Just a year after Tim Cook sat down for his first non-financial interview as CEO of Apple, the man himself is back for yet another round. He’ll be seated in Rancho Palos Verdes, California tomorrow evening at the D11 conference, taking questions from hosts Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, and we’ll be liveblogging every moment of it. The interview is taking place with under a fortnight to go until Apple’s WWDC, where we’re expecting to see details on iOS 7, the Mac lineup and perhaps a glimpse at whatever the company is (presumably) cooking up in the wearables department. The action begins at 6PM PT (9PM ET) tomorrow, so feel free to bookmark this link and return at the time listed below.
Last week at CTIA, we sat down with Lixin Cheng — CEO of ZTE USA — for a candid discussion about the company’s future in the US. The conversation started with ZTE’s current portfolio in the US, which consists of 18 SKUs — primarily inexpensive Android smartphones (most with LTE) for the prepaid market. Mr. Cheng mentioned that the company’s doing quite well in the US thanks to an 85.7 percent year-to-year growth in market share. ZTE is now in third place among prepaid handset manufacturers with a market share of 17 percent. He explained that carriers are seeing revenue growth from prepaid services which now account for 22.5 to 29 percent of revenue. This puts the company in a strong position for the future, despite last year’s investigation by Congress. So we asked Mr. Cheng if and when ZTE would bring flagship phones like the Grand S or Grand Memo to the US in partnership with the four major carriers. His reply:
I have promised you at CES that we’re going to bring the Grand S or Memo series into [the] US, and we are working on that, and I think that very soon we will announce some good news.
That’s good news indeed. Hit the break for more, including our video interview and full transcript.
Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.
Steve Wozniak pioneered the personal computing industry with the Apple I and II. In a throwback to our 31st issue of Distro, we’ll take a very thorough look at the mind and habits of the Woz. Spoiler alert: he has a thing for the bitten fruit.
Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.
In our latest round of gadget-related queries, Astrophysicist and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Principle Scientist Amy Mainzer discusses the fully-body typing experience and planetary preservation. Join us after the jump for her responses to our full barrage of questions.
This week CEO of Solar Impulse André Borschberg is piloting a solar-powered airplane from Phoenix Arizona to Dallas Texas in a record-breaking 18 hour flight. SlashGear got the rare opportunity to participate in this flight earlier today in an interview with Borschberg while he flew over Highway 85. This was an in-flight interview done from a Samsung Galaxy Note II to Solar Impulse’s base station and up with a satellite connection to the plane.
The flight took off Wednesday May 22nd at 04:47AM MST (UTC-7) from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and is scheduled to land at 01:00AM CDT (UTC-5) at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The total distance covered will be 868 miles (1396.8 km) – and as you might be aware, the speed at which this plane travels this distance isn’t exactly speedy – you can drive between these spots much quicker.
But that’s not the point – instead it’s traveling this distance without fuel – without non-sustainable energy, rather. Have a peek at our in-flight interview here and read all about it below – and stick with SlashGear for more information on this flight as it continues across the USA.
A Sustainable Energy Movement
AB: It’s an unbelievable feeling to see how this technology works. You have to imagine that I am sitting in an airplane, I will be flying in it all day – I will be climbing to 27,000 feet, and at the same time I will be filling up the batteries.
So the more I will be flying, the more energy I will be able to collect. This is for us a good demonstration of what this technology can do.
To be able to fly this airplane, and to be able to fly this airplane day and night – we worked hard to reduce the energy consumption of this airplane, and developed technology that can be used on the ground. It can be used with solar sets in homes, batteries in cars, the insulation materials in refrigerators.
Solar Impulse Products Used Today
AB: We believe that these technologies have a great future – to develop new products, to develop new jobs, to develop new industries.
The largest buyers of our parts – by far – do not come from the aviation world. These companies, like Solvay, like Bayer, like Schindler, like Omega – are in completely different industries. Their interest is to develop new products for their own applications, for their own customers.
We have insulation materials that we developed here which insulate better than what we had up to now, that are lighter. These insulation materials are going into cars, some of them are going into refrigerators, so I think there are opportunities for the direct use of many of these products.
The flight today is a step toward making flight around the world possible. It was important to test this airplane in different kinds of weather, different weather systems in the United States – I mean, you saw what happened in Texas [in the tornado on the 15th] and Oklahoma [in the tornado on the 20th] as it’s not easy to steer such an airplane in difficult conditions. So that is for us a first important goal.
On Media Connections and the In-flight Interview
AB: It’s a good opportunity to discuss with media, and also with partners – and with schools. I had many discussions with schools where children could ask questions and we could discuss what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Of course it all depends on the flying conditions. Currently the weather is extremely good, so it’s not extremely difficult to talk to news.
The arrival in Dallas will be challenging, because it’s windy. It’s windy on the ground and it’s windy around the airport, so getting to this approach phase, we will not be able to give interviews.
What’s Next?
AB: This airplane is fully sustainable, but the big challenge is to make the pilot sustainable. That’s why we are constructing a second airplane – which is being constructed in Switzerland – and this second airplane will be designed for travel over long distances, over the ocean, and we plan to do the next trip 5 days and 5 nights, non-stop, with one pilot onboard only – with this second plane.
With this one, we limit ourselves to 24 hours because the airplane has to be manually steered all the time.
You can continue to watch Borschberg make this flight live at Solar Impulse Live – tell him we say hello!
Countless wearers of Google Glass stalked the halls of this year’s Google I/O developer conference, but only a lucky few were sporting the prescription model, which makes room for lenses in a more conventional glasses frame. Among those lucky early adopters with imperfect vision was Thad Starner, a Georgia Tech professor who, in 2010, was recruited to join a top-secret project at Google’s fabled X Lab. That project, as it turned out, was Glass, and Starner’s role on the team as a technical lead would be a vital one.
Starner invented the term “augmented reality” in 1990 and, after experimenting with wearable technologies for 20 years now, offered us a rare perspective on where the stuff has been and where it’s headed. So, then, we were very glad to get a few moments to chat with the man at I/O and get his insight into how we got to be where we are and, indeed, get some suggestions from him on where we’re going from here.
Look at the prevalence of Wolfson’s audio chips today, in everything from audiophile DACs to smartphones like the Exynos-powered Galaxy S III and Galaxy S 4, and it’s hard not to be impressed. Factor in the company’s humble beginnings in 1984 as a university offshoot in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the growth story becomes even more dramatic. The company shipped its billionth chip in 2008, its 2 billionth in 2012 and now expects to sell a billion per year by 2015.
It’s ironic, then, that at the start of its journey into mobile devices Wolfson actually failed to grow quickly enough, resulting in the loss of its biggest and most high-profile customer. With Apple using its chips in a number of iPods, the Scottish company just couldn’t scale up to meet a sudden rush of demand. It missed some deadlines and Cuptertino left it out of the iPod Classic as it shifted its loyalty to Cirrus Logic, where it has stayed ever since. How did it recover? Where is it headed next? And how will it break Qualcomm’s continuing grip on smartphone audio in the US? Read on for answers from CEO Mike Hickey.
Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.
This week’s edition of our regular session on inquiry chats with the nation’s first Chief Digital Officer, Rachel Haot. NYC’s CDO discusses navigating the five boroughs with Google Maps and her filtered photo obsession. Head on past the jump for the full set of responses.
This week at Google I/O 2013, the company’s yearly developer conference, the wearable technology device Glass was discussed as a scalable fashion platform by the project’s lead industrial designer. In a fireside chat with several other creators and head minds from Google on the Glass project, Isabelle Olsson let it be known that Glass has come a long way since its first day in the lab – she had one of the original prototypes on hand to show off in-hand.
Olsson showed a rather bulky and – according to her – rather heavy piece of hardware that was a mix of geeky massive and hipster odd. Speaking about the experience, walking into the room at Google on the first day that prototypes had been mocked up, Olsson described it as a rather exciting – if not scary – experience. One of the first changes the team had to make, she said, was in the unit’s ability to adjust.
“When I joined the project, we thought we needed 50 different adjustment mechanisms, but that wouldn’t make a good user experience. So we scaled it down to this one adjustment mechanism.” – Isabelle Olsson, Google Glass Lead Industrial Designer
Olsson also showed off Glass’ ability to be taken apart and moved. There’s one piece that acts as the most basic frame and the other – the computer – that can be attached to many different bits and pieces being built today.
“We make Glass modular. In this stage, this means you’re able to remove the board from the main frame. This is pretty cool. This opens up a lot of possibilities. It opens up possibilities for not only functionality but also scalability.” – Isabelle Olsson, Google Glass Lead Industrial Designer
Glass is still at a place where this team cannot tell the public when they will be ready to sell to consumers – the same goes for the future of Glass. Noting that they wouldn’t be able to comment on the future of Glass very much at this point. This was called into question by a boisterous audience member who yelled:
Why not?!
To which the host of this chat, Senior Developer Advocate at Google for Project Glass, Timothy Jordan, replied: “because it’s Google’s policy not to comment on future unannounced products. And because I follow rules.” To which the same audience member replied, pathetically hilariously:
Ok.
This attitude reflected the thoughts and wishes of the entire audience – or at least those without the device on their temples. With more than 30 members of the audience wearing the developer “Explorer Edition” in full effect, we were in rare company without a doubt.
Nearly two years ago to the day, Google introduced Music Beta at I/O 2011. But in reality, it was little more than a gigantic cloud to store 20,000 of your favorite tracks. Despite a plethora of rumors that the search giant would beat Spotify to the punch by launching a subscription-based music service in the United States, we got a digital locker that has done little to distract most listeners from giving Rdio, Pandora, iTunes and other like services at least a piece of their heart. Fast forward to today, and Google’s finally joining the bandwagon… in majorly limited fashion.
Google Music All Access is presently only available for mobile as an Android app, and only to users in the US. Moreover, it costs $9.99 — the exact same sum as practically every one of its rivals. Rivals that have multi-year headstarts in terms of mind and market share. (Yes, it’s $7.99 per month if you sign up prior to June 30th.) Google has landed deals with the same “major labels” as everyone else, but even product manager Paul Joyce affirmed to us here at I/O that All Access doesn’t have access to any exclusives. In a post-keynote meeting with Joyce, he noted that this is only the start for the product. Naturally, Google’s going to do its finest work on its own platform, but it’s certainly odd to see iOS users left out in the cold given Google’s acknowledgement of its importance just minutes earlier.
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