Pocketnow Weekly 131: HTC @ MWC, YotaPhone 2 review, Project Ara

Published: Jan. 18, 2015, 4:05 a.m.

A coming HTC event, a two-faced smartphone, new 4G tablets, and a smartwatch with a rotating bezel. From the big to the weird to the dull to the small, it's a new and varied news cycle and that's just the kind we like to come back to. Fresh from the holidays and from the roaring insanity of CES, the Pocketnow Weekly is back again. We're not just talking Hima, YotaPhone, and Samsung's spinning smartwatch rims, either: there's news from Microsoft, LG, Xiaomi and even Google's modular-phone concept Project Ara – plus a YotaPhone 2 extended hands-on session and the return of Stephen Schenck's editorial series Dial F For Fail. And it's all capped off by the return of our long-lost Editor-in-Chief, Anton D. Nagy! That's an awful lot of jawin' for one show, so let's get to it. Join us for Pocketnow Weekly 131 below –either through the live video stream at 12:35pm Eastern on January 16 (click here for your local time), or the high-quality audio version available later on– and shoot your questions to podcast [AT] pocketnow [DOT] com for a shot at getting your question read aloud on the air. See you then! Pocketnow Weekly 131 Recording Date January 16, 2015 Hosts Michael Fisher Anton D. Nagy Stephen Schenck Producer Jules Wang Podcast Rundown Sponsor (00:02:23) Kickstart your new year and challenge yourself to learn something new with a free 10-day trial to lynda.com!  lynda.com is used by millions of people around the world and has over 3,000 courses on topics like web development, photography, visual design and business, as well as software training like Excel, Wordpress, and Photoshop.  All of their courses are taught by experts and new courses are added to the site every week.  Whether you want to invest in a new hobby, ask your boss for a raise, find a new job or improve upon your current job skills in 2015; lynda.com has something for everyone! News (00:04:41) HTC invites go out for MWC event Rumors name YotaPhone 2 US carrier partner Xiaomi Mi Note announced as company's new flagship New LG tablet with LTE shows its face at the FCC 2015 Samsung tablet lineup reportedly leaked Samsung round smartwatch might get rotating bezel Project Ara market pilot coming to Puerto Rico this year Microsoft readies Windows 10 smartphone preview Gadgets in Hand (00:52:56) The "two-faced" smartphone is one of the most intriguing handsets we've entertained in months, and we're eager to take your questions! Let us know what you want to know about the YotaPhone 2, using the Q&A function in Hangouts if you're watching live. We'll do our best to get to every question we can before time runs out. Dial F for Fail (01:13:08) A segment from our top news wrangler about injustice, misdeeds, and general foolishness within the mobile industry. Today’s topic: Samsung's Tizen Z1 ... and how it's really hard to care about it. Samsung's snooze of a Tizen launch: the ZZzzzzzzzzz1 Context: Samsung Z1 announced as company's Tizen flagship Listener Mail (01:28:24) E-mailed submissions from Greg Vogt, Paul Stevenson, and Kevin Choi Music It may just sound like a ringtone to you, but our transition music track ("Radiation") is a real song, from a real album, by a real artist: Ali Spagnola. You can download that album, along with many others, at Ali's website here, visit her YouTube page here, and follow her on Twitter here! • See you next week! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.