Earlier this month, HTC cofounder Cher Wang stepped down from her role as CEO. In her place, former Orange EVP Yves Maitre has taken up the reins for the Taipei-based smartphone maker.
One of Maitre’s first acts as the head of HTC will be to join us at Disrupt in October. The interview — and his new role — comes at a tenuous time for HTC. The company has been harder hit than most by several years of stagnant smartphone sales.
In spite of a $ 1.1 billion deal in 2017 that gave Google access to most of the Taiwanese company’s R&D resources, the following year still saw massive layoffs. All the while, it has looked to emerging technologies like VR and blockchain as a potential way forward in an oversaturated market. In his first public interview, Maitre will discuss how HTC got here and what the company can and will do to help turn the ship around.
Maitre joins an incredible speaker lineup, which includes Steph Curry, Rachel Haurwitz from Caribou Bioscience, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Zoox’s Aicha Evans. Still need tickets? You can pick those up right here.
HTC’s PC-powered VR rig is set to get one of the plusses of cheaper mobile virtual reality systems early next year, after the company announced a wireless add-on that will let users untether the headset from the gaming PC required to power it. 
The HTC Desire 530 is $ 179 unlocked. That’s the main thing you need to know about it. Everything else about the handset is pretty underwhelming at best – and reviewers haven’t exactly been heaping praise on the thing. But it’s $ 179 unlocked and it’s arriving this month in the States. The company debuted the phone at Mobile World Congress back in February, leading… 
In these earliest days of commercial viability, virtual reality is running up against the same wall as so many technologies before it: how does a company translate it for the majority of consumers who won’t be able to demo it in the wild?
HTC is officially struggling once again. The Taiwan-based tech company’s latest financials show its sales dropped a staggering 64 percent over the past year. 