The Vergecast - The Verge YouTube Roundtable at CES

Episode Date: January 10, 2015

Join Dieter Bohn, Austin Evans, Marques Brownlee, and Jonathan Morrison as they discuss the best gadgets they saw at CES 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Vergecast listeners. This is Deeder. We don't normally do this, but at CES, we decided to do a little roundtable with some YouTubers that we like. And we had a really good discussion about what they were interested in at CES and how they do their job as, like, YouTube people rolling the floor at CES all by themselves. So we figured you might want to listen to it, so we're tossing in the feed. Hope you enjoy it. Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming to the Verge Lounge. We're sponsored by Ford. They have a Mustang. We have been doing Vergecasts every day, and we thought it might be fun to do it. another one, but make it sort of a special edition. So we're calling this a Verge Roundtable. And rather than the standard Verge crew, we've got some of our friends who are, what would you call you guys on? YouTube famous?

YouTubeers. Also, super hardcore into gadgets, unapologetically, just love them some gadgets. So we thought it might be cool to just sort of hang out, talk about the gadgets that we saw at the show and how things are going. So I am Dieter Bone. I'm the executive editor for Theverge.com. And let's go around the table and you guys introduce yourselves. My name is Marquez. I make YouTube videos, as we all do. YouTube.com slash MKBHD.

That's about it. Yeah, my name's Austin Evans. I make videos that are slightly less good as Marquez, and my channel is Austin Evans. I also make videos, John, short for Jonathan. I like the Bulls. And YouTube.com slash TLD. Can we talk about this hat that you're wearing briefly

before we get into gadgets? I wasn't prepared for that, but we can. It's a very nice hat. Is it not hot walking around the show floor wearing that thing? It's comfortably cool right now. Yeah. It's actually nice here, yeah. It's a good hat.

So, yeah, we're walking around the show floor. What have you guys, like, how's the show floor been for you? Does it seem super crowded? Is it seem, are people costing you everywhere? Or are you just sort of just having a good time or what? I, this is my third CES. Okay. And I feel like every year you try to, you have a different strategy.

I guess for a one-man band, you kind of have a different strategy of what you want to see. I'm surprised there's this many people here on. today. Usually it's slowed down by now, so I guess I would say yes, it's more crowded than I thought it would be. But I've made my way around all three centers. I've seen a lot of stuff. I don't know if you guys have any specifically awesome things that you want to talk about that you saw. So I was a little bit behind, but I finally just played with Gear VR about an hour ago. What do you think? I was really surprised. So I've been a guy who, I like, I tried Oculus, the original. I loved it. You know, the developer kit 2, Morpheus, I just play with the Razor OSVR and all these things and they're

great and they're great. And I put on Gear VR with like very low expectations. Like, oh, it's just a phone. Yeah. Google cardboard is cool, but it's like, you know, whatever. So I was expecting something like that. And I was really impressed. There was a game. I'm not entirely sure what the name of the game was. It was like a spaceship shooter. And basically the entire controls were like you're just constantly moving forward and you move your head and you're able like, because there are no tethers with GearVR, you can like spin the chair around, do everything. You're always flying in whatever direction. There's just a little touchpad on the side that you can shoot stuff with.

I just want to mind. The footage that I was shooting was hilarious. I was finding people who were doing random VR things, and they were just kind of like moving around and it looks weird. But playing this game, you're flying forward, and you're just kind of looking at things that pass you, but you're in a swivel chair. So you're actually like swiveling around really fast

and impossible to hold focus. Looking ridiculous. Yeah. Make it easy for you. Do you guys find that there's enough content, enough stuff to do in VR to hold your attention beyond attention, beyond a tech demo? Ask that man.

He's the VR master. Not yet. I mean, I have the Oculus, the developer kit too, and I play with it sometimes. But, I mean, unless you're really into, like, all the demos and all, like, the little things. Like, a lot of the games I've played with are very much like the, okay, look, this is the game. We poured it over to Oculus. It works. It's kind of cool.

It's a better experience. But it's not quite there yet for me. So for me, it's definitely in the tech demo, the kind of the, hey, look. you got like a friend over or something, play with this, look how cool this is, and you put in the closet for like another month or something. The most fun thing to do with VR is hand the goggles to somebody and watch them use VR. Oh yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome.

That's not my line. I stole it from Addie Robertson. I can't take credit for that. That's true. So you guys do a bunch of phone stuff, right? I love watching your phone videos. Not much in the way of phones. No, GFlex 2.

GFlex 2 and then the whole lot of not GFlex 2. Yeah. No, that was easily the most. That was the most requested thing I've heard people that want to see a video about is that phone, and then little murmurings of other things. Right. But phones, you see the bigger phones getting their own events, their own announcements. So CES has become a place for the lesser known brands and lesser known phones to rise up from where they were before.

So what did you guys think of the GFlex, too? Did you like it? I thought it was really comfortable. Yeah. It reminded me of the Galaxy Nexus. Yeah, same, same. Exactly the same. Yeah.

Yeah. It feels kind of restrained to me. Like LG's figured out that they can just, you know, it's an ostentatious phone, right? It's a giant curved phone, which is crazy. But it's not like blinked out, look at me. I'm full of Chrome. It's just sort of a chill, cool phone. I think that's good for it. Yeah. If they want to make this a phone that people actually want and want to buy, it's a lot closer to what the LGG3 looked like, and I think that was a really popular phone. It doesn't have the same, you know, beautiful tiny bezels, but it looks like, like I said,

people are saying it looked like a one plus one, and it looked like a LGG3 on the back. And those are phones that people already like using. So the G3 from before was huge, and this is actually a smaller phone, which makes it, I guess, easier to pocket, easier to hold up to your face without looking ridiculous. So I actually haven't seen the GFlex 2 yet, but I did play around with the original GFlex.

Is the screen any better? Because that was the big thing for me. The screen was a little rough on the original GFlex. The screen of the last GFlex was a big plastic Ammoled 720P screen. And the screen of the new GFlex is a slightly smaller, slightly less curved 1080P display. Okay. I think it looks a lot better. Yeah, for sure.

Two thumbs up. Okay. So what else you guys find out on the show? What's your favorite gadget? We should go around the table and do favorite thing. the show. The most fun I've had here is actually off the floor was, we're Sam. He'll agree with me. The Z-Board 2. Yeah. Talk to me about that. No, that was sick. So it's lighter, faster, charges faster. And, like, I played with it before, and I've kind of been okay with it. Yeah.

But this was the first time I've got to use it, like, as transportation. So, like, we're going to downtown Vegas, and I could really see being a means of transportation. So that was kind of cool, because we get so discombobulated with tech and chargers and headphones. So, It's kind of cool to bring that tech into something that you can go outside, get a little air right around. So that's probably the most fun I've had at CES so far. So is it, so I'm a giant clutz. I tripped on the way over here on the thing.

I can't do anything. And I used to skateboard around as a kid, but I don't now. Is it any easier to handle? I don't know a skateboard. I mean, I think because it's a little more intuitive, it seems like if you have just the slightest amount of, like, foot coordination, That's all you need. So I'm out.

I mean, you're in, maybe. But I don't ride a skateboard in, like, five minutes in, like, we were flying down the streets. Yeah. How fast were you going? The new one goes up to 24 miles per hour. Whoa. That's fast. Yeah.

Yeah, I almost took an old lady out. But, you know, it happens sometimes. It's worth it. I had to bail on it, so it was the lady or the board, so. You can bail at 25 miles an hour. Yeah, I was going to say, whoa. I wasn't going 24. It can go up to.

Right. I think maybe Sam will go 24. I'll keep it like at 15. Yeah, I know. One of my favorite things that I saw, I actually like to talk about two things. There's a BMW stuff that was outside in that tent. Yeah. And then there is some 8K TVs I saw today.

Didn't think I'd think that much of them. But for as much as I see 4K stuff and 4K TVs, the 8K TVs looked a lot better than the 4K TVs. Yeah. And these were at like 89, 90-plus-inch TVs from 10 feet away. Yeah. And looked a lot better than 4K TVs. So what kind of stuff are they showing?

They're showing these slideshows. They had this one text demo where you could read a whole bunch of text, and at the bottom there was this tiny text, and you could literally walk all the way up to the TV and read the text on the screen if you wanted to. That was cool. And basically photo slideshows, because at 8K, no one has 8K video, but you can show these 25 videos of photos.

Well, actually, they did have some video. They had some from this one Japanese 8K camera that's somewhere in Asia right now. There are four of them exist, and one Japanese news agency has three of them. and they bought all their footage from them. But it looks awesome when you actually see it. Yeah.

Yeah. So that actually looks significantly better than 4K. It's super expensive, though. Who wins a TV battle this year? I have my guess, but I'm curious to hear what you guys see. There's a lot of cool stuff at Sharp. None of the TVs that I think are coming out that were really that impressive. But they had a lot of different interesting panels.

They had the one that wraps around the pole. I think it was like a, I'm going to forget it. It was a super like hard bend around. around the pole. They had some of those, like, completely bezelist displays, like, for, like, gauges and that kind of stuff. They had 120-inch 4K TV. They had the 8K stuff. A lot of that stuff, I don't know if I could pick a single thing, but they had a lot of really interesting stuff. And a lot of it was just like, look, this is a concept. If people actually want to buy it, you know, let us know we might make it happen. But it's more just like, hey, look, we can do this

now, you know, hit us up. You want some? We got them. I think I like the new Samsung TVs is the best. I mean, the, the, the, one that you've been hard designed is just amazing. But I was expecting this quantum pixel technology to just be a complete and total nothing. I expected to be just, you know, a gimmick and it didn't, I wouldn't be able to see the difference. But I feel like I could. I feel like it got closer to the dream of having an LCD panel that looks more like plasma. Did you guys check those out? I did a video on it. That was uploaded last night just explaining what it does and what it is, but I saw some Samsung quantum dot TVs that looked really good. Unfortunately, I couldn't see them

next to a regular LCD TV. So, of course, it looks great in the demo. The footage looks amazing, but how much different is it really? But, yeah, I was going to say Sharp had a little bit of everything at their booth. They had that 8K. They had OLED. They had a lot of curved TVs, a lot of flat TVs. I saw a lot of curved TVs.

Yeah. There's a lot of curves. A lot of curves. I have not heard a single television producer utter the words 3D once. Nobody's, like, they all might be, but from what I've seen, they're all like pretending like it never happened. No, there's like here and there the occasional like glasses free, 3D, but like it's dead. Huh.

I'm happy. I'm happy it's gone. Yeah, it was never that good of an idea. It was just, you know, guys, come on. OLED looks awesome, though. OLED, yeah, yeah. OLED? Yeah.

Really? Oh, lead? Yeah. It's the future because it's too expensive. But it looks so much better than everything else. The blacks, the also I saw these, the BMW, M4 and their booth had these OLED tail lights and the thing I think of when I think of

OLD because I'm messing with so many phones is not very bright because OLED tends to not be as bright but then I look at these OLD TVs and they look awesome and they have pitch black blacks and these vibrant colors and super awesome contrast ratios so I'm a fan of the OLD TVs

We never got around to your favorite gadget Was it the gear? It was the gear as well as those two The BMW stuff was there's a lot of really cool stuff on the, I don't know, I think my favorite thing was in the BMW booth, they actually had these, I think they had the I3, which was not only driverless, well, driverless, basically you could hit, like, the button on your smartwatch and actually be able to see, like, okay, look, I want the car to come up and pick me up. And so just, you see it driving, like, the wheels spinning by itself and everything. And then also the crash avoidance.

The crash avoidance is wild. The I-3 had the best demos of anything. They had the one, the smartwatch thing that summons the car. I sat in the back seat of it. And then, and then, And basically the lady's like closed the door behind me, so I got the camera set up and I was waiting for it to like get summoned. And basically the wheel snaps into place and it slowly starts rolling. And that was weird because that was in the backseat of a completely unmanned car. Yeah. You don't think that's going to be something you're going to do, but it was awesome. And then the crash avoidance thing where basically I sat next to the guy who pointed the car at a barrier, floored it, and didn't let go.

And we didn't crash into it. It slowed itself down, stopped. And he showed me he, after we stopped. He floored a couple more times and the car didn't move, so that was pretty awesome. That's wild. Yeah. Man. Okay, so mine, because I have a huge, long history and I'm a big dork, is probably the WebOS watch.

Have you guys? I haven't seen it yet. It's out in the parking lot. Audi's showing it. They're showing it, you know, they can unlock the car or whatever. So, wait, Audi is the first one to show this off? Audi is the first one to show it off. They first showed it off.

They wouldn't say what it was. Everybody assumed it was Androidware, and then somebody reported it was Android. Androidware. And then my old guys back at Android Central went out there and went into the settings and it's WebOS. Whoa. Yeah. And it probably won't come out for forever. They've got to do a bunch more work on it. But it was really fast. It had a really nice screen. And it's just, you know, I've got nostalgia because I'm a big old Palm fanboy. Yeah. And also the Palm brand. So I was bringing up a load about this. Don't even. He's going to leave. Never mind. I didn't say anything.

No, no, no. It's so, yeah, we talked a little bit yesterday. So it got sold to Alcatel. Or no, TCL, and they make Alcatel phones. And they just want to, like, have people help them figure out what to do with it. So they haven't actually announced anything. They just bought the name like, hey, guys, what's up now. They bought the name and said, tell us what to do. We don't know. We know you guys love Palm.

Wow. It's a good strategy. So was there anything else besides the name that they bought? There's not much left to Palm, right? Because WebOS went to LG, and they're making smart watches and TVs with it. And all the patents went to Qualcomm. and all the employees left. So what's left?

So it's just the name. Wow. I wonder what's left of that name, like how, I feel like some people will probably know it, but I don't know how much value really is in that name. Yeah, I think that old dudes like me, like take, like you guys, like BlackBerry has got some really hardcore fans, right? Like take that and cut it by like a quarter, and that's probably it. But the problem is you can't really use Palm or WebOS devices anymore,

So they're dwindling really fast. So there's just not that many fans. That's a sad story. Endangered species. Yeah. Have you guys heard that you can buy a fake Apple Watch? Yes. Here?

Yeah. It's like 35 bucks. I think it's somewhere. Like a dummy? Yeah. Is it functional? Yeah. Well, no.

It's like tells the time. I don't know. I haven't had a chance to go see it. We're actually going to put a story up about there's a few of them out there. Yeah, I need to try to hunt one down. Yeah. Should do a video about it. Maybe.

Oh, wait, craziest gadget. So my craziest gadget, I didn't get to see it, but it was, it's a Band-Aid that you put on a baby, and then it tells the temperature of what the baby is over the course of, like, 24 hours. So if your kid has a fever, instead of, like, freaking out and checking the baby's temperature every five minutes, you can freak out every three seconds. It has a battery?

Does it have a battery in it? Yeah, it's just a disposable thermometer that you stick to a kid and it will last for 24 hours. Whoa. All right. It's like kind of a good idea, but also kind of a freaky idea because the kid will become obsessed. You'll become obsessed with your kid okay. But I suppose it's better than like, you know, just having a thermometer all the time.

See, I was about to say we were over, we were Marquez and I just like an hour ago. The telepresence. Yeah, so you know those telepresents robots that are like, when you go around? Well, there's like a 20 foot tall one of those driving around their booth. It was good, though, because you didn't notice it at first. There was all these telepresence robots that are like five feet tall and you're kind of talking to these people. or they have the webcams, and you're rolling around like, all right, I guess I kind of understand this booth.

And then you hear a voice from, like, the ceiling. And you look and you just see these big wheels, and there's a gigantic one rolling around, I guess, trolling people. The jolly green telepros this robot was weird. The ridiculous thing I may have ever seen at CES, period. Wow. Like, there was a guy looking up. It was like, and there's a camera, like, facing down.

So, like, the guy, like, you see he's, like, on the screen at top. He's looking down at you, and he's, like, moving towards you. And you're just like, there's this giant robot coming towards you. you. That sounds terrifying. It's weird. That wins for me. You see anything wild, Jonathan? Crazy wild. They have vibrating blue suits controlled underwear. Is that... It's for real. Does that do for what I think it does in his before? Yes. And also a couple's ring. Tell me that they didn't have like a demo station. The lady was straight-faced, like giving you the talk. Like, you can apparently control it halfway around the world. So,

But three quarters of the way around the world, not so much. Just half. I get it. So that was definitely the craziest, weirdest thing. But they're selling that stuff. Yeah. All right. Wow.

The ES. No, gadgets are back. There's all kinds of weird gadgets. It's just like people have figured out that they can like cram things together, put a tiny little chip on it, have it talk to the cloud, and just make weird stuff again. It's kind of exciting. Yeah.

And terrifying. So what's your guys' strategy for covering the show? Like, for The Verge, it's shock and awe. We've got a huge team. We've got a huge great video team. And so we just descend upon the show and go every which way. But you guys don't have huge teams. And so I'm sure everybody's really curious to know, like, when you come at the show,

what's your tactics for, you know, finding the thing you want to find, showing your fans of things they want to see? Yeah. So, yeah, as far as I know, most of us shoot our videos by ourselves. So we're used to being a one-man crew. So you come out here and there's a ton of stuff to shoot. You have to find other ways to do it. So we're collaborating with each other.

We're each other's cameraman. We're each other's sound guy. We give each other ideas. We collaborate on other stuff like that. So it kind of works, helps to have other people who are like-minded. Maybe not we don't work for the same company and are part of a video team, but it kind of works that way where we know what each other likes because we make tech videos all the time. Right.

Yeah, for sure. Like yesterday we went and we pretty much spent all day shooting a couple videos on your channel. Like it's nice to be able to have some backup, you know? Like usually we're all by ourselves. and it's like, oh, I've got to go focus the camera, but we're all just roaming around and looking for cool stuff to do. I think for me, especially considering

that we are by ourselves and that we're having to do everything ourselves, it's like there's very limited times. It's like, okay, try to find those few things that are worth doing the videos. It's like, I can't do, I mean... It's still one editor. Yeah, like, this is day three

and I have one video up, so it's like... And hotel Wi-Fi. And Hotel Wi-Fi. Oh, yeah, because we should talk about that. You should mention what happened, what it took to get that MKBHDBHDBHBHDBH video up last night. Well, it wasn't that bad of a story. Basically, I had a 900 megabyte file to upload, and the hotel internet is three down, one up on Wi-Fi, if it's working well. Yeah. So I got,

I started uploading this file, and it said something like 99 minutes left, and then I tethered on Lou's iPhone for a while, which was getting like seven down and up on T-Mobile. Oh, wow. So that's shortened the process by a lot, but. Yeah, but it also took 10 hours to render that video. It did take 10 hours to render that video on a dual-core MacBook. Wow. Worth it. So the trick I've learned is if you can get into the press room or you can wheedle your way into the press room, which is the thing I did my first year. Yeah.

Get there at like 7 a.m., which is when it opens. And they probably still have it. You know, they've got laptop stations. They've got a printer, which is insane. But there you go. If you need to print something. But then they usually have got at least one row of desktop computers, walk up to one of the desktop computers and just, you know, steal the Ethernet. Ah.

Yeah. There you go. Usually you're finishing editing and you've done everything, you're done editing, and you just want to upload on the spot. Yeah, right. So wherever you are, hit that upload button, and that can put you with some weird spots. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing, too, is that it's nice being able to be a little relaxed because I think so everyone out here is just, like, shoving videos everywhere. So it's kind of cool being able to pick and choose and maybe not rush it out. because everybody is going to see the videos from every other tech blogger on the planet.

Right, right. You can kind of pick and choose what's good and then really put the time and effort to make that worth watching. And I think that's really the approach that every single one of us takes. Yeah, because, I mean, you look at, like, I was looking at your subbox the other day, and there's like 500 CES videos. Well, my subbox is a collection of things around CES. So if I've heard that something's at CES, like LGG Flex 2, and I go to my subbox and I see that first video on it,

The other nine videos about the LGG Flex 2 are probably the same video. So I'll just kind of watch the one that's there and then just leave. So when we're making content, we're kind of thinking, I want to add something to that, but I don't want to make the same video. So we're just trying to find other ways to add value, add information, add an experience. That's why we're collaborating, having other opinions about stuff. So that's a lot of fun. Yeah.

Doing the interesting, unique stuff is always. I think, too, though, like, it's always that saying, like, surround yourself with people better than you. Like, it's cool. Like, you just want to be around talented people. to step your game up. So I think that's the biggest thing that we've learned collaborating is just vamp off each other

and it ends up making better videos. Do you guys find your like editing differently? Like, I don't know. Actually, let me ask a better question. How do you shoot VR and have it not just be a, you know, dude going like this? Oh, that's it. That's it.

That's all you can do. Go wider. Just get wider. Just pan out, pan out. Yeah, I mean, for something like that, you're just going to have to talk about, Like, look, this was good, this was bad, this is how it feels. I mean, that's kind of a hard thing to get across on video.

But, yeah, I mean, I think people get it. I mean, people have kind of got an idea of how it works. And, you know, some people may have tried this or, you know, try, like, Google Cardboard or something. So, like, usually they'll have an idea of what, you know, VR is going to look like. But it's not the easiest thing for sure, you know. Yeah. I've found that all the VR stuff I've tried, if it's not Oculus, it's behind Oculus.

Right. The Oculus stuff from his experiences were awesome. And then the other stuff, I think, I don't want to even name drop, but, like, Razor's demo was just not good. It was bad. Well, I mean, I'll give them some credit. And it's the first try, I understand that. Aren't they trying to say that, like, this is just like a development kit?

It's a proof of concept. So here's a bad one that we built, try and build something better. And you know what? It feels a lot like the original Oculus. It feels like they're, yeah, like they're kind of starting from the same spot of, you know, where let's give us try. The hardware's not finished. And, you know, there's a lot still to be worked out.

But, yeah, I mean, it's, it's decent. But, I mean, you know, it's Oculus, they're massive. I mean, have you seen the Oculus booth? I have not. It's huge. I've been afraid to go there because I know I'll get lost, and I haven't set up an appointment to see it yet. Oh, yeah, there's like a two-hour line to play right now.

Yeah, like last year they were in a little tiny meeting room. I remember we took a look at it and did a little video, and now it's just like one of the huge booth that's like all the way up to the ceiling. It's like, wow, there. You got that Facebook money, you know. That's what it is. Yeah, but. Well, guys, I think we are close to wrapping up.

I wanted to give you a chance to talk about your channels a little bit, just because we're going to put this out on the Vergecast, and people might not be familiar with you. So maybe plug yourself again, but I actually talk a little bit about the kind of stuff that you do and how to find you where you are on Twitter, that whole jam. Oh, me? Yeah, so you guys can find me, Austin Evans on YouTube.

I pretty much just do videos on technology in general. I do a lot of PC gaming stuff, how to build computers and whatnot, But I just do anything that's cool with technology. I don't like to kind of like pigeonhole myself into like, oh, this or that. It's just like, if I see something cool, I'm going to do a video on it. It has something to do with technology. So, yeah, YouTube.com slash Austin Evans.

Great. Word. My name is Marquez. It's YouTube.com slash MKBHD. And I do a lot of mobile videos. So I talk about phones a lot, phone technology. But then I branch off into other cool stuff that phones remind me of. I say anything with an on button is game.

But headphones. A great slogan, by the way. Yeah, monitors, TV. cameras, whatever it is. If it's cool, I'll check it out. Yeah. They summed it up. YouTube.com slash TLD.

Tech, but at the same time, I try to make it not so serious. I mean, we're all human. We have fun. The hat shows that you don't take it very seriously. We like tech. We like to have fun. So that's it, yeah. Cool.

And if you didn't know, we are YouTube.com slash the verge. And you can find us on at Verge on Twitter, a whole bunch of other places. Hey, guys, this has been great. Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks for having us. Sweet.