, we are going to do the Galaxy S5 announcement live here.

Mary Jo: Sweet.

Leo: I think Motorola has some announcements, but Nokia's announcement is when, because I've got to make a note. Because we definitely have to do that live.

Daniel: Monday morning.

Peter: Monday morning.

Leo: Oh, no.

Peter: Yeah.

Leo: Monday morning —

Daniel: Yeah, real early.

Leo: — Barcelona time?

Peter: It would be 11 PM Pacific, I think.

Daniel: Yeah, I think 8:30.

Leo: What time Pacific? Two in the morning?

Peter: No, it's — I think it's 11- 11:30, I think they said.

Leo: Oh, all right. Because the Galaxy S5 — no, no — because the Galaxy S5 announcement is at 11. Or, it's at 10.

Peter: Because they're nine hours ahead in Barcelona, Pacific.

Leo: Oh, Lord.

Mary Jo: It's going to be a busy night.

Daniel: It's going to be a long day.

Peter: If it's 8:30 Barcelona time, it will be 11:30 Pacific, in the evening.

Daniel: Nokia also has a —

Leo: Midnight. All right.

Daniel: — developer day on Tuesday, so —

Mary Jo: That's right.

Daniel: — they'll be talking about some — I imagine — I think there'll be probably some app announcements and some strategy things. I think there'll be little tidbits of Windows Phone info coming out, too, but nothing — they're saving the big guns for build, obviously.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Right. But yeah, it's interesting because a lot of people were like, "Oh, no, there's no Windows Phone announcements at Mobile World Congress." Well, Microsoft's kind of taking that strategy, right, like they are with CES —

Daniel: Sure.

Mary Jo: — and they're not using these big shows, where their news gets lost, anymore to make really big announcements like that.

Leo: They don't need to. They don't need to. They can do their own thing. Now, let me ask: Will there be anybody announcing a Windows Phone outside of Nokia?

Daniel: There's been some talks of some third — like, you know, Huawei. Possibly they have, I believe, the W3 that may be announced. We haven't heard too much about it.  So some low-level, entry-level devices like that. I don't believe anything from Samsung or HTC, though, so I think it'll be just maybe Huawei and that's pretty much it.

Mary Jo: Because they have to wait for Windows Phone 8.1 to have the next generation of devices, right?

Daniel: Sure. Yeah.

Mary Jo: So all those things like Goldfinger, Moneypenny, all these next-generation phones — the Samsung Heron on Verizon. I think those are all post-build, right? If they come to pass.

Daniel: Sure.

Leo: Oh, so there — so Samsung's going to keep making Windows phones?

Daniel: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Supposedly.

Leo: What a shocker.

Daniel: (Laughs)

Leo: I did not expect that. How about HTC?

Daniel: They're kind of — they haven't ruled it out, but it's not a high on their priority list. I would still expect them to probably put out a device at some point for 8.1, probably later in the year, but I'm — you know, they haven't released, technically, a new device in a long, long time — I think about 14 months.

Mary Jo: I know. I'm sad; I love my 8X.

Leo: Mary Jo loves her 8X, yeah.

Daniel: Sprint has a —

Mary Jo: I love my 8X. I wish they'd do another phone, especially on Verizon.

Peter: Do we still think that Samsung is going to go for this, even after their — signing that deal with Google?

Daniel: Realignment with Google.

Leo: No. I don't think so, but I know nothing.

Daniel: They still — I mean, Mary Jo may be able to speak to this. Doesn't, I believe, Samsung sort of get discounts? Since they already do PC's, they get discounts on licenses for Windows Phones and vice versa. So every time I've talked to Samsung off the record, they've always been sort of like, "We're keeping our foot in the door with Windows Phone." I don't think they want to shut the door. I think, in case something does happen on Windows Phone, they want to be there.

Leo: They're such a big company that it's not a big drain on them to have some guys in the corner over there doing a Windows phone.

Daniel: It's actually surprising — I think just by how little they push Windows Phone, I think they sell more than HTC does, still, even though Samsung doesn't really —

 

Peter: Really?

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: Is that a high standard? I don’t know.

Daniel: No, it's — well, considering with Nokia, it's actually — I'm actually surprised, every time I see Samsung numbers for Windows Phone, how high it is. It's —

Leo: It's probably not in the U.S., right? It's probably in other markets, or no?

 

Daniel: Well, they've got the —

Leo: ATIV, yeah.

Daniel: Yeah, they have the new ATIV for AT&T, which is actually pretty nice.

Leo: Yeah. Interesting.

Peter: I haven't seen that. And that's the thing. I mean, at least HTC is kind of the company you think of as making Windows phones. Because, like, the 8X made quite a splash. Samsung, the ATIV, things really haven't. So if they're selling better than HTC, that's really surprising to me.

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: It's just a measure of Samsung's power in the marketplace.

Peter: It is.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: I think HTC is in such trouble, that I — it doesn't make sense for them to have too many development teams. I think —

Peter: Do you not think that Robert Downey, Jr., is going to save HTC?

Leo: (Laughs) I think you're going to see the next — the new One, I guess that's what they're going to call it, the new One. And that's — they're going to put all of their might behind that. Because that's — their might is not so great anymore. But Samsung is so huge, they could — you know, they've got Tizen, which is basically a Linux phone. There's no reason — they're big in Android — there's no reason why they wouldn't do a Windows phone.

Peter: Tizen is basically dead.

Leo: Is it?

Peter: Oh, blatantly.

Leo: Because of the Google deal?

Peter:  It's just delayed, and — oh, the Google deal, I think, puts another nail in its coffin, but I —

Leo: You've got to think that selling Motorola to Lenovo was part of the deal.

Daniel: Oh, sure.

Leo: They said, "Look. We'll get out — we're going to get out of the phone business, but we need you, Samsung, to really toe the line here and really do — kind of clean — yeah."

Daniel: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, I totally believe that. Because that was just way too odd. I'm not saying that Motorola made sense, even for Google — besides the patents — but that quick sell-off —

Leo: Yeah.

Daniel: — was very unexpected, and I think that's definitely part of —

Leo: Well, and add to it pressure from the Korean government, which made a law that said you have to be able to remove this crap-ware, I think Samsung was getting it from both sides, so ...

Daniel: Yeah.

Mary Jo: What about Sony? Do you guys think Sony'll do Windows phones?

Daniel: Ooh. Yeah, that's a good one. I mean, we've been hearing about that for a long time.

Mary Jo: I know.

Daniel: They're sort of on the sidelines, like, "We're not ruling it out." I don't know. I honestly don't know. I haven't heard of anything actually in the wings, but —

Mary Jo: Right. No code names have leaked or anything.

Daniel: No.

Mary Jo: No Ev leaks.

Leo: Do they do one now? Pardon my ignorance.

Daniel: No.

Leo: All right.

Mary Jo: No. But there's been rumors for a year, right?

Daniel: They were announced — yeah. They were announced for Windows Phone 72The original announcement — they were one of the few companies that were on board with Windows — it was Windows Phone 7 devices back then.

Peter: (Laughs)

Daniel: And Sony was on board, and there was — it later came out, this Julie prototype. But then it got — they pulled out at the last minute, and so they never made it to the actual release of Windows Phone 7. And so they pulled out, and that was that. It was actually an interesting device. It had a slide-out keyboard, and a lot of people — every time we posted images of it, people were always excited. But Sony would be a welcome player to sort of fill in Nokia's hole that they're going to leave when they're no longer an independent hardware division.

Leo: They make —

Peter: What about — wildcard suggestion: Motorola Windows Phone.

Leo: No.

Daniel: (Laughs)

Leo: Actually, Lenovo might well.

Peter: Because why would — you know, it — let's say if it got, like, a steady ten or fifteen percent of the market. Why would Lenovo not?

Daniel: Sure.

Peter: You know —

Daniel: Yeah, because they're a big partner for —

Peter: Why wouldn't they? Because there again, it's like Samsung. They're big enough to have a finger in every pie. The marginal cost of — you design the hardware, yeah. You design it for your Android flagship, but you can stick Windows Phone on there —

Daniel: Sure.

Peter: — easily enough. Why not?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Daniel: Yeah.

Peter: And if you say that, like, Samsung gets good pricing on the software because they sell a lot of PC's, well, who sells more PC's than Samsung? Lenovo. So ...

Daniel: Yeah, I think all these companies are on the sidelines waiting to jump in, but they won't until — I mean, the big problem is U.S. market share. Three percent for Windows Phone is still too low. It's — the rest of the world, it's doing pretty well, you look at Spain, you look at Italy.

Leo: Well, that's the thing, yeah.

Daniel: Yeah. But the U.S. is pretty slow.

Leo: But that's the thing: Lenovo's a Chinese company. Do they care that much about U.S. market share? Maybe —

Daniel: No, and so far their Android devices haven't made much of a splash, either, but they have potential, so ...

Peter: And they did interesting things. They were one of the first to ship an Intel-powered Lenovo —

Leo: Right.

Peter: — Android handset.

Leo: Scale.

Peter: So ...

Leo: Very interesting subject. We're — but it's good — it's — may you all live in interesting times. It's a good thing. You want to see some ferment. I think it's bad for Microsoft if Nokia's the only company making RT tablets and Windows phones. They need some partners, for sure. Is anybody making RT besides Nokia and Microsoft?

Mary Jo: Not now.

Daniel: Nope.

Leo: So that's — to me, I'm just likening the Widows Phone marketplace to the RT marketplace. It's like, well, if nobody's making RT because they don't want to compete with Microsoft, and this dual-headed Microsoft/Nokia thing — why would they want to do Windows Phone?

Peter: Well, I — the one — I sort of agree with you, for the most part. The one thing I would say is probably the phone market is a little — can sort of support a little more diversity.

Leo: Right.

Peter: You know, because people want lots of different screen sizes and some people want sort of slightly weird things, like dual-SIM and things like that.

Leo: There is no market more diverse and heterogeneous than the PC marketplace. There are more Windows 8 form factors —

Peter: PC, yes, but tablet, no. The tablet market — you know —

Leo: I'm looking — that's my sign for the Yoga. You can tell I'm doing —

Peter — because, you know, your tablet, you have the screen size, and that's the only variable that really matters.

Leo: Yeah.

Peter: I think there's more place for niche mobile phones than there is for sort of niche —

Leo: Boy, it doesn't look like that. It really looks like it's shaking out to Samsung and Apple and that's it.

Mary Jo: No!

Leo and Daniel: (Laugh)

Leo: I know you don't like that.

Peter: There's an awful lot of weird Android phones out there.

Leo: Yeah.

Peter: Particularly AOSP Android phones.

Leo: Right.

Daniel: Well, and so far, Samsung has sort of avoided the real low-end market for Android. They make a lot of premium —

Leo: That's where all the other — that's where the diversity's happening, is the low end.

Daniel: Right.

Peter: Yeah.

Leo: Not the high end.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Daniel: Same with Apple, too.

Leo: Yeah. Because neither Samsung nor Apple is pushing into the 35-dollar phone market. Big opportunity for Microsoft.

Peter: Will we ever see, like, a dual-SIM iPhone? Of course not. Because it appeals to the wrong market.

Leo: We, apparently, are expecting to see a dual-SIM Windows phone, though. That's from Nokia.

Daniel: Right.

Peter: Because it's big in emerging markets. It's one of the things they care about.

Leo: This is a story on Windows Phone Central.

Daniel: Yeah, India's probably one of the fastest-growing markets right now for Windows Phone. The market there is absolutely huge, so having a dual-SIM device would be pretty massive there.

Peter: Yeah.

Leo: Explain to me — because nobody here in the U.S. needs dual-SIM. What is the purpose of a dual-SIM phone? Daniel, what's the idea?

Daniel: I think people on — so in India, it's obviously not like the U.S. Market, where you have to sign a two-year agreement. And people basically use different SIMS for different parts of the country. When they're traveling around, they can pop them in and out. Some have better data plans, so you can use voice on one, data on the other. So they offer a lot more flexibility. And if you look at, like, the Asha phones, they do have dual-SIM already. It's sort of a big thing that's missing from Windows Phone, considering the market there. The 520, the 620 — those devices are the top sellers right now in India. And so bringing dual-SIM — to what's going to be called Moneypenny — that's the code name from Nokia — is going to be sort of a big deal. and, you know, it's an interesting story, I think, for Windows Phone, that emerging markets in countries like India is probably one of the biggest areas of growth for them. But it's not as sensational as the U.S. market.

Leo: Interesting. There's no market in the U.S. for dual-SIM. I mean, we have travelers, but —

Daniel: No, I don't think so.

Leo: No, that's kind of a specialty market.

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: Or at least not a U.S. market.

Peter: Well, I mean, yeah. I think it's quite a big market, but it's not a western market.

Leo: Yeah, yeah, sorry.

Peter: I've heard, apparently — again, same as India — it's big in Africa. People — sort of, people who will travel between countries a lot, they'll have a home SIM and a roaming SIM.

Leo: But do people travel that much, or is it maybe that the borders are close and they just —

Peter: The — yeah, yeah. It's where —

Leo: Migrant workers, that kind of thing.

Peter: The border may be porous, and you may live near —

Leo: Right, right.

Daniel: I think that's sort of the interesting thing here with Windows Phone, is this emerging market — India, Africa, you know, you have Latin-American countries, Mexico, it's very popular, and I think they have eleven percent market share. I think Microsoft was sort of caught off-guard by that success. They've always been sort of aiming for that higher-end market — or mid to high, I should say — and the fact that countries like India and Mexico have really caught on has forced them to sort of add these features like dual SIM. In hindsight, it would have been better to have it earlier on — six months ago — but now they're going to have to add it to 8.1.

Peter: Which — to me, that's always raised an interesting question: What happens if, a few years down the line, Microsoft has a really sort of — okay, not dominant market share in these countries, but at least a 15, 20 percent market share in those countries, which, I think, is not impossible to imagine. What happens if they have that, but they're still only sort of three or four percent in the U.S.? Do they stick with Windows Phone, then? Where it's sort of an un-sexy success, or do they just pack it in and say, "We give up"?

Daniel: I don't think they'll do that, only because I feel like, you know, the strategy they did with XBOX. They were very content with losing money for a long time with this long-term strategy. I think they — I mean, the fact is, it's a good operating system. When you look at the criticisms for Windows Phone, it's not because it's buggy, it crashes, it's slow. It's because of — well, it used to be lack of apps; that's sort of disappearing now. And sort of, it's not as flexible as Android or iOS for user features. That'll be interesting with 8.1. So the base is good. The message is, they have a good product to sell, so if it was reserved, I would say it would have a tough strategy. Like, you look at Windows Mobile years ago. We all used it, but admittedly, it wasn't very good for consumers. So I think they do have this. You know, it's just finding the right market. I don't know what it's going to take in the U.S., though, to actually catch on, but it's definitely a tough problem for them.

Mary Jo: You know, it's interesting to remember what Microsoft's heritage is, right? They came at the market on all kinds of things as the low-cost volume company. Like, that's how they got into the enterprise, that's how they kind of unseated a bunch of their competitors. And so I think they aren't averse to coming in at the low end and making that the volume play, and then kind of parleying that into something bigger. So I agree with Daniel; I think they're going to stick it out and just keep throwing money at it.

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: Windows — go ahead.

Peter: Is it that much money? I think probably —

Daniel: No. And as it merges with Windows RT, and that whole project comes to be, you're still — you're going to be overlapping costs, and that will be — that redundancy will be removed.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: It's just a shame because Windows Phone, as somebody's saying in the chatroom — Species is saying in the chatroom — really is a great OS. It just came a little too late, developers didn't embrace it to the degree that they needed to. I — you can't — can you say it's an expanding market at this point? Is it growing?

Daniel: Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it's definitely growing. It's growing at the rate, or slightly higher, than general smartphone adoption across the world.

Leo: Oh, okay. Well, that's good.

Daniel: So it's — yeah, no, I think it's — most reports show it over 100 percent year-over-year growth, some going high as 140, 109 percent. But, no, it's growing, it's just the whole pie is growing, too. Actually, Apple's market share is declining, even though their numbers are increasing, because of that — because of Android. So it's an interesting strategy. I think it's —

Leo: Rising tide raises all votes.

Daniel: Right. But that story's going to end, too.

Leo: And your vote's going a little bigger than others.

Daniel: Yeah. But I would say, probably the next three, four years, that will probably end. There is wiggle room now, as people abandon dumb phones and go to smartphones, Microsoft has an opportunity. But if they don't hit it within, I'd say, four years, that story would be very different, I would suspect.

Leo: Is Blackberry a cautionary tale? Is there something Microsoft can learn from what happened to Blackberry?

Daniel: I don't know. You know, Blackberry 10 — I have a few of their devices. It wasn't a bad OS, but the problem with Blackberry was, that's all they sold were phones. And so they didn't have as much clout. Microsoft can take a few bad quarters with Windows Phone with no issue because that's not what they rely on to sell. So I would say Blackberry and Palm are very similar, but Microsoft is very different here.

Leo: Right. They're much more resilient, of course.

Peter: Well, Blackberry — I think Blackberry will survive, actually, but not as a phone company. They'll —

Daniel: As services, yeah.

Peter: Yeah, services, mobile device management, all that kind of thing.

Leo: Yeah.

Daniel: Sure.

Peter: But yeah, I think their days as a phone company are numbered.

Leo: Let's talk about Windows Phone 8.1. More leaks, more features, more stuff.

Mary Jo: More things, I know.

Leo: More things. Who wants to take the lead on this one? Should we let Daniel —

Mary Jo: Well, I think you should open that WP Central link on our shownotes that says, "Features we're most excited about." Look at the list —

Leo: We'll show this video, yeah.

Mary Jo: Look at the list of features, how many things there are in this release.

Leo: Wait a minute — I'm getting a Chinese page; is this right?

Peter: If it were —

Mary Jo: Oh — no, sorry, the bottom — the "Features we're most excited about."

Leo: (Laughs) Whaaaaa? I'm a little nervous when I see a page in Chinese. Whoa!

Mary Jo: No, that one's okay. That, actually, is an interesting page, too, from livesino.net. That's —

Daniel: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah, he dug around in the SDK and found a bunch of icons for Cortana, which we haven't heard that much about. You know, the Siri-like component that's coming to Windows Phone 8.1.

Leo: Look at all that Cortana stuff.

Mary Jo: Microsoft blocked the access, but this gives you some, kind of like, little clues about the kinds of things that you may be able to say to Cortana. You know, "Check my flight time," blah blah blah, that kind of thing.

Peter: Honestly, if it weren't for the — what I've seen that's been leaked so far, which is — nothing personal, no one leaks anything to me —

Mary Jo: (Laughs)

Peter: If it weren't for the branding difficulties it would cause, this is Windows Phone 9.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Daniel: Sure.

Peter: This is Windows Phone 9, and it's going to be called 8.1 because —

Daniel: Just to match.

Peter — they're saving the 9 name and they wanted to match the 8.1 name.

DANIEL: Sure.

Peter: This looks like Windows Phone 9.

Mary Jo: I know. It has so much stuff in it.

Daniel: Yeah, this is equivalent to, I would say, Windows Phone 7.5, which famously had 500 new features and was a really big overhaul. This is sort of, I would say, along the same lines. So Cortana, which is the Siri-like assistant —

Peter: I think this is bigger.

Mary Jo: You do?

Daniel: Yeah, possibly.

Peter: It's got all the underlying API bits and pieces as well, which the alignment looks like it's going to be a lot bigger between phone and regular Windows, so I think this is going to be a huge release.

Daniel: Yeah. It's going to be — like I said, Cortana and Action Center — also the notification center, that's a part of it — are the big stories that it's easy to write about. But it's — really, on that Features page, we give — with all those small changes, that's going to be a real big user story. There's just so many small tweaks that they've done for user options that has really made this, I think, a really surprising release that's coming out.

Mary Jo: Yeah, swipe screen, we get, right? The swipe typing screen?

Daniel: Yeah, swipe keyboard.

Leo: Just looking at all this really does — it's not a .1 update.

Mary Jo: There's a lot. No.

Leo: This is a big one.

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: Swipe is a great — it's the swipe keyboard that we use on Android?

Daniel: No, it's — so yeah, this is a little — it's —

Leo: It's spelled the same.

Daniel: It's not Swipe, capital S. Well, it should be — I think it's — yeah, it's just — it's going to be the stock keyboard, but instead of actually typing, you can just drag your finger —

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Daniel: — and it'll create the little swipe sort of —

Leo: Swipe is the first to do that. Google's new keyboard for Android does that. It's really a nice way to — SwiftKey does it now. You — instead of tapping, you draw, kind of.

Daniel: Yeah. So this is Microsoft's version. It's not a separate keyboard, they're not opening it up to third-party keyboards. It's simply an option you can do on existing stock. So it's their own flavor, . would be — I think it's real interesting for it to come to tablets, too. This is part of the whole keyboard technology that they're developing.

Peter: Have you used Swipe on an Android tablet? It is so weird, I find. Because the tablet's too big. The keyboard's too big —

Leo: Yeah, I never use it on a tablet. I — yeah, I always use it on a phone. Interesting.

Mary Jo: What about an 8-inch tablet, though? Would it make more sense there?

Peter: That might be possible.

Leo: I think once the keys are big enough that you could thumb-type, you don't need Swipe.

Peter: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Swipe is for the small —

Peter: I'm a big fan of the split-thumb keyboard.

Daniel: Sure. Yeah.

Leo: I'm kind of with you on that.

Peter: You don't have to swipe on that.

Leo: Well, this is exciting. So we're still on target for March, or ...

Mary Jo: What are you hearing, Daniel, for RTM and —

Daniel: Yeah. They're tidying up right now. I heard all the major production of 8.1 is done; they're just basically going through right now and making sure everything is good and cleaning up some UI's. Some of the leaks we've seen today are from builds from a few weeks ago, so they're not — there's going to be still some changes. But yeah, we're hearing RTM will be announced before Build, and once — they're going to announce it at Build, presumably, and then they're going to give the developer preview at that same — either at that same time or that week. That's the goal, so that you'd be able to actually update your phone to 8.1. And anybody would be able to do that. You won't get the firmware from, like, Nokia and HTC that may enable some advanced features, but you'll get the core 90 percent of the operating system, which would be — I think it's a great story, for Microsoft to be able to do that.

Leo: You don't have to wait for the carrier. You can do it yourself.

Daniel: Right, right.

Leo: And — so when is Build?

Mary Jo and Daniel: April 2.

Leo: So April for the developer, and then when do we — when do we get the develop downloads for our phones?

Daniel: I'm hearing not before June 15.

Leo: June.

Daniel: At least for the Icon.

Mary Jo: Oh, wow. Really?

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. So —

Leo: Well, the Icon's the one I was going to buy.

Peter: Yeah, see —

Daniel: You could still put —

Mary Jo: You can buy it with what's on there.

Peter: [unintelligible] exasperating here. Yeah, because, I mean, it sounds like it'll be a little bit better than the situation with 8.0, where basically the phones were on the market as soon — the software went live, the SDK went live, and the phones were already on the market. So basically, no developers got a chance to take advantage of any of the new features —

Daniel: Right.

Peter: — because they just didn't have time.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: So Mary Jo —

Peter: So if this comes out in June, it sounds like it'll be a little bit better because they'll have a couple of months, but it still seems bizarre to be so secretive about it, and —

Leo: Oh, no, this is Microsoft. Come on.

Daniel: Well, you see, what happened when they did give the SDK to what was a very small number of developers. I've heard the number was pretty tiny. I don't know if they —

Mary Jo: Oh, really? Wow.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. And so that was a real select group of developers that they chose to give the SDK to.

Leo: Oops. (Laughs)

Daniel: And it was, like, literally hours because it got leaked. It — I know Microsoft was pretty upset about that. because up to that point, 8.1 was largely a mystery.

Mary Jo: It was.

Leo: So all the stuff that we know now is from that SDK leak?

Daniel: Pretty much, yeah.

Leo: So Mary Jo, did you get hands-on with the — I saw your Icon — oh! Oh! Let me see, let me see! Oooooh. What do you think? Wait a minute. All right, hold on. Peter's got it, too. That means Daniel's going to hold up his now. Wait a minute — go ahead.

Daniel: Oh, yeah, I've got mine right here.

Leo: I hate you all.

Peter: You've got a black one. Mine is white.

Mary Jo: Oh, you got the white one.

Daniel: Yeah, I got the black one.

Leo: Yeah. I wish they had colors. I really like that.

Mary Jo: I know.

Daniel: It's Verizon.

Leo: Yeah, Verizon doesn't like color.

Mary Jo: Oh, Verizon, Verizon.

Leo: So —

Peter: I wish this phone was not on Verizon, and —

Daniel: Everybody does.

Peter: Like, The Verge said it's really ugly, and I don't get why they say it's really ugly.

Leo: Looks pretty to me. From a distance.

Mary Jo: I don't think it's ugly.

Peter: I think it's stylistically more similar to the 925 and Verizon's 928, so —

Leo: It's slabby. It's slabby, right?

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: Does it have the square corners and all that?

Daniel: It feels great to hold, though.

Peter: Yeah. It's a lot better size than the —

Mary Jo: It's heavy. (Laughs)

Leo: So Mary Jo, you say you wanted to love it, but you do like it, but don't love it.

Mary Jo: I like it, but man, I am bummed how heavy this is. And everybody's like, "Oh, come on, woman up."

Leo: (Laughs) Woman up!

Daniel: Well, that's because you used the 8X. The 8X is a very slim, light phone.

Mary Jo: I used the 8X, right. Okay. Look at the 8X versus this phone.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: So they're the same thickness when I have the case on the 8X, but man, this thing is so — it's, like four ounces. This is closing in on six.

Peter: There's no metal in it. It's, you know —

Mary Jo: It's heavy. Like, I've noticed when I hold it in one hand, because it's a 5-inch phone, I have to rest my hand on the desk to make it comfortable. I do.

Peter and Daniel: (Laugh)

Mary Jo: I do.

Daniel: I don't know. See, I'm a big — I know a lot of people are big fans of that. I mean, the Lumia heft, you can call it, the Nokia heft. You know, that's just a trademark of Nokia phones. I mean, they even joke about it.

Mary Jo: I know.

Daniel: Right, so on Twitter they'll put out photos of the phone on the sidewalk with cracked pavement, saying it's a Nokia.

Leo: (Laughs) Six ounces. It's less than a filet mignon. Come on.

Mary Jo: I know, but when you're holding it and trying to use it one-handed, and you're holding it up for a long time, my hand gets tired. It does. And I don't know, I'm not that weak. I think this was heavier than I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be like the 925.

Daniel: Sure. Actually, I find the 925 almost too light. I had to put a case on it because it's so slippery, it comes out of my hand pretty easily.

Peter: That's like, I bought an iPhone 5, and it's too light. It doesn't feel substantial enough for how much the damn thing cost.

Leo: It should weigh more! I want more ounces for my dollar!

Peter: I do. I want it to be a little denser because it just feels more reassuring and satisfying in my hand.

Leo: Mary Jo, is it a — do you think it's a gender thing? Do you think women would want a lighter phone than men?

Mary Jo: I don't think all women do. I think some people like a heavier phone. You know, I also get to try that —

Leo: It weighs less than a pint.

Mary Jo: I know, it does.

Peter: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: And with all the pints I've been lifting, I should be able to lift this phone, no problem. (Laughs)

Daniel: (Laughs)

Mary Jo: But no, it's just — you know what I've noticed? The 1520, I always use that with two hands because it was, like, closer to six — a 6-inch phone. So I never picked it up one-handed.

Peter: Like a dinner plate.

Mary Jo: Right. This one I'm trying to use one-handed, and it just —

Leo: Ah, I see.

Mary Jo: I just noticed my hand starts drooping. I don't know if it's just me or-

Leo: It's a five inch screen. Is that the biggest phone you've ever had?

Mary Jo: It is.

Leo: Yeah, some of it could be that.

Peter: Have you used the 1520 though?

Mary Jo: I used the 1520 for a while, and I really liked that phone a lot.

Daniel: That's my daily device.

Leo: Is the 1520 better than this, the 929?

Daniel: Nope, same hardware. It's just one is six inch and one is five inch.

Mary Jo: Right, they have the same camera-

Peter: The 1520 can get a micro SD.

Leo: And you can get a micro SD on the 1520, but you cannot-

Mary Jo: Right on this one.

Peter: On the other hand, AT&T cripples the 1520 by removing the wireless charging because AT&T-

Daniel: Right.

Leo: They turn off Chi?

Peter: Yeah.

Daniel: Oh, yeah.

Leo: Why?

Daniel: Because they support PMA.

Leo: Oh I hate you AT&T, I hate you with a passion that burns like a white fire in the soul of my belly. I hate you.

Peter: The AT&T model is, I think 16 gig.

Daniel: There are two though, there is a 16 gig and a 32 gig you can get online.

Peter: Like the international model is always 32 gig and with the Chi charging. But AT&T says nope, we don't want any of that because that might be good.

Daniel: Although the 8.1 will be less of a- Because with 8.1 you can install apps and games to the SD card now. So actually, the 1520 with even 16 gigs and a 64 gig card is still pretty awesome.

Leo: You guys just said you hated Verizon, so it seems like the 15-

Mary Jo: They're service is the best.

Leo: In New York City, there's nothing better because it was 9x, so I guess, if you want Verizon this is your choice.

Mary Jo: It is.

Daniel: No, it's a good phone. I mean, if I didn't have the 1520 I would be using this phone all of the time. I keep telling people once you go to a six inch phone, as ridiculous as it is, you can't go back. It's really hard, I find even the Icon kind of small now.

Leo: Now what's the deal on Glance because there is no Glance on the Icon.

Mary Jo: When I asked Nokia, they said there is some kind of a hardware restriction and they aren't completely ruling it out, but it's not there and neither is double-tap to wake on this phone.

Leo: Is it because it's 1080p?

Daniel: No, I think it's the 1080p combined with OLED. They've done Glance on OLED, they've done Glance on 1080p but they've never done Glance on 1080p OLED. So I think there's something going on there that's causing them a little bit of trouble. I don't know the exact details but that's my guess.

Peter: OLED should be perfect for Glance. Glance and OLED seem like they're made for each other.

Leo: Tell us what Glance is real quickly Peters, for those of us who don't know. Show us a Glance.

Peter: I've got so many damn phones here. Let's see. They're not behaving. Glance shows you, even when the screen is black, it will show you a clock. Whether it's in vibrate or noisy mode. In the most recent update it'll also show you the notifications.

Leo: Right. So this is what the Moto X does also, it's the active-

Peter: It's a similar sort of thing to that.

Leo: And the reason it works well OLED is because you can turn on portions of an OLED without turning on the whole screen.

Daniel: Right, exactly.

Peter: For an LCD screen, the whole screen is lit up even if it's black.

Leo: Yeah so this is Glance on a 920.

Peter: Yeah, you've got the notifications on the bottom, the clock and it's on vibrate.

Leo: Yeah, it doesn't use up a lot of power, you don't have to pick up the phone and turn it on to see the time and what's going on. It's a nice feature, I think.

Daniel: Yeah, it really is.

Peter: It's a sort of classic Nokia sort of feature.

Leo: And we should say they did it before Moto X did.

Daniel: Right. Yeah.

Mary Jo: Daniel how many bars of service are you getting on the Icon?

Daniel: Yeah. I'm out on the island, Long Island, not NYC and Verizon is not as good for me as AT&T so where I am I only have about two bars on 3G. If I go outside it'll pick up LTE but I get way better service with AT&T so... But that's mostly dependent on area. I haven't had too many problems with reception in general, as far as taking and receiving calls and data though.

Mary Jo: I'm asking because on my Avex I always get full bars of 4G here in New York, but on the Lumia Icon I'm getting two.

Daniel: Interesting, have you had an actual speed test?

Mary Jo: I have not tried that yet.

Daniel: Yeah because sometimes, I know, they will report differently, as far as the bars. They may not necessarily be calibrated, so I'd be curious to find out.

Mary Jo: I didn't know if it was because the metal sides on this are antennas, right?

Daniel: Right.

Mary Jo: On the Icon, and if that was, I don't know, anything different or-

Peter: That's where holding it wrong comes into play.

Mary Jo: Exactly. Maybe that's why I'm- I'm resting it on the table, so maybe that's affecting my number of bars. She's so weak she can't even hold it up. What about you Peter? Are you getting very many bars of service on the Icon, or no?

Peter: I have four bars. I have four bars on T-Mobile as well. I don't know if I've got any AT&T sims, so I don't know what I'd get on that.

Mary Jo: I do like the phone though, I'm not a hater. I can see maybe buying it but I really wanted to just love this phone and say okay tomorrow when it goes on sale on Verizon I'm buying one, but I'm still a little bit on the fence.

Leo: I think I'm going for the big six inches.

Mary Jo: Are you?

Leo: Now, I'm a little disappointed.

Peter: It seems a little strange to release it now because it's going to get a new generation of 8.1.

Daniel: Yeah, 8.1's chip must be kind of interesting. There's an expectation, at least, from a lot of people that Microsoft is going to announce 8.1 and then there's going to be a whole fleet of new devices coming out and the latest we're getting on that is that's not the case. There will actually be like two phones, Moneypenny and Goldfinger, each representing opposite ends of the spectrum. One is going to be a low-cost device and one is going to be a high-end feature device and then you'll have that Samsung one for Verizon. But I think they'll be mostly concentrating on updates for older hardware, opposed to just releasing new hardware.

Peter: Which is good, it's a good selling feature, they'll actually do that when Android is troublesome. I mean it's what they went with primarily so it's now time to deliver that I think. So will the new phones take advantage of the on-screen buttons? That's kind of a big hardware feature, isn't it? That you can have the on-screen buttons.

Daniel: Yes. From my understanding, Moneypenny is basically a Lumia 520 with on-screen buttons and some updated internal hardware. But it's basically that kind of device, dual sim option on some variance, and then on screen keyboards. Goldfinger is a lot less, we don't know that much about it. In fact, I heard that there's been a recent revamp of the hardware on that. There was rumors that it was going to be canceled but now it's not, it's just changing and they're possibly downplaying some features. I don't know exactly what that means though because specifics are hard to come by.

Leo: We're talking about Windows, Microsoft, and a lot of phone stuff but that's because we've got Daniel Rubino here, from WindowsPhoneCentral, wpcentral.com, he's the Editor and Chief. Peter Bright, Doctor Pizza is here as well, from Arstechnica, and of course, Mary Jo Foley. Paul Thurrott has the week off. You're listening to Windows Weekly, we'll have more in just a bit, including Office on the iPad and a special deal for those of you using Skydrive. First, we're going to have a fight over who gets the offer code. The free 500 megs. But first, ladies and gentlemen a word from our good sponsors, ITprotv. They just celebrated 1000 subscribers, this is so exciting. This is a group of guys who really are doing a great job, I think, kind of recreating what we've done, but for people who want to get certs. So if you're in IT, and a lot of you are kind of by default in IT, because you know you're the IT person for your business or school, or maybe even just your home. And you want to upgrade your skills, maybe even get those certifications to work in IT professionally, this is a great place to start. You could spend a lot of money on school for this, you could even spend a lot of money just getting study materials, but here's a way to learn that's as easy and fun as watching TWiT, and is really effective. Hundreds of hours of content, twenty hours added each week, and it's live so you can chat with the pros as they teach you. These guys are engaging, they're smart and they've been teaching certifications for a long time but they decided they kind of wanted to do it in a more friendly fashion. Which means, you can watch this now, not only on your tablet or your computer, you can watch in on your Roku on your big screen TV in your living room. Do with ITprotv what you do with TWiT, just keep it running all of the time and you will learn while you're watching. It brings a lot of personality to it. They answer your questions live on the air, on the live stream, which is fabulous. You can get all of the videos ever, in fact if you go to the episode library, you'll see they have a lot of episodes and all of the major certs, you've got your CompTIA, your CompTIA+, Net+, Security+, and CASP. You've got the Microsoft search as well, Cisco, and the (ICS)², SSCP, CISSP. There are hundreds and hundreds of hours of content, they add twenty new hours every week, they're working as hard as I am. Network security, laptop repair, VLAN, subnetting and more. I'm curious, I'm going to log in and see if they're broadcasting live right now. Sometimes it's kind of fun to see what's going on. ITprotv, and I'm going to tell you, by the way, a special deal in just a second. And congratulations to the folks at ITprotv on their one thousandth subscriber, and you could be one thousand and one right now. Let's see if they're live, yeah. They've got chatroom going, they are live I think. This is so cool, I'll turn up the audio so you can hear a little bit of it.

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Leo: You can learn a lot hear, and it's much more geeky than what we do, I mean, this is for people who want to get those IT certs. There's a free preview of course, subscriptions are $57/month or $570 for an entire year. That's a lot less than going to one of these schools, but I've got a special deal for you. When you use our offer code: WW50, you're going to get 50% off. Not just the first month, or the first year, but for the lifetime of your account. That brings the cost down to $28.50/month, $285.00/year, this is the way to learn. If you want to get the certs, you want to learn without even knowing IT, this is it. Visit itpro.tv/ww to find out more, itpro.tv/ww. You can test drive the content and see if it meets your needs and get that special deal. Take advantage of the offer code: WW50 for 50% off. Itpro.tv/ww and congratulations on their one thousandth subscriber. That's such good news, and this has become a real success at itpro.tv. You're watching Windows Weekly, Mary Jo Foley is here, Paul has the week off, Peter Bright, Doctor Pizza with us from, I say that with verve maybe because we're approaching lunchtime, from Arstechnica. Doctor Pizza is here with all of his phones. Also joining us, I think for the first time, the first time that I remember, Daniel Rubino Editor and Chief of wpcentral.com. Great to have you Daniel, and thank you for joining us this week.

Daniel: Thank you.

Leo: And you're in Long Island, huh?

Daniel: Long Island, but not for long. I'm going to move to Massachusetts, going to be in Paul's backyard pretty soon.

Leo: Oh, it's going to warm up, you're going to....

Daniel: Yeah right.

Leo: No snow there, right? You're moving up to the sun bell.

Daniel: No, no. I'm originally a New Englander though, so I'm not a big fan of new york and I'm happy to be back home.

Leo: I'm a New Englander too. And WPcentral, I imagine, like most tech news sites is distributed all over probably.

Daniel: Oh, yeah. We've got UK writers, we have people all over, Texas, California. So...

Leo: Awesome. I am curious, and Mary Jo Foley knows, Windows Microsoft Office on the iPad, coming soon to an iPad near me?

Mary Jo: Maybe, maybe sooner than we originally thought.

Leo: Wow, it's alive she says.

Mary Jo: Yeah, this was funny. Last week after we taped Windows Weekly, Tammy Reller, who is the head of marketing at Microsoft did a presentation at a tech conference. And she was asked of course, about Office for the iPad, like everybody at Microsoft gets asked all of the time. She gave kind of a wishy washy answer, but she just said yeah, we're being thoughtful about it and blah blah blah. Suddenly, everybody... Like all of the semi-professional Microsoft watchers I should say, jumped on this and made it immediately into Microsoft is not going to do Office for the iPad, listen to what she said. She was very hesitant and blah blah blah. Well no, I checked in with my sources and asked if they were still doing it and it came back yes, they're still doing it and not only are they doing it, but they're doing it quicker than the original time line had them scheduled to do it.

Leo: Interesting.

Mary Jo: So originally, they were supposed to do Office for the iPad and come out with it around this fall sometime. October 2014-ish. But supposedly, this is what my sources said, they said late last year, the Office management went to Steve Balmer and they said we could actually deliver Office for the iPad before the touch version of Office for Windows if you guys want to and they said okay. Which is showing you how different the Microsoft of today is-

Leo: The Satya Nadella Microsoft has begun.

Mary Jo: Yeah, except this actually happened with Balmer, which is kind of crazy right? So, they went to Steve B and said do you want to do this? We can if you guys want to, and they supposedly said yes.

Daniel: He was like, whatever... I'm on the way out.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: I know, yeah. Knock yourself out. So yeah supposedly, by the end of June Office for iPad will be out.

Leo: What do we think, is it subscription model, is it free, do you have an Office 365 subscription, what is it going to be?

Mary Jo: We don't know that for sure, obviously, but the rumor is Office 365 subscription required. Just like Office Mobile for the iPhone and for Android phones. So, some people say that makes it less attractive, but you've got to think from Microsoft's perspective, how do you kind of put a little bit of a premium on what you get for Windows, versus what you're going to get for your iPad, right? And one way you could do that is to tie the iPad one to a subscription. That's the rumor, I don't really know what this means, so many people are saying is this them giving up on Surface? No, it doesn't mean because they're coming out with this for the iPad first, that they're giving up on the Surface. But again, just like the case we were talking about with Android and phones, it's going to be some tricky positioning if you're Microsoft. Like, how do you tell your customers, who are waiting for the Gemini Office touch-first released that hey, you guys are going to come after the iPad. They're going to have to tell them that.

Peter: Are these going to be the same applications though?

Mary Jo: It's supposedly going to be Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote only.

Peter: But like will Office for iPad and will touch Office or Windows...

Mary Jo: Oh, be the same? Yeah, I don't know if it will be the same. Supposedly, both of them are optimized for touch. We don't know for sure if that means that it's the exact same set of features, and the same kind of controls. You know, the way you might have a radio dial on those kind of apps to select things. I don't know how that's going to look.

Daniel: I'm real curious to see about this, like how they're going to take. Because Office can be pretty complicated, obviously. And how you make it touch, because obviously they can't put all of the features in there, but they have to put the main ones. So I'm really curious because I mean, I think that is still a big complaint with the Surface.

Peter: What about the main ones, that's the problem.

Daniel: Yeah, right. Exactly. How do you determine that.

Mary Jo: Right. Because supposedly, the touch-first versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are going to be the metro style apps that are coming, the thing codenamed Gemini, those are not supposedly, as fully featured as the desktop Office, so-

Peter: Well, that's inevitable, I think.

Mary Jo: Right, me too.

Peter: Because you don't want to be like writing macros and things.

Mary Jo: Exactly.

Daniel: Right.

Mary Jo: So, I think you'll see something similar for the iPad, it won't be every possible feature that's in PowerPoint or Excel that's taken to the iPad, it'll be a subset, I would think.

Daniel: Microsoft still has the ability though, at least on the Surface, to sort of integrate the Office system deeper into the operating system, so that things can talk to each other. I'm going to be interested to see how that goes on the iPad, like if it'll be more siloed or how much it will hook into other cloud services.

Mary Jo: Right. I should just throw in, because people were asking about what about the next Office for Mac?

Leo: Oh yeah, that.

Mary Jo: Right, it's been a long time.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Office 2011 for Mac was the last one. I keep hearing it's in development, but maybe not until this fall or sometime around then.

Leo: Alright, so they are still working on it..?

Mary Jo: They are.

Leo: And will the Office for the iPad count against my installs, probably not right?

Mary Jo: I would think it-

Daniel: I don't know, yeah.

Mary Jo: Might. Or they add something in like they did with the phones, where you have something in your Office 365 subscription-

Leo: A few extra mobile... Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yep, going to be interesting.

Daniel: I like Office 365, I'm a big fan of it.

Leo: Yeah, everybody is. You know, you can use it in a limited form on the Safari browser on the iPad, it's not like you don't have access to it, I think.

Mary Jo: Yeah, you can use Office web apps.

Leo: Yeah, that's what I mean. The web version.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Peter: I think it's quite clever the way they tied it to Office 365 because it's like they can say yeah, we've done Office on this this. But all of the haters, and there are many haters who say I don't want subscription software, I want to own my software.

Daniel: Even Adobe is embracing that, I mean a lot of companies are doing that now.

Leo: IT people love the creative cloud, oh such great PR for Adobe. Ooh.

Daniel: Right? For me, at least, buying Office was always a weird thing. $250, I forget what the price of it was but it was still pretty expensive.

Leo: Right, too expensive.

Daniel: You can get the student discounts and stuff but the idea of buying like say, a Windows tablet and it just comes on there for free, it's already a good deal.

Leo: And somebody in our chatroom has pointed out that Outlook, OneNote, Lync, and Sharepoint are already on iOS. So we're just talking about-

Peter: Outlook.com is...

Leo: Outlook.com, right. Oh, that's actually a very big difference. I blame Microsoft for that confusion.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Peter: Maybe they could rename it, it'd be like-

Leo: Mobile Mail.

Daniel: One Email. We need One Email now.

Leo: One Mail.

Peter: One Mail, there you go. We just did it.

Leo: One male, two female that's what we got right now. No wait, that's turned around. Three male, one female. How about Lync, an Android version of Lync? That would be good news for us. You know we've been looking at playing with Lync as an alternative to Skype. Although Skype works with a Lync server of course, for everybody. Especially Paul and Mary Jo. Having it on Android would be a nice additional feature.

Mary Jo: It's coming. It's on the phone but not the tablet, right now.

Leo: Oh I see. Okay. And the Federation of Skype and Lync is coming along too, right?

Mary Jo: I know, we should get Doctor Pizza on that because he wrote quite a bit on that.

Peter: Yeah. I still don't get why they have these two things in the seperate- They're slowly coming together. Last year, they had Lync Federation with Skype for voice chat. This year they demonstrated it yesterday, I think.

Mary Jo: Yeah. It was yesterday.

Peter: Yesterday they demonstrated Lync sort of federated with Skype video chat and they said that will be released sometime in the second half of this year. I don't think they said second half but I think it will be sometime around the second half of this year. So they will still be separate but if your administrator wants to enable cross communication between Lync and Skype that will become an option. I think that fills out the remaining gaps so you'll have voice, video, presents, and I assume text messaging is there already. It would be crazy if it wasn't. The thing that was more exciting to me, was that they were going to finally have some PSTN options for Office 365 and Lync online. So if you have Lync in your server room, you can connect it to your SIP gateway and make voice calls to phone numbers and all that kind of thing, but if you have it in the cloud with Office 365 you can't do that. And when they bought Skype it seemed like the most obvious thing because Skype is huge for calling to actual phone numbers it's got a huge portion of- I think it's got 30-40% of international call minutes, pretty significant.

Leo: I had no idea, that's amazing.

Peter: Yeah, it is a huge thing, and they've got points of presents all around the world so you can get a phone number in many many different countries. So you can have a local number.

Leo: Somebody should buy Skype, that's good.

Peter: Yeah. And to me that seemed like a really nice thing to integrate with Office 365 because then it could become- Almost like your whole Office in a box, so give you the productivity software, the user management and that kind of thing, and give you your phones which is actually still quite an important thing for a lot of businesses and it looks like they're going to finally start doing that sometime this year. I don't think they were very specific but I think they said it's going to be an option to have PSTN calling.

Leo: That makes sense, I think a lot of people sit in front of Outlook when they're on conference calls. This is how you use it a lot, right?

Peter: Right. So you know you'll be able to sign into a machine with your Office 365 credentials , you get access to all your work, all of your email, your phone calls will get rooted to you, you can make calls to people.

Leo: Amazing. It's truly a mobile Office, it's everywhere.

Peter: Right, and it seemed to me like the first thing that should be done after they bought Skype. It was the one really nice sort of synergy that they have, that Skype had this. They're not saying they'll be using Skype, but I can only imagine that it's using the same kind of- Because Skype has to negotiate with phone companies around the world to get this, and they've had disputes about it in the past, where like contracts offended, and people's phone lines have gone away. So I assume there's going to be some leverage of Skype.

Daniel: Does GroupMe work it's way into this conversation at some point? Because I'm curious with like Lync, Skype, GroupMe, they're all owned by Microsoft, they all overlap, but do different things, too and have different roles. But are they all going to fall together long-term?

Mary Jo: Skype and Lync are not, they are going to stay two different products and the way Microsoft differentiates those two, is they say Skype is what you use outside the firewall and Lync is what you use inside the firewall.

Daniel: Got ya'.

Mary Jo: I don't know how GroupMe fits into that discussion. If that goes away over time, or if that integrates into something else, or if they keep that as a separate app and service.

Peter: Even that makes no sense. As the Skype people know well enough, lots of businesses use Skype.

Leo: All of the time.

Peter: We're using Skype right now. This whole dichotomy between inside and outside the firewall just doesn't make sense.

Leo: It's meaningless.

Peter: It's not consistent with how people actually use the software, which is why the whole continued Skype Lync duality doesn't make any sense.

Leo: Microsoft bought Yammer too, right?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: They've got way too much stuff. They need to clean out the attic.

Peter: Just think, they all overlap a bit, maybe not one hundred percent, but they all overlap a bit and it's just, what are they going to do with that.

Leo: Somebody's got to be working on a unified product.

Mary Jo: Yeah. I mean, the Federation is kind of what that is.

Daniel: Yeah, and I think they want Skype to be way more than it is but Skype was built to be on computers, and the world changed to mobile. And so they bought it and they've got to change the whole back end to match that new world, and I don't think people necessarily understand the complexity involved there but it's you know- And I heard all of the product lines iOS, Android, everything was written completely different on every platform so they've got to sort of realign all of those too.

Leo: Interesting.

Daniel: So it looks like they have a lot of work to do, but obviously people want Skype to be sort of a What'sApp, with the ability to make phone calls and I think you know, that's the challenge that they have before them.

Leo: We've got to wrap things up but before we do, remember that BSkyB, Rupert Murdoch's Sky network sued Microsoft over SkyDrive and Microsoft just fell over at a dead feat and said oh I'm so sorry. I had no idea you existed, and said alright we'll rebrand SkyDrive the rebranding began today. I got new OneDrive apps on Android and iOS and when I went to SkyDrive, I got OneDrive. So this is it, it's happening.

Daniel: Yep. And the new features came too.

Leo: Oh, what are the new features?

Daniel: Android, I think, got automatic backup for the cameras, which is pretty nice. The Windows phone app has a few new features. You can pin individual folders to your start screen, which is actually really useful. You can also share multiple items at once, which is also really useful. So yeah, it's not just a renaming but they're rolling in new features with it as well, so pretty good stuff.

Leo: And if you go to your SkyDrive account right now... How long is that going to be going on?

Peter: It's finished.

Leo: It's over?!

Mary Jo: Sold out.

Daniel: The first hundred thousand users-

Peter: Yeah, and it's finished.

Leo: Oh, I'm so glad you mentioned it at the beginning of the show Peter, and I'm sorry for everybody else.

Peter: At the beginning of the show it was live, now it's dead.

Leo: So we should shouldn't mention that it was 100 gigabytes of storage.

Peter: Yeah, free. But it's gone now.

Leo: I'm thrilled to know that for some reason, SkyDrive thinks my name is Paul. Welcome back, Paul! Someone has accepted your invitation to OneDrive and you've received free storage!

Peter: You probably somehow, invited people to increase Paul Thurrott's-

Leo: Oh, I hope that's not... How could I have done that?

Peter: I don't know, but maybe you've found some bug in the system.

Leo: I think so.

Peter: And Paul is getting hundreds of extra gigs, and you're getting none.

Mary Jo: Man..

Leo: Oh, I am. I'm in Paul Thurrott's files. How did that happen?

Peter: Because of the shared OneNote.

Mary Jo: Oh, maybe. Yeah.

Leo: This seems to me, a bug.

Peter: I think you've found a bug.

Mary Jo: Odd, yeah.

Leo: Should I go through his files? There's the book, and-

Peter: See what you can delete.

Leo: No, all of this stuff's public fortunately. Well look at this, I'm in Paul's stuff! Hello, Paul!!! Go ski!

Mary Jo: I hope he's not watching right now.

Leo: It's all public, so I'm not going to worry about it. But I had better get out of his OneDrive. I actually like the name OneDrive.

Peter: I think it's a much better name.

Leo: Unfortunately, there is a cloud storage solution named OneDrive, so get ready for the lawsuit.

Mary Jo: Yeah. They told me they've done their due diligence and they don't think they're going to have a legal issue.

Leo: Really?

Mary Jo: That's what they told me.

Daniel: They got paid off.

Peter: So in other words, the other company is small enough that they can buy them if they have to.

Leo: I think it's a very small company. I'm mad, because Paul got all of my-

Mary Jo: All of your free gigs of storage.

Leo: Apparently, the link I shared on Twitter benefits Paul Thurrott and not me, he's going to be very surprised when he gets off the slopes today.

Peter: Aren't you glad now, that I didn't retweet it?

Leo: Yeah, because I got nothing. I'm in my OneDrive now and I've got nothing.

Daniel: Yeah, I tweeted it out again I think. Although, I think everybody that follows me already has a OneDrive.

Peter: You've got to find people who don't have any OneDrive at all.

Leo: Anyway, for those of you who missed this, they were offering 100 gigabytes for the first hundred thousand people who logged into their OneDrive. Which is nice, I have 129 gigs now.

Peter: Actually, the feature that I'm most intrigued by, one of the other new features, is probably- If you uplolad a video to SkyDrive in your phone and share it out, email a link of here's my cat, baby or whatever, it will do some on the fly transcoding so that people can stream that video without much bandwidth. So if they're like on a mobile device or at home with a nice 1080p screen and it will transcode it automatically on-demand. So it's pretty cool.

Leo: We are at an arms race now because of course, Google does a lot of auto-awesome stuff, on Google+, so this is going to become an arms race and we will benefit.

Peter: So I guess if people upload their snippits of exponent gameplay, it'll build.

Leo: I'm doing it right now. Awesome, that is a nice feature. Alright let's take a break, when we come back we'll have a tip of the week. I can't believe I gave Paul my gigs. It seems like I shouldn't be able to do that.

Peter: Yeah, that does not seem legit.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it was weird.

Leo: Hello, Paul! Alright, well he owes me a beer or something, it's so weird. Our show today, wow... Software pick of the week, tip of the week, enterprise, codename, and beer. All coming up, our show today brought to you by our friends Personal Capital. And I say that because I interviewed the CEO of Personal Capital when he was first starting the company, Bill Harris, and now more than a year later, it is just going great. And of course, I signed up then because he told me about it. He is the former CEO of Intuit, and PayPal so he knows a little bit about money and managing money online. Personal Capital is designed to take all of your accounts and manage them in a single place. Give you kind of a map, or GPS of where you stand. It's free, it's secure, you can absolutely trust it and they've solved two barriers that I think are really significant to growing your wealth, growing your retirement fund, making your investments pay. The first barrier, of course is it's just hard to keep track of everything. Not just your mortgage, your credit cards, and your loans, but your stocks, your 401k, I hope you have a 401k, your bank accounts. Each of them on different sites with different user names and passwords, you can never really see them all at once. The second is, if you're paying someone to manage it, you're probably paying too much. You can do it yourself with Personal Capital. It's you're next generation, your 21st Century financial advisor. It brings all of your accounts and assets to a single screen on your computer, your phone, or your tablet. Beautiful real-time graphs, completely intuitive, easy to understand, it shows how much you're paying in fees, whether you're over-paying, how you can reduce those fees, that's a big deal. You also get tailored advice on optimizing your investments, so why wait? It's free, sign-up just takes a minute, and it will, I promise, pay big dividends. I've been very happy with my Personal Capital account. Total clarity and transparency so you can make better decisions right away. Sign up for your free account at personalcapital.com/windows. It's free and the smart way to grow your money. Personalcapital.com/windows, sign up today and you will not regret it, I promise you. You can thank me later. Windows Weekly on the air, Paul Thurrott has the week off, he's going to be very happy when he gets off the slopes and discovers hundreds of megabytes of free storage on his OneDrive account. Mary Jo Foley is here, of course from allaboutmicrosoft.com. Peter Bright from Arstechnica, and Daniel Rubino Editor and Chief of wpcentral.com. Let us start off... Daniel, I guess you're going to take the Paul Thurrott role, the young good-looking Paul Thurrott role.

Daniel: Hello Leo. Did I do a good impression?

Leo: Hello, Paul! Nice, very nice! And your software pick of the week..?

Daniel: I would say Bing apps. So, Microsoft has been doing a lot of Bing stuff lately. Really rolling out from Bing News and Weather from the basics, to their Health&Fitness, in Food&Drink apps, these are both available on Windows 8.1 and now Windows phone. This week we actually saw the roll-out of a new update of Windows phone, which allowed syncing across those apps to different devices. So, if you log on to your Weather with your Microsoft account, it'll show up on your Windows 8 device, in your Windows phone, in whatever other service you're using, which is pretty interesting. It's for the future, this single sign-on. Actually, Google users should be very familiar with it. That's coming to Microsoft and across their products. The Bing apps have gotten some amazingly high reviews, and you've got to give a little bit of credit to the Bing Team for design and they know what they're doing.

Leo: Yeah, we're at an agreement, we love those Bing apps. I think they're just- And they get better, there's more all of the time. Doctor Pizza, you want to pick something? We'll let you have some pick of some kind. You don't have to... What's your favorite pizza flavor?

Peter: Pepperoni.

Leo: Okay, of course. The sensible choice of-

Mary Jo: What about sausage?

Leo: No, no. Pepperoni's the choice of pizza lovers everywhere.

Peter: Sausage is- I do love sausages but I like English sausages.

Leo: Ew, bangers. Ew!

Peter:  Bangers.

Leo: That's not sausage!

Peter: Leo, you'd better watch it.

Leo: Banger is to sausage as filet minon is to steak. It's just soft meat, Peter.

Peter: You've clearly never had a good sausage Leo.

Leo: I've had bangers. Alright, we'll grant you that. But you really wouldn't want a banger pizza.

Peter: I would've named like the Titanfall Beta, but that's closed now, so...

Leo: I am loving it! Okay, so you're playing it? So you other guys, can go away.

Mary Jo: We'll come back later.

Leo: Let's talk.

Peter: I play it on the PC, where it deserves to be played.

Leo: Oh, I've been playing it on the Xbox One.

Daniel: I play on the One, too.

Leo: It's 720p but you know what, it's very snappy and given all of the stuff that's going on, everybody seems to like it. Do you guys agree? Mary Jo, you can ignore this.

Peter: It's good. I really like the Parkour bits. Running around, and running up like a wall and jumping onto things, all that kind of thing. Weirdly, I don't like being in the Titan. When I'm in the Titan, I'm like big and slow and lumbering, and I just like running around.

Leo: But you kill stuff...!

Daniel: A lot.

Leo: A lot!

Peter: It's the running around bit that I'm really enjoying.

Leo: I like that auto-aim gun that gets like three people at once.

Peter: That's  pretty cool as well, that's a pretty fun gun. It's like you come across these little grunts, and bing bingbing...!

Leo: They're all gone.

Peter: Boom.

Leo: It doesn't work with the Titan.

Peter: Sadly, not.

Leo: Do not piss off the Titans.

Peter: But the running around and shooting-

Leo: But then, that's just Call of Duty.

Peter: Call of Duty, you can't run up the walls.

Daniel: It feels like a first-person shooter to me.

Leo: It is, it's first-person shooter with Mex.

Daniel: Exactly, it's good though. The feedback has been huge, I think the press is going to be massive. And I can already tell you that there will be a console for it, custom console. And that will be announced real soon.

Leo: What's that mean, custom console. I don't understand.

Daniel: They're going to release an Xbox One that has-

Leo: Oh, a Titanfall Xbox One?

Daniel: Yeah.

Leo: So, I think the real reason people are so interested in this is because the launch titles were so anemic for the Xbox One and so, there's nothing unique. But this is the first title now that's unique to the Xbox One, and it's fun to play, it's a good title, and I think I'll be playing this for a while. I kind of liked Ryse Son of Rome. I played that for a while, even though it's not a hard game, I'm not a-

Peter: People slated that. I haven't played it but-

Leo: Yeah, people hated it and I'm surprised because it was kind of fun.

Daniel: Yep, it got really bad reviews.

Leo: The graphics were gorgeous, you felt like you were in Rome, the Emperor was a weasel, what more could you ask?

Peter: You guys are selling me on Xbox right now.

Daniel: With my Xbox One, I use it mostly for the new generation-

Leo: Media.

Daniel: I use it mostly for TV. Netflix, Amazon, media. Right. I can play games on it-

Leo: It's in my den with the OLED TV, that's the good set-up and that's what I watch Netflix on, that's what I watch regular cable on it, because it's pass-through, NFL on it is great. I've actually been very happy with it as a media player. The update didn't seem to change much, but I'm really hoping for more voice commands. I do have to say though, when you're watching a movie and you say, "Xbox, pause." And it stops, and you go pee, come back and say, "Xbox play," that is awesome!!

Daniel: It's so useful. It's great when you have pizza in your hand, speaking of pizza.

Peter: Yeah, I'd get into big shouting matches with it though.

Leo: You know, mine is sitting on the same channel speaker, and I don't know.. It works. I don't understand how that works.

Peter: So I have this thing, if you're watching a series on Netflix, you know it does that thing where it's playing the end credits of the old episode, it sort of shrinks it down, then you see the next one and I say, "Xbox play," and it'll pop up a message saying I can't play here. And then a list of commands appears at the bottom of the things you can say. Play, every time it trolls me.

Leo: I blame Netflix.

Mary Jo: Maybe it's your accent, and it just doesn't understand it.

Peter: No, no no no. It will recognize that I said play, the damn thing is just mocking me.

Leo: I have a theory that it's because there is an agreement that you can't interrupt the credits. They do the same thing with television. They squeeze the credits down and say what's coming up, but they can't- The credits are, you know, an obligation.

Peter: Yeah, I don't know. I think it's just designed to make me annoyed.

Leo: Somebody in the chatroom says "skip" or "next."

Peter: I'll try that.

Leo: It's the same thing on the Roku, apparently. I didn't know that. I have to say, I'm bullish on the Xbox One and I'm glad to finally see a title, four months later, that's worth playing, it's good.

Daniel: Well I think that's just, you know, Microsoft and Sony both, did not want to release these consoles now. They both did because it was an arms race. I guarantee both teams wanted to be like, give us another year and we'll round it out even better but, they didn't have a choice, you know? So...

Leo: There's no compelling reason to buy these because you can't play your old games on it.

Peter: If you look at the media capabilities of both of them-

Daniel: They're really primitive compared to the 360 and the PS3. They've been rushed, and it really shows, the software isn't great.

Leo: Well, I think Titanfall was a good software pick of the week, thank you Doctor Pizza. And now Mary Jo gets the floor back, with our enterprise pick of the week.

Mary Jo: It's going to be tough to follow Titanfall though.

Leo: I know.

Mary Jo: So this week's pick is the fact that Microsoft has finally gone public with the end of pre-load dates for Windows 7, at least, partially gone public with this. So, what they announced late last week was that the consumer versions of Windows 7 are no longer going to be able to be pre-loaded by PC makers on new machines, after this October 31st. So that means, if you're in the market for a consumer PC with Windows 7 on it, unless you go through the whole downgrade rights stuff, you're going to have to get this by October 31st. The exception is Windows 7 Professional. So, OEM's are going to have longer to be able to pre-load Windows 7 Professional, so the business version, on PC's and continue to build and sell those into the market and that's the date we don't know. They haven't given us the drop-dead date for that, but they said they will give everyone a year's head's up. So we know it's at least February 2015, but it's probably going to be much longer than that I would think. They say this is not because Windows 8 is not catching on with businesses, and not because of the end of life of XP fast approaching, they just said the reality is businesses are in the midst of their Windows 7 deployments, so a lot of businesses want Windows 7 PCs with Windows 7 Professional pre-loaded and we want to be there for them. Whether you believe that or not, that's your business, but that's the reason they're saying, that they did this.  So there you have it, if you're a business customer in the market for a Windows 7 PC, you have longer to still go out and buy one, at least, past this fall. Which is when the consumer version pre-loads end.

Daniel: Interesting.

Leo: Interesting, yeah. And not surprising. It seems like a sensible way to do it because it's business after all, that's most unhappy about-

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: And your codename pick of the week?

Mary Jo: Codename pick of the week is Miramar and that is the codename for Office on iPad. I was looking up what is Miramar and there is two different geographic locations that it seems that it might be referring to, you know because Microsoft likes to use geographic locations as codenames. One of them is in Florida, there's a Miramar beach and I guess it's a whole town, Miramar.

Leo: Yeah, they have an oil station or something. Ooooh.

Daniel: Yeah, that's where Top Gun took place.

Mary Jo: Oooohh, maybe that's why.

Leo: Tom Cruise reference... Alright!

Mary Jo: Or it could be, there's a neighborhood in San Diego called Miramar also. So if you hear anybody talking about Miramar, it's Office for the iPad.

Leo: There you go. Office for the iPad is Miramar. I feel a need for Office for the iPad. And finally, the moment you've all been waiting for, I think there are people in fact, who tune in just for this-

Mary Jo: I know, I've heard from them.

Leo: They want to know, by the way, what your handle is on Beer Advocate.

Mary Jo: Yeah, so I'll tell people again, since I love getting more followers there. MJFoley is me on Tapped, and so anybody can add me there. I do a lot of my beer picks of the week based on things I've been drinking during the week and this is one of those. So, if you like rye bread, and how doesn't? I bet Doctor Pizza does.

Leo: How about rye bread pizza?

Peter: Hmmmm?...

Leo: Now we're cooking with gas.

Mary Jo: How about that? Well there are a lot of rye beers, but there's one from a brewery in California called The Bruery, b-r-u-e-r-y, that is an excellent rye. It's called Rugbrod and it's really good. A friend of mine who had it with me said it's like drinking a loaf of rye bread, pretty much.

Leo: Course it is.

Mary Jo: It is.

Daniel: I might like that.

Mary Jo: Oh it's delicious, it tastes exactly like rye, it has a little fruitiness to it, a little spice, and it's a really excellent example of the style, so yeah. This is my recommendation.

Leo: Rugbrod.

Mary Jo: Is that how you say it, Rugbrod?

Leo: I don't know, I'm making it up as I speak. Brod is bread, I'm sure. Rug, I don't know. It might be rug, it might be rye, I don't know.

Mary Jo: I have somebody saying TopGun is in San Diego, back to the codename.

Leo: Miramar Naval Air Station is in San Diego, Miramar as in Florida...So there's the two possibilities. Well that's it. What a great show.

Mary Jo: I know, thank you guys for being on.

Leo: I give Paul his OneDrive gigabytes, and we'll just see you later Paul. Filling in for Paul Thurrott this week, the great Peter Bright from Arstechnica, arstechnica.com. Anything you want to plug Peter, besides your great column there? He's a great writer. and a fine glass of Coca-Cola.

Peter: Vanilla Coke Zero.

Leo: Oh, God! Now I understand why he likes bangers, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter: That is my beer of the week.

Leo: I bet you like custard as well, in a can.

Peter: I have been known to eat custard from a can.

Leo: Hey, it's great to have you Peter, at Doctor Pizza on Twitter. Great also, to welcome for the first time to our show, Daniel Rubino, who is Editor and Chief of Windows Phone Central. I mean it's wpcentral.com, but that stands for Windows Phone Central, right?

Daniel: Right, yep. Part of the mobile nations.

Leo: It's okay to say that..?

Daniel: Oh yeah, it's a weird branding thing yeah. Wpcentral is the address, but we call ourselves Windows Phone Central so people don't misunderstand.

Leo: Mobile nation's fame, number one for all things mobile!!! That's Rene Ritchie's part of your crew, too. We love Rene.

Daniel: Good Canadian.

Leo: Yeah, it's good to have you Daniel. Come back soon, it was a lot of fun.

Daniel: Definitely, I would love to.

Leo: And thank you Mary Jo Foley, allaboutmicrosoft.com is where you'll find Mary Jo and of course, you'll find her here each and every Wednesday 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern time, 1900 UTC at twit.tv. You can get audio and video after the fact, we make it available on demand at twit.tv/ww for Windows Weekly. So come here live if you can, but otherwise, download it. You can also subscribe, in fact, I can't wait until Windows phone 8.1 has that new podcasts app and you'll be able to subscribe in that, it will be awesome. Meanwhile, use the Xbox music store or whatever they call it these days. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time on Windows Weekly!