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.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
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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.
Tues May 28 06:00:00 PM PDT 2013
Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops, Mobile, Apple
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When Valve's first hardware hire, Jeri Ellsworth, tweeted back in February that she was fired from the company, we were disappointed but also intrigued by what she meant by "time for new exciting projects." Well we finally saw what she's been up to here at at Maker Faire 2013. It's called Cast AR, and it's a pair of 3D augmented-reality glasses that she and former Valve programmer Rick Johnson were working on at Valve before they left.
The model we saw is still in the early prototype stages, but the concepts are already in place. Perched atop a pair of active shutter glasses are a couple of miniature LCD projectors, which bounce images from a connected computer onto a special reflective surface at a 120Hz refresh rate. A camera module sits on the eyewear's bridge and monitors an array of infrared LEDs embedded in the reflective surface. This allows for quick and accurate head tracking. Join us after the break for our impressions and our video interview with Jeri Ellsworth.
Gallery: Cast AR hands-on at Maker Faire 2013
Filed under: Gaming, Wearables
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From the latest harbinger of the robopocalypse from Boston Dynamics to more friendly looking machines like Romo, Engadget has a longstanding love affair with all forms of robots. Syfy channel's newest show, Robot Combat League (RCL), has provided us with twelve new objects of robotic affection --and the best part is, we get to watch them destroy each other in gladiatorial fashion. RCL isn't the first show to have 'bots do battle on TV, of course, but it is the first to have the robots be humanoid avatars that mimic the movements of the people operating them. Mark Setrakian is the man who designed and built the dozen robots on the show, and we recently got the opportunity to chat with him about how he did it.
Filed under: Robots, HD
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