The Verge interviews – The Verge

Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra says the company wants to be known as a design leader

2016-02-24T16:37:05-05:00

Xiaomi just announced its latest flagship, the Mi 5, and we got a chance to sit down with vice president Hugo Barra following the phone's introduction. Barra is the company's public face, having previously served as one of the leaders on Google's mobile team, and he exudes both the vast ambition of his current employer and the quiet confidence of his former company. The big thing he wanted to get across today was that Xiaomi's attendance at Mobile World Congress is mostly an ambassadorial mission. The company isn't announcing new markets for its products - it's still focused primarily on China and building out its operations in neighboring c …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Get $200 off an Oculus Rift with Dell’s new PC bundles

2016-01-07T23:00:02-05:00

The Oculus Rift's $599 price has been a tough pill to swallow for many, but there's already a way in which you can slice it down to a more reasonable size: buy the Rift with a Dell or Alienware PC. Here at CES, Dell has just announced that it will take $200 off the price of purchasing a Rift VR headset with one of its certified Oculus Ready PCs.

$599 + $1,199 = $1,598

So far, there are only three PC makers approved to carry the Oculus Ready branding - Dell, Alienware, and Asus - and two of them are technically the same company. Dell is capitalizing on that leading position now by opening orders for its Oculus Rift bundles, which are built ar …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nextbit’s Scott Croyle on why the Robin is a new kind of Android smartphone

2016-01-06T19:46:04-05:00

What makes the Robin different? Well, it certainly looks different from the rest of the Android field, with its fresh minty color scheme and regular geometric lines. Designed by Scott Croyle, the former head of HTC's design team, the Robin represents an effort to do things a little differently. It tries to hide its technological capabilities rather than impress people with them. This is a phone that promises to be smart enough to back up disused apps and unloved photos to a cloud storage locker without driving its user insane by making undesired judgments. That's a lot of smarts, but it's all dressed up in a friendly, humane design that invi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Windows 10 and Skylake processors were ‘designed together,’ says Intel’s Kirk Skaugen

2015-09-01T21:01:00-04:00

Intel makes a habit of announcing its new processor generations in gradual steps. A month ago, it introduced the first members of its sixth-gen Core family - better known by the codename Skylake - in the form of the overclocking-ready Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K, a pair of desktop chips primarily aimed at gamers. Today at IFA, the American chipmaker is unfurling the full breadth of its Skylake range, which will span the broadest spectrum of devices in the company's history. Intel will have Skylake processors going from a 4.5W TDP designed for ultra-thin, fanless machines all the way up to 91W for workstation and enthusiast gaming purpose …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nextbit Robin: the design story

2015-09-01T10:01:24-04:00

Phone fans owe a lot to Scott Croyle. In his time as HTC's design chief, Croyle presided over the creation of the critically acclaimed One series of Android smartphones as well as earlier standout devices like the Windows Phone 8X. He helped evolve smartphone design beyond mere utilitarianism, and for that he deserves our appreciation. Croyle departed HTC in April of last year to join a small startup named Nextbit, whose initial focus was on making software rather than hardware. But it wasn't long before Croyle was back to making cool new things for our pockets, and today he returns with his small group of like-minded, experienced phone make …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The future of books is on your phone, not your tablet

2014-11-05T11:00:11-05:00

Subscription book app Oyster has come a long way since launching just over a year ago. The service has more than quadrupled its library of books to 500,000, landed big publishers like Disney, and released apps on several new platforms like the web. This week, the company debuted a new feature called Book Lists that's like GoodReads - except this time, the place to find new books is also the place to read them with one tap.

It seemed like a good time to catch up with Willem Van Lancker, the creative co-founder of Oyster, who also happens to be one of the guys who designed Apple's iconic iOS emoji. If Van Lancker has his way, his legacy will …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Can 1Password save your digital life?

2014-09-26T10:37:02-04:00

This week, a very dangerous vulnerability was discovered in one of Linux's most widely used utilities. The good news is that the good guys discovered it, but the bad news is that it's potentially "worse than Heartbleed" in the wrong hands, according to some experts (and Heartbleed was pretty bad news). It's a terrible situation for almost everyone in the computing industry. One of the few exceptions is AgileBits, the company behind password-management software 1Password.

Each time a massive hack or leak makes news, 1Password sales go up. Each time celebrity nudes get stolen, a few more people realize that their data is not as secure as they …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Slack is killing email

2014-08-12T11:00:25-04:00

It's been four years since Stewart Butterfield last sent an email to a work colleague. His team long ago replaced email with a chat app that plugged in to all their favorite services like Twitter, GitHub, and Dropbox. It worked so well that, when Butterfield's game Glitch went under, his company decided to launch their chat app to the world and reboot their company.

Slack users spend nearly 10 hours in the app every day

In the six months since launch, Slack, as the app's called, has been growing at a breakneck pace. Over 125,000 people use the app every day, among them 13,000 teams at companies as large as eBay, Sony, Yelp, and NBCUniversal. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The visual effects legend behind ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Terminator 2’ on realism, restraint, and adventure

2014-08-08T10:40:24-04:00

For over 25 years, John Bruno has created some of the most memorable visual effects in film, and he's got an Oscar (and a pile of nominations) to prove it. His credits include classics like Heavy Metal, Batman Returns, and Ghostbusters. And his collaborations with longtime friend James Cameron gave us The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies, Titanic, and Avatar. For all of these, Bruno has dictated the style and substance of the surreal and supernatural on our screens.

Most recently, Bruno took a turn in the director's chair to document James Cameron's historic dive to the Challenger Deep at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which lies 36,000 fe …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Point of despair: father of net neutrality Tim Wu talks about tech policy’s worst year

2014-08-04T10:07:20-04:00

Any way you look at it, Tim Wu is an unlikely candidate for public office. The Columbia law school professor who coined the term "net neutrality" is a public intellectual better known for his academic work than his political activism. But he entered New York's Democratic primary when Zephyr Teachout, a fellow law professor and activist, asked him to be her running mate in a long-shot challenge to incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo. The current lieutenant governor, Robert Duffy, is not seeking reelection, so Wu faces Cuomo's chosen successor, former Congresswoman Kathy Hochul.

Internet activists have long supported Wu's writing; now he's asking …

Read the full story at The Verge.