This Week in Google 271 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte: It’s
time for TWiG, This Week in Google, the Lollypop edition. Gina and Jeff are here. We’ll talk
about Android 5.0, the new phone, the new tablet, the new TV device. There’s lots to talk about today on TWiG.
It’s coming right up.
Net casts
you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth
for This Week in Google is provided by Cache Fly, cachefly.com.
Leo: This is TWiG, This Week
in Google, episode 271. Recorded October 15, 2014.
The Lollypop Guild
This Week
in Google is brought to you by Mandrill. Mandrill is a scalable, reliable, and
secure email infrastructure service. Trusted by more than
300,000 customers. Sign up at mandrill.com. Use the promo code TWIT and
you’ll receive 50,000 email sends per month for your first six months of
service. And by Personal Capital. With Personal
Capital you’ll finally have all you financial life in one place and get a clear
view of everything you own. Best of all, it’s free. To sign up go to
personalcapital.com/twig. And by Prosper. Prosper is a peer-to-peer lending
marketplace that connects people who are looking to borrow money from those who
have money to lend. Visit prosper.com/twit and receive a $50 Visa prepaid card
when you get a loan. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for TWiG,
This Week in Google. The much awaited, this is for us. This is a big day in
Google-land. Jeff Jarvis joins us from Seoul, Korea where it’s 5 in the
morning. Oh my God. Thank you, Jeff. You are above and beyond. That is a
commitment to the cause, thank you.
Jeff Jarvis: My pleasure.
Leo: I really appreciate it. And because you’re in
Seoul, you have the best Skype connection you’ve had all year.
Jeff: I know.
Gina Trapani: Is the internet that good
in Seoul?
Jeff: 94 up and 92 up.
Leo: Oh my God, I’m so jealous.
Gina: That’s good stuff.
Leo: Gina Trapani from New York, New York. Good to see
you.
Gina: Good to see you. This is a huge news day. Of
course I’m sad because I did All About Android last
night. But we can talk about everything that happened today.
Leo: You put it to bed last night without knowing what
the morning would bring. But we all kind of knew that today would be a big day.
Gina: Oh yea, we rocked the show saying we know for sure
that all this stuff is going to happen tomorrow. It’s probably going to be
Lollypop. We’re going to hear about all the new Nexus. And of course it’s going
to happen tomorrow because we do All About Android on
Tuesdays. So the big Android news seems to always break on Wednesdays. But we
get to catch it on TWiG, so that’s good. And of course
we’ll talk about it next week.
Leo: And to be honest, nothing surprising. Or is there?
Gina: No, I mean we said last night we knew pretty well
it was going to be Lollypop. Even though there was quite a bit of misdirection
going on. The statue guy was dropping a lot of hints about licorice. There was
a lady finger eating a lady finger in one of Google’s videos.
Leo: Didn’t they do an audition? They had an audition
video where they were auditioning the next dessert. For those of you who don’t
watch the show regularly and have never heard of something called Google, you
Bing users maybe don’t know that Google names its versions of Android after
desserts. First one was not a dessert, right? That was just Alpha.
Gina: Cupcake?
Leo: There was Alpha and Beta. And C was Cupcake, the
first release version. Donut, Eau Claire, Froyo,
Ginger Bread.
Gina: Honey Comb.
Leo: Honey Comb, which had a short-lived; it was the
tablet version. Short-lived.
Gina: Honey Comb was the red-headed step child for sure. Ice Cream Sandwich. Jelly Bean, Kit Kat, and now we
are on L.
Jeff: That was very sad, you two.
Leo: That we knew those?
Jeff: All those brain cells devoted to that.
Leo: It is weird, isn’t it? Here’s the casting Google
did. I think this is really great for L.
Gina: It was cute.
Leo: Lava Cake. Lady Finger. Lemon Drop. Quiet please, casting in session. This is
hysterical. Oreo?
Gina: I like the Lady Finger eating a lady finger.
Recursion!
Leo: Google has such a great sense of humor. I just
love that.
Gina: Totally.
Leo: Now I’m going to make news out of it. Last time
they did Kit Kat. I was a little miffed-where’s my Kit Kat bar-that they used a
brand name. They apparently made a deal in which no money was
exchanged-aha-with Hershey’s or Nestle depending on which country for Kit Kat.
And I thought do you think they waited to do Lollypop until the last moment
hoping they could make a deal with Laffy Taffy?
Gina: I don’t know what the delay was about. Yea, I
don’t know. I think they just weren’t ready. They simply weren’t ready. They
didn’t have the statue or the promo videos made.
Leo: The statue wasn’t made!
Gina: The statue wasn’t built yet. I just think they
weren’t ready. They wanted to do some new launch. Although it
was just a blog post. It wasn’t like there was an event today.
Leo: No. Somebody asked me yesterday, oh Mr. Apple Fan, I bet you’re not going to cover the Google event
tomorrow. And I said, well I would if there were one.
Gina: If there would have been, we would have covered
it.
Jeff: Are you an Apple fan or an Apple enemy? I can’t
keep it straight.
Leo: Well that’s the problem. It depends who you ask.
So here’s the follow-up by the way to the L casting. Licorice, did you see red
licorice?
Jeff: Notifications, notifications. Sorry. Notifications
notify you even in the lock screen. Show me sweet.
Leo: He’s memorizing. Oh this is the full-length one, I
guess.
Gina: Oh, okay.
Jeff: I went in there and I lagged. I lagged!
Gina: I like that Lava Cake has a little berry in his
hair.
Jeff: And if you don’t feel like you can get it in one
take, which I know you will, you just demand another one. Don’t say sorry.
Don’t say excuse me. Don’t say please. You say I want to do it again. I know
you. I know you! You do know it’s L this time, right? Ugh... we, Oreo.
Gina: Wait, who’s that guy?
Leo: Wait a minute. What is the giant sponge with
coconut on it? What is that?
Gina: What is that thing?
Leo: Chat room, you’ve got to figure that out. It’s an
L dessert. What is it?
Jeff: Or is it MNO talking?
Leo: It’s Oreo. What is that? It’s weird-looking. It’s
a lacaroon? What is it?
Gina: A lacaroon.
Leo: Anyway, let’s continue on.
Jeff: Focus, focus. You’re objective is to go in there
and crush these people’s dreams. No, no! Seriously, I’ve never had…
Leo: Oh! Oh!
Gina: Oh…
Jeff: Hey, next year is M. Muffins! Oh come on!
Leo: This is probably exactly what it’s like.
Gina: This is pretty great.
Leo: Lollypop is here.
Gina: So that woman was dressed as licorice. Lemon bar.
Leo: Lemon bar, Oreo. Sorry Mr. Lady Finger. Who is
this guy? LMP, lemon meringue pie. Licorice. Lemon drop, lava cake. Who is this guy?
Gina: Lemon drop!
Leo: No we saw lemon drop. Who is this guy? Ladue. What the hell’s a Ladue?
Chad Johnson: And then, there they are.
This is me. This is what Ladues are. They look like a
cross between…
Leo: It must be an Indian dessert.
Chad: … a deep-fried thing or a meatball. I’m not sure.
Leo: It’s got to be, it’s one of those… okay, I don’t
mean this to sound disparaging in any way but every time I go to an Indian
restaurant I skip the dessert. Because it’s like that. Often it’s kind of a sweet liquid.
Gina: Yea.
Leo: Not a fan.
Gina: It’s an acquired thing, isn’t it?
Leo: Acquired taste. I love Indian food but the
dessert, ehh. Anyway, no Ladue. It’s Lollypop. Doesn’t mean anything, right? There’s no prize. And they
couldn’t do a deal with Lifesaver?
Jeff: Ooh.
Gina: I think that would have been overdoing it.
Leo: I think they got the message when I and others in
the tech press said I don’t know want to say a brand name every time I’m
talking about your version of Android. And in fact we did. And Kit Kat got a
lot of free publicity because of it. It’s just not appropriate for a code name,
I don’t think.
Jeff: So this is the first number jump since when? This
is 5.0.
Leo: Yea, 5. So 4.2 was Jelly Bean. 4.4 was Kit Kat. So
I think since Ice Cream… no Ice Cream Sandwich was 4, right? Honey Comb was 4.
Gina: This I should know off the top and I do not. My
brain cells are not being used.
Leo: Since Ginger Bread. Because
Ginger Bread was… Ice Cream Sandwich was 4.
Gina: Ice Cream Sandwich was 4.03 to 4.4.
Leo: But Honey Comb was what? Four, right? No, Honey
Comb was 3. So it’s the biggest jump since Honey Comb.
Gina: Since Honey Comb.
Jeff: And how long ago was that?
Leo: Ages ago.
Gina: Since 2011.
Leo: So why 5? Well, it’s the new look, right?
Gina: Material design.
Leo: I like material design.
Gina: It’s beautiful. I’m very excited about material
design.
Leo: It’s flat-ish.
Gina: It’s flat-ish, yea. It
supposedly runs really well on low-powered devices. So it’s getting the next
one billion online.
Leo: Because all those gradients are expensive in CPU
terms. And the gooey stuff, and the lighting effect, and all
that. That’s expensive. So I guess they’re kind of eliminating lighting
effects. This is all very flat.
Gina: Yea, definitely very flat, for sure. And the Chrome tabs are for first-class citizens. Each web process is its
own process. There’s a lot to L. I don’t know there; there definitely are
transitions. Things don’t transport, they slide and shift. And L also focuses
on big images. And also as all of Android kind of has this
responsive design where it fits perfectly on whatever size screen that you’ve
got.
Leo: Here’s an interesting slide show describing
material. The interesting page seven: users initiate change. Changes to the
interface derive their energy from user actions. Motion that
cascades from touch respect and reinforces the use as prime mover. This
is the kind of thinking that goes into this stuff. There’s a message being
passed subliminally to the user. Like I this case, you are the God. You are the
power. Animation is choreographed on a short stage. Motion provides meaning.
Just don’t have motion for motion’s sake. It’s feedback.
Gina: Right, when you move, touch, swipe, everything
should move with you.
Leo: When I move, you move. Color surface and
choreography emphasize actions. Somebody put some thought into this.
Gina: Definitely.
Leo: As if they didn’t put thought into it before. I
like it. I like it. So one of the things we know, in fact I’m very pleased to
hear this; they’re going to put Lollypop on going all the way back to the Nexus
4. You’ll get updates on the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 5.
Gina: Great.
Leo: Yea.
Jeff: This will just take three years to roll out to
phones, but that’s alright.
Leo: Your carrier may Lollypop-block you. But if you’ve
got a Nexus, you’ll get it right away. And then I’m very excited about the
Nexus 6. What are you laughing at?
Jeff: No, I said expensive?
Leo: Yea that I’m not so excited about. The Nexus line
has traditionally been the low-cost. The new Nexus 6 and the Nexus 9, powered
by Lollypop will come out; well the Nexus 9 will be available for preorder on
October 17th. And it will hit stores on November 3rd.
Nine is a tablet, it’s a successor to the Nexus 7. It’s 8.9 inches. The 16 gigabyte version is $399.
Jeff: That’s the one that upsets me. I think 7 was a
great size.
Leo: It’s $225.
Jeff: The 9 is just too big. It bothers me. So now I
guess the joke is do I get rid of my tablet? Is my 6 a tablet? But no, there’s
quite a difference here.
Leo: You know who I think should feel a little ripped
off are people like me who bought the 2014 Moto X. Because essentially, this is
a 6-inch Moto X.
Gina: Is this the death of the small phone?
Leo: No, in fact isn’t Google keeping the 5 around?
Gina: I think they are.
Leo: Because they realize that people may want a
smaller phone. I don’t think the small phone is dead. But I think we’re now
going to see a very clear division. The 4.7 is the sweet spot. 4.7 and 5.5 and up; 5.5 to 6.
Jeff: The battery life on the…
Leo: I like the Moto X in many respects but the battery
life is too short for me. It’s 12 hours.
Jeff: What about…
Leo: It’s a much bigger battery and they’re claiming 24
hours.
Jeff: Because that is the main selling point of the One Plus One as far as I’m concerned.
Leo: Me too.
Gina: Yea, definitely.
Leo: And we’ll talk about the new update. I don’t know
if you guys got it.
Jeff: Yea, I got it. My lock screen is now different
from my screen saver. That makes me very happy. I finally have, hold on a second here; I have Lennon.
Leo: And McCartney?
Jeff: And Marks Sinagos.
Leo: Aren’t you lucky? Actually I’ve had different
pictures for some time.
Jeff: I couldn’t get it to work.
Leo: The new one gives you… it’s just different. This is not it actually.
Jeff: No, I did all that before and it didn’t work.
Leo: Well I’m not using it and I never have. But let me
turn on the new custom lock screen. Wait a minute, we’re getting distracted!
Gina: We are getting distracted.
Jeff: Squirrel!
Leo: I’ll save that for later. It’s so easy. There’s so
much to talk about. But let’s not throw it all in at once. They also announced
a Nexus TV device which is kind of…
Gina: Yea this was the one surprise.
Leo: Yea, we didn’t know about this. The Nexus Player,
they call it. With remote control. $99, optional
controller: $40. Are there pictures of the Nexus Player? I don’t see them.
Jeff: Yea, I see them. It’s this little round thing.
Leo: It’s running Android TV. It’s kind of an Ouya competitor. It will run games.
Jeff: Why does the remote control cost $40? That’s what
I don’t get.
Gina: It’s almost half… well not quite. But almost half the cost of the device itself. You can use
your phone to control this thing, right? You don’t need this controller.
Leo: Right. Although the Nexus Player
has voice search. It’s a lot like the Android Fire TV really.
Jeff: I was in the AT&T store this week and I said
so is that Fire selling? They said ha-ha, no.
Leo: So wait a minute. You get the remote control with this.
Jeff: Oh you do?
Leo: You don’t get the gaming controller. This is just
like Fire TV. So this is the gaming controller for $40.
Jeff: I’m glad I don’t have to pay for it.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: So the difference between the Nexus TV and Apple
TV is what?
Leo: It’s the same difference between the Nexus, Apple,
and everything else. And that is only the Apple TV supports iTunes. And Apple
TV does not allow apps so you can’t have gaming on the Apple TV either. So I
don’t think Apple TV is, unless you’re really in the iTunes universe, Apple TV
is the right thing for most people. This competes directly against Roku and the
Fire TV. Let me go to the Google website here.
Gina: And the Chromecast?
Leo: No, Chromecast is so different.
Gina: It feels like the Chromecast is a light version of
this. Because this is all cast-ready. This all works
with the Chromecast stuff. It seems like this is like the device for people who
want more than the Chromecast.
Jeff: They demoed this stuff at IO. And I was confused
then trying to figure out what the real difference is.
Leo: So look at the apps. That’s interesting. Because that’s a set worthy of Roku. Netflix of course, IHeartRadio, Crackle, Tune In, Hulu Plus, YouTube, Ted,
Daily Motion, Pandora.
Jeff: Where are you on it?
Leo: Well, TWiT is an Android
app, so I don’t know. What’s missing on here? Plex is
here. That’s good.
Gina: All you need is a podcast app.
Leo: Amazon is missing. That’s a big one. So now you
have to get the Fire TV if you’re an Amazon-streaming customer. The Apple TV if
you’re an iTunes customer. That’s kind of unfortunate. I don’t see Google… oh
there it is, Google Movies. If you’re a Google Movies person, you’d want this
one.
Jeff: But now that I have a smart TV, it basically does
all of that.
Leo: I want all of them, yea. So it’s an Intel Atom
processor, a 1.8 GHz quad core. 802.11 a/c which is nice. HDMI app, that’s how you’ll hook it up to your TV. You get the remote with the
player.
Jeff: Severe shortage of HDMIs.
Leo: Yea. You got to get an A/V receiver. That’s the
only solution. I bit that bullet a long time ago. But that’s good because it
really confuses spouses. It’s a spousal-confusing device. Why can’t I just turn
on the TV? Oh, and ex-spouses, too. Which is handy. Lisa’s husband came over and he couldn’t figure out, he would turn off the TV
and then the A/V receiver would turn it back on. Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh.
Gina: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been with
friends who have gotten a call from their significant other, like how do I turn
on the TV? I just want to watch Netflix or whatever. It’s so true. And it’s
like listen this is what you do: turn on the media player. Is the light on?
Alright now make sure the video source is set. It’s a universal experience.
Leo: Well A/V receiver just makes it worse. Because it’s another remote.
Gina: You get way too much fun deriving-too much
pleasure from that.
Leo: He said it keeps turning itself back on! So I
don’t see HBO Go on here. I don’t see Showtime anywhere on here. That’s two big
omissions. I really want to see HBO Go on this. But I presume that Google could
make those deals or I’m not sure how this works really. Did you guys get this
from Google IO? Did you get one?
Gina: No, we didn’t get one. But Jason snagged, they had
developer kits. And Jason got one of those. So I mean it’s just a black box.
But he’s been playing with it and he’s been using it with an early preview. So
this is cast-ready, so with HBO Go, if I cast from that, I don’t need an app
for that, right?
Leo: I don’t think Showtime anywhere does Chromecast
though.
Gina: And for TWiT, there’s
got to be a TWiT app.
Leo: There is, TWiT Cast.
Thanks to Mark Lane.
Jeff: You just want to promote it though.
Leo: Well I’ll promote it. TWiT Cast, get it everybody.
Jeff: You promote it on the actual device.
Leo: It’s frustrating because Showtime does not have
Chromecast support. That makes me mad. And you still have to log into Xfiniti. By the way, big story: HBO let out that they are
going to end that next year. That you’ll start to be able to buy a subscription
to HBO that will not be tied to a cable provider.
Gina: That is awesome.
Jeff: Every man for himself.
Leo: That is the crack in the wall. If they go through
with that, it’s all over. It’s the end.
Gina: That’s going to be awesome.
Leo: It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of
people: the cable companies.
Jeff: A story we didn’t talk about last week I think,
was also the Google fiber said that one of the problems they have with rolling
out is the negotiations with cable companies. And this is the case where Google
gets a much worse deal because they’re not in the cartel.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: It’s a horrid, horrid thing.
Leo: It’s good to be in a cartel.
Jeff: It’s handy.
Leo: So those are the big announcements. I’m excited
about the Nexus 6 because even though it doesn’t have the Moto maker support.
You can’t get leather. There’s only two colors:
midnight blue and snowy pearl ice or something. Black and
white. Let’s just call a spade a spade. Black and
white. But it is a 6-inch screen which I think is good. I have been
using a six-inch screen on the Nokia 1520 and I think it’s good. I don’t think
you’re going to hate it. It is big.
Jeff: This is a transition for me. And I’ve gotten used
to this. This feels normal. Here in Korea, and by the way, let’s just say in
Korea, the world laughed at you Korea for your fablets.
You were right.
Leo: Yep.
Jeff: Everybody thought, Oh those silly Koreans all
carrying around these gigantic phones. And they were way ahead. But when I put
this next to a Note 4, it looks almost the same size. When you see someone
holding a Note, it just looks so much bigger.
Leo: That’s a design thing I think. The key is tapering
the edges and so forth. And bezel size; what I’m really thrilled about… so I
loved the Moto X last year, I thought it was the phone of the year last year
despite its 720p screen and weak camera. And they fixed some of those things in
the Moto X. But the battery life was not great. It was a little frustrating.
And I was a little disappointed because it looked like they have dual-ported
speakers in the front. Only one of them was a music speaker. The other one is
the phone speaker. So Google is putting out a Nexus 6 which is essentially a
Moto X with bigger battery life, a bigger UHD screen-by the way it’s not just
1080p. It’s whatever the new thing. Oh I just turned my flashlight on by
stroking my phone.
Gina: That happens.
Jeff: Quite obscene.
Leo: Just go like that and the flashlight turns on. It
goes I like it! Keep it on!
Gina: Oh things just got weird.
Leo: But they have front dual-stereo speakers which is
one of the things I loved on the HTC One.
Jeff: Leo, why aren’t you carrying your Moto right now?
Leo: Battery life! And we’ll talk about this later but
the new R-38 update for Cyanogen. By the way, I am now convinced that the best
version of Android is Cyanogen mod. Do you not agree all of you?
Gina: It’s pretty great.
Jeff: Yep.
Leo: Far and away! And one of the things it does is it
takes raw images now with the camera in addition to a JPEG. And that’s huge.
It’s going to be a better camera on the shamoo, the
Nexus 6.
Jeff: If I want to update and get a new 7-inch tablet
because I’m going to be resistant on this 9-inch stuff, and I get a Samsung
7-inch…
Leo: You’re going to have a six-inch phone!
Jeff: But Leo, this is quite a difference.
Gina: Well that’s 5.5.
Leo: It’s not six.
Jeff: Number one, I’m on the plane watching movies on
this which is better. Number two it fits the pocket so it’s smaller. Number
three I can type on this easier for big documents which is better. I don’t
think the half-inch is going to make that much of a difference.
Leo: You’re probably right.
Gina: Alright.
Leo: In fact given these One Plus Ones that we’re all wielding that are $350. And the Nexus 6 is going to be
$650.
Gina: Yea, that price…
Jeff: 64 gig is $700 isn’t it?
Leo: Yea. Twice as much. Twice
as much!
Jeff: Yea. But it says on the back, Leo.
Gina: I can’t go another half inch you guys. This 5.5, I
can’t do it. This 5.5 has taken me a while.
Jeff: You’re just not going to do it?
Gina: I’m being lucid. I love the Nexus line and yea, I
mean I love the front-facing speakers. I really miss that from the HTC One.
That was one of the things I loved about it. But yea, no I just can’t do
another half inch. I was on the subway the other day trying to type out an
email. And there’s just some places you can’t be
holding on and typing at the same time. There’s just some places my thumb
doesn’t go.
Leo: That’s a special need though. I don’t ride the
subway.
Jeff: For little people.
Leo: And subway-riders.
Gina: And one-handed.
Leo: That’s this whole thing about one-handed which
Apple guys make a big deal about. I don’t really understand it. I haven’t had a
one-handed phone in years.
Gina: I agree. I think people make a bigger deal about
it than we can. But there are times when I feel slippery and I just don’t feel
I can get my grip on it the way I like. So the 5.5 has definitely been a push
for me. I don’t think I could do six.
Leo: Six is a big difference. When I handle the 1520,
it’s big. It feels big in your hand. It’s a little stretch. I’ve been using it
to stretch my hand in preparation from the Nexus 6. The Nexus 6, you’ll be able
to order not until October 29th and it will come in the second week
of November.
Jeff: They’re really cutting it tight.
Leo: It will have wireless charging. It will come which
the Moto X did not, with a quick charger. That was $30 or $40 extra on the Moto
X. It will come with a 3220 MAh battery. That’s about
400 MAh more than the Moto X. Dual front-facing
speakers, 32 or 64 gigabytes. A snap dragon 805 also better
than the Moto X. 13 megapixel rear camera. In every respect, it’s a slap
in the face to everybody who bought a Moto X because for the same price had we
waited a month.
Jeff: But it’s the same specs as the One Plus. What’s
the battery size on the One Plus?
Leo: I should request that. I don’t remember. I think
it’s very close.
Jeff: And a 13 megapixel camera is the same.
Leo: You don’t have dual front-facing speakers, you
don’t have cheap charging. It’s similar and I think frankly if you have a Plus
and you’re happy with it, stay with the Plus.
Gina: 3100 MA.
Jeff: Versus what?
Leo: 3200. This is more. But one difference is the
screen. This is the new screen, it’s-as I said-ultra HD.
Jeff: How much of a power hog is that?
Leo: That could make a big difference. It could mean
that the bigger battery gives you less battery… you know we have to wait and
see. Supposedly Lollypop is also an improvement to the battery.
Jeff: It ought to be.
Leo: What is the resolution of the new screen?
Chad: 1440 by 2560.
Leo: So it’s 1440 instead of 1080.
Chad: Yea. The PPI is 493.
Leo: I thought it was over 500.
Chad: Well that’s what they say on the website, is that 5.96 inches.
Leo: Oh, so it’s not six.
Chad: It’s not perfectly six.
Leo: Now how do you feel?
Chad: It’s 0.04 inches away
from being six inches.
Jeff: Okay, Gina. It’s okay. Just get longer
fingernails.
Leo: Quad-HD. You know, that’s really… anything more
than 300 PPI is probably invisible at a normal… unless you’re really
near-sighted.
Jeff: Especially that size.
Leo: Yea. 493 pixels per inch is pretty amazing.
Gina: And the 6 Plus is 5.5 inches, right? This isn’t
0.4 inches bigger than the 6 Plus?
Leo: The 6 Plus? What’s the 6 Plus?
Gina: The iPhone 6 Plus.
Leo: Oh the iPhone. I forgot about that. The iPhone
screen is identical to the One Plus screen. In fact I think it’s the same part.
So it’s 5.5 inches. You have an iPhone 6 Plus screen
in your hand.
Gina: Right.
Jeff: Is that what makes it so difficult to get scale on
the One Plus?
Leo: It is now my theory that that is exactly what’s
been happening. That Apple has been taking every one of these screens. And so
all One Plus can do is whenever they get a batch of screens, they put out more
invites.
Gina: Interesting.
Leo: That’s my theory.
Gina: We should try to get one of those One Plus guys on
the show. That would be kind of fun.
Leo: Because all three of us have settled on the One Plus One as the phone to have. Let’s take a break. When we
come back I want to talk about the update on the One Plus One which actually puts it over the top now. As the without
question king of the Android phones, in my opinion. And there are some
real rivals to this. The LG G3, there’s some tough rivals. We’ll have to see
when the Nexus 6 comes out but for now I think we can declare a king of the
hill. Hey a brand new sponsor. I want to welcome Mandrill to This Week in
Google. And it’s just a coincidence but Gina uses it!
Gina: I do! My company Think Up uses Mandrill to send
all of our email. I love it. I’m so thrilled that they’re a sponsor.
Leo: Mandrill is scalable, reliable, secure email
infrastructure. Trusted by more than 300,000 customers. It’s the back end for Mail Chimp. We determined that. And I’ve been recommending
Mail Chimp for years for our consumer users. Particularly on
the radio show. But this is like the heavy duty back end for it. Fast,
you can integrate, deliver, and track. And analyze everything.
Gina: Look at that. They’re amazing. They just got this,
I literally just copy and pasted that code into my app and it’s working great.
Leo: Okay so let me understand it better. I’m glad
you’re here. So this is like a mail server?
Gina: Yea, it’s a huge farm of mail servers in the sky
and you basically… there’s an awesome API. It’s just a very simply rest API and
you say send this email, use this template. It helps you design your HTML
templates to make your mail look the way you want. And it sends it.
Leo: So you could use it for mailing lists but you put
it in your app as a way for the app to have email capability?
Gina: Exactly. So on Think Up, you can opt-in to a daily
email with your Think Up insights. And Mandrill sends that. So in your app, you
say yes I want email. And then when our crawler runs it says does this user
want email? Yes; then it pings Mandrill and that email comes through them.
Leo: You send Mandrill a template from your mail
account. Or you can code your own and port it. They have a rest API. They have
a template editor in Mandrill. Real-time notifications. Bounce-rate changes. Reputation
management. So if people start interpreting your mail as spam, you’ll
know before anybody and you can make adjustments. Real-time analytics with web
hooks to integrate real-time into your account and keep track of trends like
open rates. Are people reading your email? Are they clicking? Are they
unsubscribing? You’ll know. Mandrill is brought to you by Mail Chimp, a company
with 10 years’ experience building world-class email marketing platform. They
send 10 billion emails a month for 7 million customers. And this is the back
end. You’re going to use the super duper tool. For developers who love
documentation, integration, high delivery rates, web hooks, analytics, a beautiful interface; they have not stinted on that.
Flexible template options, custom tagging, advanced tracking reports. It’s the
only email infrastructure service with a mobile app that lets you monitor
delivery and troubleshoot from where you are. Mandrill. Mandrill: it’s a powerful scalable and affordable solution that you can try
right now for free. Sign up at mandrill.com, use the promo code TWIT and you’ll
receive 50,000 free email sends per month for your first six months of service.
Gina: Funny story about Mandrill. We noticed that our
open rate went very low. Like from quite high around 40% which is very high to
very low after we did a redesign of one of our emails. And we realized that the
reason why is because we found out through Mandrill that the email was getting
shuttled into Gmail’s promotions label. Which is, you know we
were using some language that made it sound like a promotion.
Leo: But now you know. And that’s what’s great.
Gina: We knew, yea. And we actually just rolled with it.
We added tags that showed the little promotion at the top of your Gmail inbox.
And a lot of our customers use Gmail. But we wouldn’t have known that because
of Mandrill. Mandrill is awesome. I love it.
Leo: That’s fantastic. So your first 50,000 emails
free. You get 50,000 free emails per month for your first six months. So
actually that 300,000 emails free. Mandrill, but you’ve got to go to
mandrill.com and use the promo code TWIT for that special deal. Mandrill.com,
promo code TWIT. And we’re excited to welcome Mandrill
in. Thank you, Mandrill for joining the TWiT family.
And I had no idea Gina used it.
Gina: That’s funny. I’m in Mandrill every day.
Leo: I’ve used Mail Chimp for years and I know it and
recommend it. But this was the Mandrill name that’s new to me. Here is a great
website, thank you to the chat room, comparing screen sizes of all the big
phones. The Nexus 5 is on the left, then the Moto X, the new 2014 one. It’s
always felt a little squatty to me, now I see why. There’s the LG G3 right next
to it. That’s a UHD screen. Our One Plus One is kind
of the one in the middle. The one that says never settle. Samsung Galaxy Note
4; my Note 4 is coming and should be here by next week. I’ll have a review for
you of that on Before You Buy next Tuesday. There’s the iPhone 6 Plus. See,
iPhone is bigger because of the bezel. And I think that’s a mistake that Apple
made. They have a physical home button and so does Samsung. I am now no longer
a fan of the physical home button. Remember how much I bitched.
Gina: I was going to say, you loved the physical home button.
Leo: I was so wrong! You were right. Google said no we
want you to do on-screen buttons. Actually I like
capacitive buttons. I never liked the physical button that much. Because I feel
like something’s going to break. Both the S5 and the 6 Plus have it because
they use fingerprint readers. Or the Note 4.
Gina: The only advantage to the physical buttons is you
can tell what end and which way your phone is turned by looking at it and
touching it. I find that I on Android phones that are just this flat black
slabs that I search on the sides for the power button. That’s part of the
reason I love the One Plus One is you can just tap the screen to wake it up and
not have to find the power button. But that’s the only thing about the physical
buttons that I miss. Otherwise I think it’s just a much nicer design and the
software can be what the software is without that, a physical button. It feels
primitive.
Leo: You won me over. You totally won me over. And I’m
not looking forward to playing with the Note 4 because of that physical button.
It’s a simple thing but I’m trying to use my phone syrupticiously in bed. And you know, I tell you way too much about my life, don’t I?
Gina: Is it syrupticiously because you’re working when you should be trying to sleep?
Leo: It’s 4am. But I clicked the button and it’s like
click! If it’s dead silent you could hear it. Obviously not
normally. I want to just silently… there at the far right is the Nexus
6. It is the biggest. It’s shamoo alright. I wish
they had a 1520 in here. Because the 1520 which is the six-inch Lumia is just
as big. It’s a nice, thin phone though. I really like the gray icons.
Chad: With this website, you could just kill one of the
phones and add the 1520. Hit the X above one of those. There’s a weird popup.
Leo: I don’t need a Nexus 5 anymore. How do I add? This
is a cool site. I’ve never seen this site. Where do I add? Here it is. Lumia 1…
Chad: Here, I’ve added it.
Leo: Oh you’re so good. See it’s that big. It’s that
big, baby!
Gina: Yea, wow.
Leo: And some of this is hard to tell because you’re
not holding it. The thinness of the body has a lot to do with how big you feel
it’s going to be.
Gina: The Nexus 6 dwarfs the iPhone 6 Plus. It really,
there’s so much more screen going on there. It’s only half an inch, right?
Leo: It’s because no bezels! No bezels, baby!
Gina: I didn’t realize how big the bezel was on the
iPhone, yea.
Leo: Bezels are bad.
Gina: But that things got to be
a monster in person though.
Leo: I’m buying it right away.
Gina: It’s nice that the Nexus 6 is actually six inches
versus you know the 6 Plus being 5.5. The numbers line up. There’s something
about that that makes me very happy as a coder.
Leo: It’s the OCD nerd in you.
Gina: Exactly. It can cause a lot of cognitive distance
that the iPhone 6 Plus is 5.5 inches.
Leo: Well that’s what they said. The joke is oh the
iPhone 6 must have been designed by a man. It’s 5.5
inches but they call it a 6 Plus.
Gina: That was Kara, wasn’t it? I think that was Kara.
Leo: Probably Kara. Probably.
Jeff: Tell Kara to get back to her son.
Gina: Oh, okay! That’s good.
Leo: October 29th, we can preorder that.
Gina: Can we talk about the new Android ads real quick?
We talked about it on All About Android but let’s just
play one. I find the whole tagline and the whole thrust of the marketing
campaign is very interesting.
Leo: I think they’re smart because I think they’re
playing on the fact that there’s choice in the Android.
Gina: They’re turning it into a feature instead of a
bug.
Leo: Yea, you call it fragmentation. We call it choice.
Gina: Right, exactly. But they’ve communicated that very
effectively this time around. In this particular set of promotions, I feel have
been really landed.
Chad: Sorry.
Leo: Chad has it.
Chad: Yea, there’s a few
different ads. Which one?
Gina: There’s a few different
ones.
Leo: Play all three of them so I can go to the
bathroom.
Chad: Okay great. Let’s start with the bus stop.
Gina: I like the bus stop.
Leo: This is the best one because this tells you
something. Remember this is before we saw the Nexus 6.
Gina: Had some great music.
Leo: Be together, not the same. That’s an interesting…
Jeff: What was that, drop your own; Androidify.
Gina: Yea, that’s Androidify.
Leo: All of these are Androidify characters, right? That was the website where you create your own Android. Be
together.
Gina: This is the tear-jerker.
If you
did, that was a cool move. That was an And move. And
moves take guts. But they can mean everything. Their And move is to put wings on a bicycle. Now we fly. When enough people have an And view, the world changes forever. If
you think…
Jeff: That’s a little bit…
Leo: It’s their think different campaign.
Gina: This is it, yep.
Leo: Oh, that’s great. That’s the self-driving car.
That’s the ALS ice bucket challenge. Robots. Graduations, selfies.
Because
everyone doing the same thing won’t move us forward.
Leo: Putting underpants in there.
Together
we can.
Leo: Wow. How much are they going to spend on this
campaign?
Gina: This is…
Leo: Hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jeff: Have they ever really advertised Android before?
Leo: Well Google has bought ads before, but it’s been
for searches.
Gina: We were wondering this last night. I’ve seen
Chrome ads on TV. But are we going to see Android ads on TV? I can’t think of
any mobile operating system that’s every had its own ad, and it wasn’t focused
on phone. There’s never been an iOS ad. There’s never been a Windows Phone ad.
But we’ve seen Windows Phone on the HTC M8 and we’ve seen the iPhone ad. So I
was wondering last night if these videos are targeted towards developers. This
is Google’s way of saying this isn’t fragmentation, this is choice.
Jeff: I think also is what kind of phone do you have. I have an Android phone. You hear people say
that. But Google’s never really branded it heavily. And Google made the model
for that stuff. You couldn’t have that separation before. If you had a
Blackberry operating system you had a Blackberry phone, full stop. Nokia operating system, Nokia phone, full stop. It was
open-Android that changed this new model and they never really branded it.
Leo: Well I also should point out that previous Nexus
phones are clearly developer phones, Google realized with the success of the
Nexus 5, maybe there’s a market. This Nexus 6 is priced like a phone-phone.
This is priced to make money. This is a product. Google’s definitely selling
this not as a developer… right? It’s not a developer platform anymore. This is
a product.
Gina: They’re calling it their reference device. In
their blog post they said we understand that you can’t innovate in software if
you don’t do it hand in hand with hardware. And that’s why-they made a very
strong stated declaration-we’re continuing our Nexus line and we’re doing so
through the Nexus 6 and the Nexus 9. I don’t know. Are consumers… there’s a big
benefit to buying the Nexus 6 unlocked at the high price. You can use the
carrier that you want and you get pure Android. I just don’t know…
Leo: They’re selling it on all the carriers. It’s on
Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile. They didn’t do that before. This is a
product for them that they want to make money on.
Jeff: Is pricing also a way to suck up to the phone
companies? Alright we’re going to stop making you look bad. We’re going to go
along with the game and charge $700 for the phone so that you can have your
ridiculous made-up business models.
Leo: I think what they’re doing is continuing to sell
the Nexus 5 because there’s a low-cost developer phone. If you’re a developer,
do you really want a six-inch screen? Doesn’t that really… I mean you’re a
developer.
Jeff: I think the pricing shamed the phone companies and
shamed both the hardware…
Leo: I agree. But so does One Plus One.
Jeff: But now it’s not Google doing it. One Plus One shaming them is a different matter. And you can’t
get them. Google shaming them is a big deal. So I’m just asking, is this Google
caving into the…
Leo: Maybe. They’ve given it to the carriers so maybe.
Gina: I’ll be honest. As a developer, I want to see what
my app looks like on a six-inch device. Because there’s a
tablet layout and a phone layout. And six inches is right between them,
right?
Jeff: You’re making excuses, Gina.
Gina: How’s Android going to
render? Is it going to be the tablet layout or the phone layout? And I want to
see what that looks like. It could look like the phone layout too spread out or
the tablet layout too squished up.
Leo: Actually it’s not of course the screen size. It’s
the resolution you care about. Is there a device with this… yes, there are many
devices with this 1440 resolution. But they’re tablets. So this is the tablet
layout.
Gina: Yea, it’s got to be the tablet layout. Did they
just the SDK or are they going to? There are going to be simulators
that shows you what this looks like. You don’t have buy every device that you are developing for. But I am certainly interested to see
what it looks like. And I also probably should do some material design updating
as we all should.
Leo: So we’ll do this quickly because I know most
people don’t have a One Plus One and it’s still tricky
to get one. Although, invitations are flowing much more
freely now.
Gina: Yea.
Leo: Than they used to. The Cyanogen mod is, you know we’ve been saying for a long time that we prefer
vanilla Google. We want the Google Play experience. So I’m curious, Gina,
because you were the biggest proponent of it. Cyanogen mod is an adjustment
just as touch is and sense are.
Gina: It is. I love it.
Leo: I love it, too.
Gina: Because it gives me extra functionality but I will
say that some of the extra functionality does border on a little extra geeky
and a little big bolted on.
Leo: Yes.
Gina: And I’m okay with that because I kind of know what
I’m doing. But there’s part of me that feels like well maybe for a regular
person the pure Android, the Google experience. I shouldn’t say pure Android.
The Google experience Android might be just as good if better. The things that
Cyanogen gives me are very fine grain controls that nerds like me care about.
But probably not everyone cares about. I don’t know. I want to hear your
argument.
Leo: Perfect example here is quick settings. Before you
see the system settings, the first thing you see when you slide down on the
right is the quick settings. On stock Android you can’t modify these. On
Cyanogen, you can. And there’s a much richer set of choices available for you.
Gina: Yes.
Leo: That is great. And it makes perfect sense. And yet
it’s still very much the… it’s just a small edition to what is essentially the
Google experience. Similarly when you go in… oh and this is also there, this
quick bar. Which is not part of the Google experience. When you go into settings it will be very familiar. Anyone
who has used a Google Play experienced phone.
Jeff: Unlike a Samsung experienced phone…
Leo: Right, you don’t have four different tabs. But
they have a few things. For instance, this is nice. You can choose… actually
this may be in the Google experience-I can’t remember. Choosing the home, the
launcher? I like the ability to choose the launcher. There’s
themes which you don’t have obviously in Google Pay edition. And there’s
a theme store. So you can change this dramatically if you don’t want to use the Holo theme which is basically, and I’m sure there
will be an L theme. Gestures, you saw me do the V to turn on the flashlight.
Gina loves the fact that once you turn off the phone, you just double tap it to
wake up the screen.
Gina: Yea, that’s awesome.
Leo: It’s a little thing. And I bet you there’s a
third-party app that will give you that capability. It’s little things like
that but essentially it feels pretty much… oh and I’ll tell you here’s the
biggest difference. These capacitive buttons are weird. So it’s home, you can’t even see it it’s so dim.
Gina: Oh, and the menu.
Leo: Home and menu. Google doesn’t want you to have a
menu button. That might be the most controversial thing on the One Plus. This
would normally be back and recent. And on the One Plus, it’s menu, home, and
back.
Gina: Right and I’m running the
Google Now launcher so I can switch between… I get wallpapers, widgets, and
setting when I tap that. You can customize it. You can customize it a lot. And
I love that. And customization is a huge part of Android and one of the biggest
selling categories of apps. I think only behind games. Which
isn’t the case for iOS. I just don’t know. I mean look, Google’s got to
create the experience that makes sense for most users. And I just don’t know if
most users care enough about their phone to rearrange the tiles here. You know
what I mean? I mean, listen this is the line you always have to walk and
consider when you’re making any kind of software. There’s so many different levels of users.
Leo: Cyanogen mod has always been aimed at the
sophisticated user, right? Which is why we like it.
Gina: I completely agree that Cyanogen is way better. I
didn’t want to have to deal with doing it myself. I loved this phone shipped
with Cyanogen on it. And I was just like okay, this is for me. I know I’m
getting updates. I don’t want to deal with any of that B.S. I don’t have that
kind of time in my life anymore, fortunately. But I love that I can buy a phone
with Cyanogen on it. And yea, I love it. I do love it.
Leo: Now they’ve added Cyanogen camera, camera raw. Now
that’s a-from this phone-that’s a 16 megabyte file. So every time I take a
picture I use up almost 20 megabytes. And you can’t read the camera raw with
anything. You have to import it to Light Rim to read it. But it’s a DNG format
which is a stammered format. They’ve also added high-res music capability which
I think is great. I can now play back flack files recorded at 192 kHz sound.
That’s the Pono Player’s doing that. The new Sony
Walkman does that. We’re moving in that direction; I think the HTC might do
that, where the ability to play really high quality music back.
Jeff: So, when does Lollypop come out for Android? And
when is it likely to come out on Cyanogen?
Leo: They didn’t say, did they?
Gina: Like when are we going to get Lollypop?
Leo: Oh, much later, right? Because they have to get
the source code and modify the source code.
Gina: They basically have to re-base their work on top
of Lollypop, yea. It’s going to be probably a while.
Jeff: Define a while.
Leo: Months.
Gina: I think it’s going to be months.
Leo: Next year.
Gina: I would be surprised if it happened before January
1st. It depends on when the source code drops and how long those
guys…
Leo: They’re at Google’s mercy. They can’t do anything
until they release the source code. I thought you were asking about Lollypop on
the Nexus 6. Well I guess it will come out when the Nexus device with the L
comes out.
Gina: And Google has been releasing the source code
faster. So that’s good for us.
Leo: I think Cyanogen is going to…
Jeff: You’re going to make Gina feel jealous that you
have a new phone.
Leo: I’m going to immediately get a Nexus 6 and
probably move to it. I presume it’s going to have the other things that I like
about the Moto X like the always listening and all that stuff.
Jeff: Oh I don’t know. Does it? It’s a Motorola product,
so…
Leo: I would guess. They put it on the Droids. The Macs
and the Turbo will have it.
Jeff: It has a big Motorola logo on the back, right?
Leo: Yea. I can use it with my Hint and my Moto 360.
Jeff: So I tried to go out and get…
Gina: How’s the Hint going?
Leo: The Hint I threw away. Say again.
Jeff: I tried to go out and get the LG R and failed.
Leo: That new watch with the bezel.
Jeff: Right, sorry yes. It’s a real round one. No flat
tire. And it’s out here in Korea for I think $330 equivalent with Korean tax.
But I asked the front desk of the hotel and the guys at the hotel said oh it’s
already sold out! And it’s weird, there’s no Best Buy in Korea. You go to these
big electronic marts and there’s just booth after booth after booth of people
selling stuff. And people making computers there and all kinds of odd things. I
can’t figure out where I would go to get it. I tried all yesterday afternoon
and failed.
Leo: I am very happy with the Moto 360 and I don’t
notice it. Does the flat tire still bother you?
Jeff: No.
Gina: I stopped seeing it. It doesn’t bother me at all.
Leo: I have to say this convinced me, this is the first device I’ve used that convinced me that wearables might have
a feature.
Gina: It’s a great device.
Leo: I would like to do the change log. Would you like
to do the change log?
Gina: I would be happy to do the change log.
Leo: Let me take a break. When we
come back, Gina Trapani with the latest from Google. Which
is all we’ve been talking about today. And we’ll also talk about why
Eric Schmidt tells us who Google’s biggest competitor is. It’s not Bing.
Jeff: Alta Vista!
Leo: Who is Google’s… this is a good brain teaser. Who
is Google’s biggest search competitor? Think about it and the answer will
surprise you. But that’s right after this word. Our show
today brought to you buy Personal Capital. A marvelous solution;
somebody just emailed me and said I’m trying to figure out what to do with our
retirement money. Do you recommend Personal Capital? I said, yes I do! It
solves two problems with planning for your future. The first is it’s hard to
keep track of where all your money is: cars, loans, mortgages, stocks, bonds,
401Ks, checking, savings, credit cards. It’s all over
the place. Each with a different password and username. All different sites. So if we want to take a look at
our actual total financial situation, that’s challenging. And if you’re paying
somebody to manage it, you may be paying too much. You may not be getting the
best advice. So this is the solution I use and I recommend it. It’s called
Personal Capital. First of all, you’ll give it all your account information.
It’s secure and safe. And all your financial stuff will appear on a single
screen. All the graphs and charts and everything on one
screen. It’s a dashboard. Whether it’s on your
computer, your phone, or your tablet, real-time intuitive graphs. Yes,
they have an Android wear app. It’s right on the Google Play store. You can
integrate it with your Android wear watch, your Moto 360, your LG, or your Samsung. It provides users with timely updates on their
finances on your watch. Also, Personal Capital will show you if you’re
overpaying in fees and how much you’re overpaying. And what
to do to reduce those fees. You’ll also get advice that’s tailored
directly to your needs. Your age, where your money is, rebalance
your investments. There’s a 401K calculator. There’s a fee calculator.
So don’t wait. This is all free; it will pay big dividends too. It will give
you total clarity, transparency, so that you can make better decisions about
your future. I tell you what, it’s great. Personalcapital.com/twig
to try it free today. It only takes a couple minutes to set up. You’ll
have it going by this afternoon and then you will be in the know. Personalcapital.com/twig. And now, ladies and gentlemen,
play the trumpets because we’ve got the change log. Here’s Gina Trapani with
the latest from Google.
Gina: Google launched a new Hangouts app for Chrome on
Windows and Chrome OS only. So sad panda here because I’m on
my Mac and was unable to try it out. But this is basically a Chrome
packaged app so it worked outside the browser. So it’s separate from the
Hangouts Chrome extension that you may be using already. This is outside the
browser and it displays in a separate list your contact list and your chats in
one window. And you get notifications of course that alert you to new messages. And chats of course with all Hangouts sync across all your
devices. It’s got calling on the desktop now. So it has all of Hangouts’
video and voice capability so you can make phone calls to any number in the
world via the Hangouts dialer from your desktop. And the app includes complete
Google voice support. So you can make and receive calls, get your voicemails,
and SMS messages directly in hangouts. So to get this, if you’re on Chrome on
Windows or Chrome OS, go to the Chrome web store and you can download this
separate app, separate from the original Chrome extension. And it will put
itself in Chrome’s app launcher and you’ll see the new window. And it gives you
kind of chat heads style almost access to your contacts and chats that are
going on.
Jeff: I was going to use it today, but I
thought I would—I installed it then uninstalled it, because I figured I didn’t
want another variable being in Korea at five in the morning.
Leo: Wise.
Gina: That was a good choice.
Leo: Wise.
Jeff: But what I couldn’t figure out was
the little green thing, I couldn’t get it to go away so it’s just always there
on top of whatever you’re working on. And I hate that.
Leo: Oh that’s annoying. Yeah, I don’t
like that.
Gina: That is annoying.
Jeff: I’m sure there’s got to be a
setting somewhere to get rid of it, but I didn’t take the time to-
Leo: Woah! Did
you see that? Woah. Drag it around.
Gina: Look at that action.
Leo: It’s always there, but you can put
it anywhere you want. You know, it’s like the Chatheads.
It’s like Facebook's Chatheads.
Gina: It’s like Chatheads.
Yep.
Leo: I hate that.
Gina: You hate it.
Leo: I hate Chatheads.
Gina: aww!
Leo: But you kind of do want it to be
persistent because I have to say, even on the Mac I’m always, you know, like
digging around for the hangouts window.
Jeff: You got a bar on the bottom, you
got a bar on the top, use them.
Leo: Well but if you click the Chrome
extension for hangouts on my Mac, because I have multiple screens and multiple
work areas—
Gina: Spaces.
Leo: Spaces. I don’t know where it is, I have to search because it pops up.
Gina: Yeah me too.
Leo: Yeah.
Gina: And then it signs me into the wrong
Google account and then I have to—
Jeff: Oh don’t even get me started.
Gina: Jarvisian rant comes on, and all I want to do is send a text message, you guys. All I
want to do is send a text message.
Jeff: I think they fixed that problem but
they haven’t. Because now you can, in fact, on Chrome os,
you can sign into both accounts without having to sign into two completely
different sessions.
Leo: Good.
Gina: Right.
Jeff: So I can switch back and forth. Well
that sounds ok, but that’s not the point, folks. The point is I want to go tab
to tab and be using different accounts.
Gina: Yeah.
Jeff: I don’t want to have to change my
entire view just because my Google plus is different from my g-mail, so it
doesn’t really help. My Chrome was crashing as never before, so I stopped it.
Leo: Oh.
Jeff: And it hasn’t crashed since, so I
think it’s a little buggy still.
Leo: Oh.
Gina: There’s a point in software
development, and I know because I’ve gotten there many times, where there’s a
giant bug that you’ve been wrestling with for, you know, months, and maybe
sometimes years, and you convince yourself that it is fixed.
Jeff: Yeah, it ain’t folks. It ain’t.
Gina: For your own sanity, and I think
maybe Google’s gotten to that point, like fixed enough.
Leo: It works.
Jeff: It ain’t,
folks.
Leo: It works.
Jeff: I’m not letting you off the hook. It’s—you
know the thing is, it works perfectly on Android. I
can go into any Android application, go back and forth smoothly between users. Perfectly
may be a little stretch, but it’s a lot closer. If you got to Android quality
in Chrome, you would be OK, but you’re not there.
Leo: yeah.
Gina: Yeah. Well.
Jeff: Because the real problem is if I
click on a link to Google plus from in my Gmail, if it opens it in the wrong
account and I can’t get the link over. Just fix that and you’re on the right
track. But enough of Jarvis’s rant.
Leo: Continue on. By the way, this is
the compromise lollipop. It’s a lemon meringue flavored lollipop.
Gina: Oh! Double l.
Leo: Continue.
Gina: All the lollipop licking is getting obscene here.
Leo: Who did this, by the way? One of
my- our staff decided to put lollipops all over my table, was this Burk?
Gina: It’s amazing.
Leo: It feels like a Burk. Or was it you
Chad?
Chad: This seems like a Jeffism, if I’ve never heard of one.
Leo: Not needles? It wasn’t needles? Tanya?
Chad: Carson and Tanya.
Leo: Well thanks to whoever gave me
about 8,000 lollipops. Look at this one. What do you do with this?
Chad: I want one.
Leo: You know what? They use this as an
excuse to go over to Powell’s sweet shop and stock up. On the good ship,
lollipop, it’s a short trip to the-- We represent
Gina: There you go.
Leo: The lollipop league.
Gina: Oh yeah, there you go!
Leo: The lollipop league. All right. More of the—
Gina: Yeah, let me keep going with the
change log, let me try and save this. OK. Change log continuing. Chrome for iOS
now downloads and saves files in supported applications, so Google has updated Chrome
for iOS. It’s got better support for the iPhone 6 and 6 plus, and now, thanks
to the newness that iOS has, it’s kind of similar to the oldness that Android
had, ha ha ha, when you run
into a downloadable file when you’re browsing you can download it and send it
over to a supported application. You can download something on your phone, on
iOS and send it over to dropbox or Google drive for
example, which is a nice upgrade. Chrome 39 beta for Android is now rolling out
with reader mode and a couple of other little features. This is coming out to
users on Google play, you have to be opted into the Chrome
beta which is available, but please do have some tolerance for some bugs. Although I do use it as my primary browser, so I recommend it if you’ve
got some of that tolerance. It’s got some performance improvements, bug
fixes, and other tweaks. Google doesn’t usually announce new features in the
beta version, but there are a couple of new things. There’s a new reader mode
that kind of strips away the UI elements of Chrome to let the user focus only
on the text of the web page.
Leo: I like that. That’s nice.
Gina: And also in this release, is this
little experimental window mode, which is accessible only on the Android L
preview. This is this when each web, each tab in Chrome actually looks like it’s own individual app when your
flipping through your recent apps or switching between processes. So Chrome
itself isn’t a process but each web page is, so that’s kind of nice. Chrome 39 beta for Android. Latest Google glass update does
notification sync a lot like Android wear does. So basically this means glass
gets the same functionality as the Android wear smartwatches, meaning that any
notification you get on your phone you’ll be able to see on your glass. I think
this makes a lot of sense that glass and Android wear is kind of syncing on Android
wear. You’re basically running the same software that you’ll be running on your
wrist. That update is due to hit glass this week and you’ll have to be running
the latest version of the MyGlass Android app. That’s
version 3.30, and that will be coming out today. Finally, and thanks for this
one, Jeff, I hadn’t seen this one, but it’s really neat, Google released a new Chrome
extension for Google Maps that lets you—that turns your default new tab page
into a random satellite image from Earth. From Google Earth.
Leo: Love this.
Gina: So every time you open up a new tab
you get this sort of gorgeous satellite image. It’s called “Earth View from Google
Maps.” Search the Chrome web store for “Earth View from Google Maps.” And you
know, I downloaded this and installed it, I thought it was a little gimmicky, I thought it would slow things down and be kind of
annoying, it’s awesome. I love it. I hit command T all the time to open a new
tab, and it loads a random Earth image and tells you where it is, and it’s just
really neat. Really cool customization from Chrome. So that’s free and that’s
also from Google.
Leo: Let me try it. Oh! That’s so cool!
Gina: Yeah, did you get it?
Leo: Oh, that’s so cool!
Gina: Yeah, and it’s totally random. Look
at that. Look at that.
Leo: This is like the new backgrounds on
the Chromecast, which are also very cool. Oh I’m just going to keep hitting
control T.
Gina: Yeah, I know right?
Leo: These are great.
Jeff: Does it say where it is?
Leo: Yeah, this is Australia. Telford.
Gina: You can’t see it, but it’s on the
lower right-hand corner cuz yeah the screen is in the
way.
Leo: St. Mary Antigua and Barbuda. Oooh. That
is Burketown, Australia.
Jeff: Oh wow.
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: While flying over Siberia on the
way here, jeeze is it big.
Leo: That must be fun.
Gina: Really that must have been amazing.
Leo: This is Argentina.
Gina: Yeah, this is, this is neat. And it
loads so fast, right?
Leo: How do they—yeah.
I don’t want to know how they’re doing it. It’s probably something I don’t want
to know.
Gina: Though it feels like locally
cashed, I feel like they
Leo: Yeah it does doesn’t.
Gina: Right?
Leo: Yeah. It must be locally cashed.
Gina: It’s got to be. Right
Leo? These are like high res images.
Leo: Yeah. Our Internet’s not this fast.
Gina: Yeah. Yeah.
Leo: These are locally cashed. By the
way, I’m now at like 800 tabs. Wow.
Gina: And I haven’t seen a repeated one
yet.
Leo: This is so cool. Oh you just wasted
the rest of my day.
Gina: Yeah sorry. Yeah, the problem with
this is that you forget you opened a new tab to start doing.
Leo: Really!
Gina: Because you’re now planning the
next vacation. Look at that! Wow.
Leo: Beautiful. Oh. That’s a repeat.
Gina: I think we saw that before.
Leo: Got a repeat.
Gina: Repeat! Oh. These are all repeats. Cashed.
Leo: No, I’m going backwards now.
Gina: Oh, you’re going backwards.
Leo: oops. Went too
far.
Gina: Well that’s all I got.
Leo: And that’s the Google change log. And
in the name of the lollipop guild: We’d like to welcome you to Android L. They
should have done that. They missed a bet. OK.
Jeff: Can you imagine the negotiations
that would have had to have occurred for that?
Leo: Who owns “The Wizard?” By the way,
it’s so funny, because I said lollipop league at first.
Gina: Right.
Leo: And of course the chat room went
crazy.
Gina: And I was like “No it’s kids, it’s kids,” but you got it right guild, isn’t it.
Leo: It’s guild.
Gina: Guild. I’m glad I didn’t correct
you incorrectly.
Leo: I knew it was guild and I thought
“No that can’t be right, it must be league,” but it’s the lullaby league and
the lollipop guild. I’m glad we got that straight. Holy Moly.
Gina: It sounds like a show title to me.
Leo: Yeah. The
Lollipop Guild. We’d like to welcome you to Android L. So the answer is,
and the chatroom sussed this, Amazon. But you have to
understand why Eric Schmidt says Google’s biggest competition is Amazon. He’s
speaking to Europe. It’s a speech he gave in Berlin earlier today. I don’t know
why Jeff wasn’t there. Seems like-
Jeff: I know.
Leo: Anybody in Berlin, Jeff should be
welcoming them. He wanted to make very clear that Google has competition,
because there’s some, you know I think in Europe people feel like they’re a
monopoly and they’re evil. He says that “we have a lot of competition all over
the world”. Some people suggested Baidu the Chinese
search engine, absolutely. Let me find the Amazon part. “Google is not the
monopoly people think it is because if you want the news, you’ll likely go
straight to your favorite news service. Build, the most widely read newspaper
in Europe, gets around 70% of its traffic directly. A little over 10% of their
traffic comes from search and just under 10% comes
from social sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you are looking to buy
something, perhaps a tent for camping, you might go to Google or Bing or Yahoo
or Qwant, the new French search engine.” Nice little plug there, Eric. “But more likely you’ll go directly to Zalando or Amazon. Last year almost a third of people
looking to buy something started on Amazon — that’s more than twice the number
who went to Google.” So he’s got a good point. Google search is not just going
and searching nowadays. He says, “Our biggest search competitor is Amazon.
People don’t think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to
buy, you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon.” And a “Google
killer” is almost inevitable. “Somewhere, someone in a garage is gunning for
us.” Says Eric Schmidt. “I know, because not long ago
we were in that garage. Change comes from where you least expect it. The next
Google won’t do what Google does, just as Google didn’t do what AOL did.
Inventions are always dynamic and the resulting upheavals should make us
confident that the future won’t be static.” A little self-serving, you know,
it’s clear who the intended recipient is. But it’s true.
Jeff: I’ve written in to say about the
German problem, I’m trying to place in a certain German newspaper; they’re
taking forever to get back to me. We shall see.
Leo: I mean, it’s not wrong.
Jeff: No, not at all.
Leo: Ireland is finally considering
closing the tax loophole that have made Google and
Apple cash rich in Europe.
Jeff: That’s the job of the government to
do that, not the job of the companies to take advantage of it.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: And it’s a fine thing that they do
it.
Leo: It’s how they powered the Irish
miracle, I would guess, is low corporate tax rates. You know, companies took
advantage of it.
Jeff: Well the tax rates going to stay
low. The difference is that you could, now I’m going to get this messed up, but
you could take certain assets and attribute them to a
Leo: Irish subsidiary.
Jeff: A subsidiary that was then
somewhere else that had no taxes. Thus Bermuda.
Leo: It’s the so-called “double Irish.”
Jeff: Yes.
Leo: So we’ll see. I mean it’s true that
Google should take advantage of this. Create a Dublin headquarters; it’s the
biggest Google office outside the U.S. with more than 25,000 people. A
Dublin-based subsidiary for Google generates revenue, mostly from online
advertising, and then pays that money in royalties to a separate Google unit
that’s registered in Ireland but is resident in Bermuda.
Jeff: Right. .
Leo: But Adobe and Yahoo and Apple all
do the same thing. The truth is, you know, the Irish miracle is a bust, right? Ireland
did very well and grew very fast, but has now slumped a little bit I think. And
of course there’s a lot of pressure from the US and elsewhere, the European
commission too, to change their tax rules.
Jeff: That’s how it should happen. It
should happen through lawmakers and diplomats
Leo: Starbucks uses the Netherlands.
Jeff: The double Dutch, right?
Leo: The double Dutch. Wow. All right. So I’m sure Google has got its attorneys have got
Google looking for a new loophole, as does everybody else. Google has removed
498—oh, this might be a number—
Jeff: No it’s not, we counted it the last week anyway, so
Leo: All right. 498 thousand have been
removed under European law, actually 498 thousand URLs were requested to be
removed; a little bit less than half. 41.8% were removed. And now Tokyo wants
to do the same thing. A Japanese man—
Jeff: It spreads. That’s the problem with
this.
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: This stuff spreads. So the right to
be forgotten has now spread to Japan, and the leichtung sus recht has spread to
become the Spanish link tax, and these games are dangerous.
Leo: You’re gonna have to learn some Japanese, Jeff.
Jeff: I know.
Leo: The Tokyo District Court on
Thursday issued an injunction, ordering Google to remove some Internet search
results about a Japanese man that are considered to be violating his privacy. He
felt, well maybe this is legit, he felt his life was
endangered by the results that came up when his name was entered in a Google
search. So they’ve been kind of closed mouthed about what the actual
circumstances were to protect his privacy, so it’s hard for us to judge that. Google’s
Chromecast is number one. At 35 bucks I’m not surprised. The number one
“connected device” according to a report from App Annie, which is pretty
reliable. We’ve trusted them before. They analyzed the top apps associated with
connected devices on iTunes and Google Play. The Chromecast app was number one
in downloads followed by Fitbit, DirectTV, HP ePrint, Kodak, Square Register, GoPro,
AT&T U-verse, DISH Anywhere, and HP’s All In One
Printer Remote. Gartner Group says that there will be 26 billion connected
devices globally by 2020.
Gina: The Fitbit comes behind the
Chromecast? Interesting.
Leo: Chromecast number one, then Fitbit. Then DirectTV.
Gina: This is quite an assortment of
devices you’ve got here.
Leo: yeah.
Gina: You’ve got Healthtracker,
the streamer, the square register. I’m surprised there’s more square registers
out there than Gopros, although the register is free.
Leo: Gopro app
is free once you have a gopro. Well the dongle’s
free. Yeah.
Gina: right. Right. So the Chromecast is 35. Fitbit’s 99, I think. I guess that makes sense. It
does feel a little bit like apples to oranges though.
Leo: Did you see the—we talked about
this on windows weekly, and I made fun of it—but Microsoft research has
released an app that will let you type on your Moto 360 or Androidwear watch. It’s a little bit—
Jeff: It’s so Newton.
Leo: It’s so Newton.
Gina: It solves a problem that you don’t
have.
Leo: I guess they forgot that we can
just talk to the watch. But now, when somebody asks you if you can do lunch,
you can say s-o-u-n-d-s-g-
Gina: I’m exhausted.
Jeff: But you could have just said “K.” Just
say “K.” It’s what the kids say.
Gina: It felt like the story was supposed
to be that MSR was collaborating—not collaborating with Google, but developing
an Android, but the real story is why would anybody want this? Right?
Leo: Well, but this, Ok. You know, it’s
not actually easily installed and blah blah blah. But I think it’s interesting that Microsoft is even
doing something for an Androidwear watch.
Jeff: Yes.
Leo: That’s kind of what? This is the
new Microsoft.
Gina: There’s Microsoft research, which
is, you know, a really cool part of Microsoft that kind of does their own thing. It didn’t feel like that was a story but
then it was like why? What is this? And it feels like Google could make that
app, right? I mean Google’s got that handwriting recognition and translate
already. It seems like a very weird thing.
Leo: I think they thought better of it.
Gina: Yeah. Right. Did you see them typing into that Google search box? Did you see them say “OK
Google?”
Leo: It’s like they maybe didn’t know
how to use the Androidwear or something.
Gina: yeah.
Jeff: Well another story though is that
old people don’t like talking to search.
Gina: That's right. I’m officially old,
because I—
Jeff: So I can imagine old people doing
that.
Leo: Do young people like to talk to
search?
Gina: Yeah, this study,
let’s find this study.
Leo: Who said yes?
Chad: I did.
Leo: Oh well you’re young, I guess.
Chad: I love talking to the search. It's
so much faster, I don't have to
Leo: So do you do it in your phone or do
you do it in your desktop too?
Chad: Both. Both. I'll be lounging in a chair in the most stupid young kid position, hurting my
back I'm sure, unable to reach the keyboard and all you have to do is say a few
words.
Leo: Mostly, I ask my Moto x what time
it is. Maybe that's an old person thing.
Chad: Yeah, I've never done that.
Jeff: Must be.
Chad: I didn't even know that was
possible.
Leo: Wake up, "Moto x, what time is
it?" And then it tells me. The new Tesla all wheel drive like that, the model D, also reads
highway speed signs and obeys them.
Jeff: Well I don't believe that.
Leo: What?
Jeff: Does it read the signs, or does it
have a database of
Leo: No no.
Jeff: speeds?
Leo: It has a camera. In fact, Tesla's
CEO Elon Musk and founder was laughing at how Google cars autonomous vehicles work. He said "eh. That's
silly." Because, you know, the lidar has to be,
you have to map the neighborhood before you can drive it and stuff. So Tesla's
starting to look into the idea of actually reading signs. So also, this I will
never use on the D, using a system of 12 sensors around the car, when you press
this turn signal it then looks at the traffic, checks your blind spot and then
actually changes lanes. You go like this and go all yours. Would you do that?
Jeff: I don't use autopilot whatever it's
called on cars.
Leo: Most cars—not most. Many cars Ford
has the bliss system will warn you if there's somebody in your blind spot.
Jeff: That's good.
Leo: That's good. My car blinks. But the
idea that the car, just all you would have to do is just flip the, just signal
your intent to change lanes, and the car would actually do it. That seems a
little scary.
Jeff: Yeah.
Gina: It's a slippery slope of
automation.
Leo: But you'll love it over bridges,
Jeff. Very rarely leaps over the edge.
Jeff: Do I have an up?
Leo: Teens embrace voice search.
Gina: Yeah, that's weird. So Jeff's car
would have to administer a sedative, and then do the lane change.
Leo: You'll have to when you get in, the
car will have a little I.V. that you insert, and then you just sit there and
it'll just calm you. It'll smooth the ragged edges. Hopefully.
Gina: Put a little laughing gas.
Jeff: Don't worry you idiot. Nobody falls
off bridges. What kind of fool are you?
Leo: 45 percent of US adults said they
felt “like a geek” talking to their phones. That sounds about right.
Jeff: Yeah.
Leo: Yeah. Less so, of
course, when they're younger. 55 percent of those under 18 years old use
voice search daily. 75 percent for those who are on their
phones 11 or more hours per day. What could you possibly--11 hours on
your phone?
Gina: Wait a second. Is that even
possible? I mean what?
Leo: Kids today, you're saying yes?
Gina: Chad, explain.
Chad: When it's your computer, yeah. When
you're watching movies and chatting.
Leo: Well, I do notice. I see all the
time, I just they walk around, there's no if you're waiting, anything it's
always--
Jeff: You're in a constant text
conversation.
Chad: Yep.
Leo: Even if there are people standing
there, you would prefer to type at somebody who is distant than talk to the
person with you. Kid's today! 40 percent of under eighteens use voice search to ask for directions. Actually, I use that all the
time.
Gina: Yeah.
Leo: Navigate too. I use that all the
time. 39 percent dictate text messages with voice. I do that, both on my Moto x
and on my Moto 360. In fact, I very frequently dictate texts. It's too much trouble
to type. 32 percent initiate phone calls. It's funny it's lower. That's the
lowest number with voice commands.
Jeff: It's because they don't call.
Leo: They don't call. That's why.
Chad: it feels so arcane anyway. You have
to go use the dialer.
Leo: Call? 50 percent
of Northeasterners.
Gina: Northeasterners. What?
Leo: What is this? This is what it says.
50 percent of Northeasterners use voice search at least once a day. What does
that mean?
Gina: I wonder what Northeastern
Leo: You're a Northeasterner. You're a
Northeasterner.
Gina: Yeah, we are. Are we supposed to be
cutting edge?
Leo: I know. Because
it's cold and you've got gloves on.
Gina: Ok. Ok.
Leo: Survey asked respondents pick
something, I feel like Richard Dawson. Pick something “you wish you could ask
your phone to do for you.” 45 percent said “send me a pizza.”
Gina: Now isn't that so interesting. Isn't
a pizza delivery app the first thing that Larry and Sergei worked on together?
Wasn't that their idea?
Jeff: Very good.
Gina: Wasn't that their idea? To place an order for pizza through the web? Those guys were
Leo: Was it Larry and Sergei or was it,
who was it? Some founders, they wanted a pizza fax service.
Gina: Yeah! It was like pizza by fax. I
thought it was them.
Leo: Pizza by fax.
Gina: So I don't have to talk to anybody,
but I get my pizza.
Jeff: Would you eat the whole breaded
pizza? I would.
Leo: Pizza by fax. I though maybe it was Alex O'Haney and
Gina: No. He's too young for that.
Leo: Google was merely a site that
allowed users to order pizza through a fax machine.
Gina: So it's amazing to me that they're
still building the pizza by fax.
Leo: They're still doing it. This is
from his solve for x talk about moonshots. We don't have to watch all of this. The
order would be faxed to the pizza shop. No phone call would be required.
Gina: No phone call required. I don't
want to talk to my dirty pizza guy. I just want him to send me the pie.
Leo: Actually, I order pizza all the
time over the web now. There's a Petaluma food taxi it's called. But there's other services.
Jeff: Domino's I don't normally use, but
I have been known to when I'm late and there are barely--it's the last place
that's going to be open where I live. The Domino's app, I have a standard thing
in there and one button on the phone and it's pretty cool.
Leo: Isn't it awesome? I wouldn't eat
Domino's pizza if I were you. That's a strange thing.
Jeff: But when it's ten till' ten and
you're desperate.
Gina: Yeah. And in the
suburbs.
Leo: You have to be really desperate to
eat Domino's pizza.
Jeff: Oh you snob.
Gina: Yeah, I'm going to be a total snob
here. I've got to tell you guys, ever since I moved back to Brooklyn after
eight years of missing good pizza
Leo: You got good pizza.
Gina: I walk to my local pizza shop and I
pick it up.
Jeff: I agree with all of that if you
don't live in the boonies like I do.
Leo: Where's your favorite pizza in
Brooklyn?
Gina: My favorite pizza joint is recently
opened. It's called Fina Pizza Bar. It's on Fort
Hamilton in Windsor Terrace. It's delicious. It just opened. The guy literally
he had the oven shipped from Italy. It was stuck in customs. The pizza is delicious.
It's kind of fancy. It's fancy pizza.
Leo: I don't understand because how could the best pizza in Brooklyn be just opened?
Gina: Well, no. Ok. Well there's
many--there's much best pizza in Brooklyn.
Leo: By the way they don't seem to have
a website.
Gina: Yeah, no. They literally just
opened.
Jeff: Well let me plug mine so I keep it
open. The brick oven pizza where I am. Lombardi's pizza company in Martinsville, New Jersey.
Leo: That sounds more like good pizza. Lombardi's pizza company.
Jeff: It started with a truck, and now
they've got a brick oven and the place has a furnace.
Leo: I like the brick oven.
Gina: Yeah, the brick oven's good. It’s
true. You're right. You know what? They don't have a website. How is that
possible?
Leo: They don't have a website. It's so
weird.
Gina: It's so--they have twitter and
Instagram though. But yeah. There's great pizza all
through Brooklyn. You really, you know. I grew up gong to Maria's on Fort Hamilton Parkway as well, a little farther up.
Leo: All right. 24 percent of
millennials say "I am not paying for T.V. Chad, you don't pay for T.V. Do
you have a cable subscription?
Chad: No. It's so funny. The cable guy
came to my door and he wanted to switch me to, like I was on Comcast and he
wanted to switch me to AT&T or something like that. And he's doing the
whole pitch, the sales pitch, until he gets to "so how much T.V. do you
watch?"
Leo: Zero.
Chad: None. And he's like, "Well,
you got a T.V right?" And it's like I moved in and I haven't plugged it
in. And he was like "Well, great talking to you. Have a great day. And he
walked away.
Leo: Goddamn millennials!
Chad: It was like the fastest way to get
rid of the guy trying to sell you cable.
Leo: Comscore and nielsen both kind of
agree that young people watch less and less T.V. They don't pay for cable T.V. 24
percent of 18 to 34 year olds say they don't pay for pay T.V. More than half,
13 percent say they've cut the chord, 11 percent said
they never had a chord. Period. Yeah. So, between that
and HBO saying "We're just gonna sell it
direct", it's gotta be scary for Comcast. And good. They brought it on themselves.
Jeff: Yep.
Gina: yeah.
Leo: They brought it on themselves. We're
going to take a break. Come back with our picks, our tip, our tool, our number
of the week. But first, a word from prosper. Prosper.com. This is the place where you go and, it's a market place that brings together people
that have money to lend with people that need money to borrow. What would you
do if in the next three days you could get 35,000,000 dollars? Would you pay
off high interest rate credit cards? Would you start a business? Do a home
improvement project? Buy an infinite amount of lollipops? It's up to you! All
you have to do is go to prosper.com and fill out an easy online application. Actually,
if you do it for me, go to prosper.com/twit so that we just get credit. It's
the same page. Prosper.com/twit. You can get a, you
provide a few simple details. Not too much. They don't ask for a lot of
information, and you will get a rate quote right there online. They offer low
fixed rates. These are unsecured loans; you don't have to provide collateral. Multi-year
terms are available. Prosper. This is Silicon Valley's answer to the big bank
loan. With Prosper's innovative peer to peer lending
process, no outrageous fees, no rising interest rates, and you don't have to
put the pants on to go to the bank. Do it all from the luxury of your browser. With
your voice, if you wish. Prosper has more than 2 million members, over a
billion dollars in funded loans. This is not a flash in the pan, this is the
real deal. Prosper.com/twit get your rate right now. You
see how easy it is. And it will not affect your credit score to fill out that
application. For a limited time prosper is offering twit
viewers a prepaid card when you get a loan. So, go to prosper.com/twit,
that's a special site for you, and find out what you can get. Up to 35 thousand
dollars in just three days, plus that 50 dollar visa prepaid card. Prosper.com/twit. We thank them for their support for This
Week in Google. Somebody in the chatroom says "Who puts their pants on to
go to a bank?" I don't know.
Jeff: This is the pants show. Leo was
taking his pants off at the beginning of the show, now we're putting the pants
on.
Leo: Was I?
Gina: I think there were women taking
their pants off for Leo at the beginning of the show.
Jeff: Oh, is that what it was? Oh, right.
OK.
Leo: It was the lollipop talking.
Gina: This is the lollipop talking.
Leo: I was just crazed on sugar. Gina,
you have a tip of the week?
Gina: I do, I do. Good one, Leo. So this, no no. So this actually
got released a couple of weeks ago, somehow it escaped the change log. But I
wanted to announce it for a special reason.
Leo: And I know why, go ahead.
Gina: So yeah. Google plus added the
ability to add interactive polls to your post so you can ask your followers any
question, a multiple-choice question and get them to vote. I use social media
for this all the time, and I love that this is something I loved about Wave,
rest in peace, so I'm really excited to see this show up in Google plus. And
the reason why I brought it up is because we at All About Android, Ron
Richards, and Jason Howell, and myself switch over to Google plus polls for the
Android arena, which is a segment of our show where we each demo an app that we
really like on Android and then our listeners and watchers vote on which one is
the best. So if you go to my Google plus, it's plus.google.com/+ginatrapani you can see that I've got the latest Android
arena poll posted there, and you can vote on it, and you can see how polls
work. What's really nice about these polls is that when you reshare them, the votes don't get forked. So right now on Google plus, if you reshare somebody's post, the comment threads get forked,
you know like your share will have its separate comment thread than the
original post.
Leo: Oh, that's good.
Gina: On the polls, the votes, the
numbers all, you know, they're all the same. Right? So
if I reshare, I have the same numbers yeah. Which is really really nice. And
of course all the votes have a names attached them and a Google plus account
attached to them, which helps deal with, you know, scripts that try to dupe the
stats or whatever. So yeah. Really
nicely done. And a cool way to use polls, so we have
some really good apps in the arena last night so.
Leo: I know, and who's winning?
Gina: Well, we didn't attach names to
what they are. But mine is winning.
Leo: yay.
Gina: So I'm pretty happy about it. We've
already gotten a huge response. Much bigger response to this poll than we do on
our normal, our regular straw poll app, so I'm pretty happy with this, so,
Leo: I like it a lot better, and it's in
of course the social community. I've been using it, I used it because I took
pictures with my one plus, my iPhone and I can't remember what the other phone
was. And asked people to give me a rating on which phone they thought was the
best, and I got 2,234 votes which I don't think I would have gotten anywhere
else.
Gina: Wow.
Leo: yeah. So that's really good.
Gina: Yeah, that' s a tremendous response.
Leo: And an unusual response. The Moto X 1 and the OnePlus One and the
iPhone 6, the laggard in the bunch, which kind of surprises me.
Gina: Wow.
Jeff: Well that's going to bring the
haters out.
Leo: Well it is GooglePlus,
I guess, that's maybe part of the reason. OnePlus was
really winning for a while, and then people chimed in for the Moto X. And
again, lots of comments on it too. This poll is great.
Gina: Yeah, it's nice. That the people
can vote but they can also discuss. Which is nice.
Leo: Really like that. I'm going to use
more of that as well. Yeah. Polls now on GooglePlus. Jeff Jarvis your number of the week?
Jeff: Well, Google has now announced it's
going to bring same day delivery to Boston, D.C and Chicago with Manhattan and
L.A. following and here's the interesting thing, they have their own version of
prime. 95 dollars a year for same day delivery. Speaking of competing with Amazon.
Gina: Is this Google shopping express? I
thought that they had this is Manhattan. I remember trying this out in Manhattan,
because they had a trial period there for a while. And it was great. It doesn't
work in Brooklyn and they said Brooklyn was to come, but yeah. This is clearly
Leo: that's really interesting.
Jeff: Isn't it?
Gina: It's clearly the next frontier.
Jeff: It's really a slap at Amazon.
Leo: We don't have that in Petaluma
obviously. It has to be a metro area I guess. That's neat.
Gina: The choices were a little bit, I
should say a lot more limited than what, I mean it was
basically
Leo: But same day means that you have to
have a depot, you have to have a place to drive. They don't bring it to your
house, do they? Or do they?
Jeff: Yeah.
Gina: I think if you lived in Manhattan
they would bring it to your house. Yeah.
Leo: To your house? Wow.
Jeff: The difference in models here I
think is that Amazon has its own fulfillment. Google fulfills out of existing
brands.
Leo: Right.
Jeff: e-bay wants to enable small stores
to do the same thing, eventually.
Leo: So it's really the shopping express
rebranded, but they're not delivering stuff from the Google store, because that
would be kind of limited. This is from third party partners.
Gina: Right, there are drivers going
around and assembling your order at target and bringing it to you, yeah.
Jeff: So by the way, the other number is it's 7:00, so it's dawn in Korea.
Leo: Look at that.
Gina: Wow.
Leo: That's beautiful.
Gina: It is. That looks great.
Leo: Can you see Kim Jong Il from there?
Jeff: Un.
Leo: Un
Jeff: It would be a trap to say Il. Un.
Leo: Il's under
the ground.
Jeff: It is news here that he--
Leo: No one's seeing Kim Jong Un either, I might point out.
Jeff: He was seen yesterday at a mixed news here, lord knows.
Leo: Yeah. Where was he seen?
Jeff: Hobbling somewhere.
Leo: Yeah. Well, he's alive anyway.
Jeff: Going to get some mac n cheese,
perhaps.
Leo: So I owe an apology to one of our
stalwart chatters who asked me about 80 times to install a program called SystemPanel and I insisted no. I don't like task managers,
I don't think they're a good idea, but I finally gave in. There are two
versions. This is the free version, SystemPanel lite,
and they also have a $1.99 pro version.
Gina: That's bright.
Leo: Bright?
Gina: Sorry, go ahead. No, it's just sort
of the bright green, sorry.
Leo: Yeah it is bright. But what it does
is really actually kind of useful. I don't recommend, this is not a task killer. We know that's not recommended anymore, and you
don't need one of those, and a lot of times programs like this will chew up
battery life, so this is really more of a diagnostic tool for those times when
you're wondering what's running in the background? What's eating the CPU? What's
eating my battery? And you can get very granular information, which you can get
somewhat from the app manager, but in a much nicer format. SystemPanel it's called, and this is a plot over, and by the way it does history. So you
can see what's been using the CPU for the last week or month or whatever. Very
handy if something is eating your battery life for instance, I mean one of the
problems with the battery monitors is that it will most of the time tell you
Android's services, but what does that mean really? What is it that's really
using the battery life? So I can see which applications are active on my OnePlus, but which applications also are running in the
background as services and I can see over time which is using how much memory,
how much CPU, how much battery life. It's really, I
wouldn't say something you want to have all the time running, but as a
diagnostic tool, very handy. I was surprised to see that, for instance, I've
never even launched it once, the Amazon kindle app was
running all the time in the background on my phone, so I just uninstalled it. Actually,
I just uninstalled a half dozen apps that I don't use
like Glimpse, but that seemed to be using CPU and memory all the time on my
phone. So there's a free lite version. The Pro version has some interesting
things that you can for instance pack up applications, uninstall them and
reinstall them in one lump. Some interesting additional
features. It's called SystemPanel. One word. SystemPanel App. And the task manager from next app. And I don't remember the
name of the chatter who was asking me about it, but thank you for pushing
through. $2.99, not one dollar. $2.99. That's it for This Week in Google for this week. Thank you so much, Jeff
Jarvis, for taking the time to join us from Korea. Are you done?
Jeff: No, I'm not. Today is when I work. I've
got to give two talks today.
Leo: Oh my goodness. Go back to bed. You
got up at 5 to be here, and I'm very grateful, Jeff. Thank you. Really
appreciate it.
Gina: Dedication.
Leo: But you know what? It wouldn't be
the show without you.
Jeff: Shucks, Thanks. Now I'm going to
put on my gas mask.
Leo: Oh my god.
Gina: What is that?
Leo: Emergency escape mask.
Gina: is that like part of the hotel
feature?
Jeff: Yeah, well when you go to the
subways here, they have huge containers with gas masks.
Gina: That's not ominous.
Leo: They seem to be planning for
something. Yeah. That's not ominous at all.
Jeff: There could be an invasion of
cheese from the sky.
Leo: Thank you, Jeff. Jeff
Jarvis blogs at buzzmachine.com. Get his books. The latest: "Public
Parts." They're on Amazon and he's the greatest. And if you want him for
speaking—we
asked this before. You don't have a speaker's bureau.
Jeff: Just come to me.
Leo: He'll arrange it. He'll set it up.
Jeff: Yeah.
Leo: Gina Trapani's ThinkUp is the way to figure out what's going on your Twitter or your Facebook or both.
You can try it for free at thinkup.com. The things that
Facebook and Twitter don't tell you.
Gina: Thank you, Leo.
Leo: She's back to blogging too, at
smarterware.org.
Gina: Scribbling.net. I know it's
confusing.
Leo: Oh. Scribbling.
Gina: I keep moving domains. Yeah. scribbling.net. I've been trying to--it's tough. It's been a
while since I've written. Code is a lot safer. People don't actually read code.
Leo: You did post today, so that's good.
Gina: I did post today.
Leo: Yeah, that's awesome. I'm sorry,
Scribbling.net.
Gina: No no. That's OK. No worries.
Leo: We'll add that to your lower third. Thank you Jeff, Thank you Gina. We do this show 1 PM
pacific, 4 PM eastern time. That's 2,000 UTC every Wednesday on twit.tv. Please
watch live if you can, but if not, on demand audio and video available at
twit.tv/twig, on youtube.com/ is it this week in Google? Probably is.
Chad: Something like that.
Leo: Something like that. And of course
wherever finer podcasts are aggregated, including iTunes, the podcast apps on
Google, I use dogcatcher, instacast, pocket cast, all
those. It's there. It's there whenever you want it. Make sure you download it
and subscribe to it and that way you'll get it every week. Thanks for being
here. We'll see you next time on TWiG!
Leo: Oh! They're putting it in!
Gina: The Lollipop.
Leo: I was actually looking for
something like this. This is good.
Gina: Driving at work. Taking
their picture.
Leo: Isn't that cool?
Jeff: Bet the Google store is going to
have amazing Google lollipops.
Gina: Yeah.
Leo: I bet that's a great community to
be a part of.
Jeff: Yep. I'm jealous whenever I go
there.
Leo: yeah. Really
neat. Feel good about what you're doing. Skinny Shamoos in that. That looked like that guy in front
of the Shamoo.
Gina: Oh that's cool. Throwing
the peace sign. That's nice.
Leo: Yeah. Android 5.0
Lollipop.