For the second time in under a year, HTC’s lead designer leaves the company

Whether it’s due to stagnant visions on smartphone design or something as simple as the inevitable motions of life, for one reason or another HTC has yet again lost their lead product designer. Jonah Becker announced his departure from the company today.

Becker was part of One & Co., a design firm that was acquired by HTC about 6 years ago. His business partner Scott Croyle had been the vice president of industrial design since the deal was made back in 2008, and Becker found himself promoted to that position once Croyle vacated it.

So what’s next? HTC has already decided to slot creative director Daniel Hundt into the role and focus on product design for mobile devices. Meanwhile, the lone remaining figurehead from One & Co. — Claude Zellweger — will continue in the role he has played as lead designer for HTC’s connected devices (such as the HTC RE Camera, Vive and Grip).

We can confirm that Jonah Becker has left HTC; he had been with the Company since HTC acquired One & Co over six years ago. We would like to thank Jonah for his work with HTC, and wish him all the best in his future endeavours. He has been succeeded by Daniel Hundt, based in our San Francisco design office.

Many will likely jump to conclusions and point to the underwhelming response of the HTC One M9 as the driving force behind this move, but it’s never wise to speculate. It’s important to remember that HTC is going through a very significant shift from the top down, with Cher Wang — co-founder to the Taiwanese company — having been announced as Peter Chou’s successor just a week ago. We imagine many more changes in executive management are on tap, and we’d do well not to overreact.

[via Engadget]

Motorola president says company has no plans to make tablets

It’s no secret Motorola’s first tablet — the late Motorola XOOM — wasn’t the most successful venture ever. It came to market with an outrageously high price tag, lack of LTE (it was later offered for those who didn’t mind shipping their device back in) and a whole gang of bugs. But it was important in that it was the first tablet to champion Android for the big screen. They then followed up with the DROID Xyboard family that was exclusive to Verizon.

We’ve always wondered whether the company would look to introduce another one in more modern times, especially with Verizon having dropped hints of a new Motorola tablet in the past, but it looks like those plans were taken out back and lit on fire. Rick Osterloh, Motorola Mobility’s president, confirmed on Twitter that the company has no plans to create Android tablets (and opted to name drop his parent company Lenovo as a fine source for Android tablets).

A rumor back in 2013 suggested Motorola was going to take what they’ve learned from the successful launch of Moto Maker and the Moto X to provide a tablet with similar qualities (that is, one that is simple, clean and can be made-to-order depending on your style). A lot can change in two years in the tech space, though, and it seems those exciting plans were lost throughout all the hubbub of being bought by Google, then subsequently sold to Lenovo.

That said, it’s worth remembering that “no plans” doesn’t mean plans can’t change. We’re still holding out hope for Motorola to make a comeback in the tablet space, but if you’re somehow still waiting for a new slate from the company after four long years then it’s safe to say you should look to move on. We hear that Nexus 9 is pretty darn good.

Sprint Direct 2 You sends company representatives to you to help setup new smartphones

While Sprint is busy putting up new towers to help improve their network and trying to match T-Mobile in the value game, they’ve come up with another unique strategy to help retain your business: personal visits to help you set your new smartphones up.

It’s called Direct 2 You, and a fleet of more than 5,000 vehicles driven by Sprint representatives will be on-hand to meet up with you at your home, office or any other location you desire — at whichever time you desire (within reason, we imagine) — to help you get going on your phone. This includes transferring content and contacts from one phone to another, with great emphasis placed on the Android to iPhone conversion or vice versa.

This is a process typically done in-store, but Sprint feels time is too precious to have you waiting in long lines at the point of sale. The best part? It’s all absolutely free. Take it from someone whose most recent upgrade took more than 3 hours of waiting inside the stuffy corners of a Verizon store — this is awesome.

The service will begin in major areas of Miami and Chicago starting April 20th (testing has already started in Sprint’s backyard of Kansas City), and will spread to more major cities as 2015 rolls on.

[via Sprint]

Here’s what the Oppo R7 will be like when the company unveils it next month

Oppo has a new champion arriving next month, and with as many leaks as we’ve seen going around we’d almost say there’s no reason for them to wait that long. It’s the Oppo R7, and it looks quite impressive.

From everything we’ve heard so far, the Oppo R7 will be one of the thinnest smartphones on the planet, if not outright claiming the title. It’ll do so with a form factor that’s just 4.85mm thin. To top that off the achievement won’t even require Oppo using a protruding camera lens.

One thing we’ve heard that will be a bit of a bummer is that the device’s battery capacity will have to take a hit as a result of its thinness, though Oppo’s VOOC fast charging technology should help alleviate some of the frustrations that come as a result. We’re hearing it’ll take just 5 minutes of charging to get 2 hours of talk time, and that the battery can be charged from 0% to 75% in just half an hour.

Another interesting point about the device’s design is the glass slathered over the front. Oppo will apparently use “2.5D” curved glass to make for a nice premium look, feel and effect. To be quite honest it all makes for a smartphone that looks quite “iPhone-ish,” but Samsung was able to borrow some design elements from Apple’s latest and greatest and they got by just fine.

Enough about the design — what about the specs? Prior rumors have put the Oppo R7’s specs in this rough ballpark:

• 4.7-inch 1080p display


• 20.7-megapixel rear camera


• Octa-core MediaTek processor


• 2000mAh battery

Doesn’t sound too bad on the surface, though we’ll obviously need more than just good numbers and good looks to see if it’ll be worth your attention come next month.

ASUS ZenWatch 2 launch is still on for Q3 2015, says company

It wasn’t long ago we’d heard ASUS was putting the ZenWatch 2 launch off until 2016, but the company says the original comments that spawned the story seem to have been misunderstood. ASUS has confirmed that their originally-planned Q3 launch window was still in effect, according to Focus Taiwan.

We still don’t know what to expect from the smartwatch, though past comments by ASUS suggest they were targeting an insane battery life of up to 7 days (though current tests are coming in at just under 4 hours, which is still quite good for a smartwatch’s standard). We were also told to expect two different sizes to fit different tastes.

We imagine whatever they come up with will have to be as premium as they come, as the trend for wearables seems to be emphasizing fashionable taste as much as practical usability. That said, we’d argue there’s no need to worry as the original ASUS ZenWatch look quite good for a first generation smartwatch.

Google bought a company that develops ways for you to use apps without installing them

Streaming movies. Streaming Music. Heck, even streaming games is a thing now. So why can’t we stream apps? That’s a very interesting question indeed, and it’s one Google has reportedly been thinking about for a while.

Google is said to have quietly bought Agawi late last year, a company that specializes in technology that allows you to stream apps with extremely low latency. “Why stream an app when I can just download it and use it natively,” you may ask.

One use case being offered up is the ability to trial apps instantly and risk-free before buying or downloading them for long term use. This may seem like a trivial use case for most typical apps that come in at just a few megabytes per download, but there are some pretty large apps out there that could benefit from this.

We also imagine the technology could be used as a feature for entry level devices that might not have a ton of internal storage to download many apps. Streaming those apps would allow them to be able to use whatever they want without having to worry about a lack of persistent storage. Agawi also says the technology could be used for streaming games on mobile.

Unfortunately we’re a bit far off from anything we’re slated to see, with Agawi apparently confirming that it’d take them at least a year to implement their wares in whichever ways Google is looking to use it. We’ll wait, though, because we’re sure it’ll be well worth it.

[via The Information]

The CEO of Twitter will be leaving the company in July

Social media sites have become hugely popular thanks in large part to smartphones. One of the first social networks to really take mobile seriously was Twitter. Today the company has announced that CEO Dick Costolo will step down on July 1st. He will be replaced by co-founder Jack Dorsey as the interim CEO.

Our CEO, @dickc, will step down as CEO, and we’ll welcome @jack as Interim CEO on July 1 #TWTRannouncement: http://t.co/q8Ygg91jzc

— Twitter (@twitter) June 11, 2015

Jack Dorsey was the original CEO of Twitter until 2008 when fellow co-founder Evan Williams took over. In 2010 Costolo took over as CEO. In the last five years under Costolo the service has had many design changes and controversial changes. The biggest thing to affect Android users is the change to the Twitter API which has killed many awesome 3rd-party apps. Twitter is everywhere and it should continue to grow under Dorsey.

OnePlus 2 price confirmed to be more than $322, company pissed off because people are skeptical

Yesterday it was revealed that the OnePlus 2 would use a new version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 chipset. It’s “v2.1″ and they’ve gone through some revisions to make sure the chipset has no overheating issues.

And everyone proceeded to call them liars. And now they’re mad. No, really, they are actually mad. They maintain that the Snapdragon 810 is a great chipset, and that there won’t be any performance sacrifices made in order to keep the heat down.

Their claims don’t seem unfounded, with AnandTech’s analysis showing that this version of the Snapdragon 810 actually has a 33% advantage in memory bandwidth and a slight increase in clock speed for its GPU.

The biggest reason they’re pissed off is because they feel they really didn’t push the limit in going with the Snapdragon 810, but that would be a very narrow way to look at it. For starters, the Snapdragon 810 is still a top-line chipset despite some of its early issues.

They also revealed that it costs more than the Snapdragon 801 ever did, noting that their phone will most certainly cost more than 2 as a result. How much higher? They weren’t at liberty to say just yet, but we’re hoping they’ll look to keep their trend of accepting razor-thin profits up, so we won’t be expecting it at much more than 0.

All of that is to say that it’s too early to pass a judgment on a phone we haven’t even seen yet (well, that’s not entirely true — the phone in the image above is an actual OnePlus 2 prototype, but it’s kind of hard to tell) so hold your horses and wait for all the details to come to light.