What are you up to these days? What's keeping you busy?

I do two things. The thing I do that I have the most fun with is I'm automating my house, but that's not the work part.

Do you have a Nest?

I had my new system put in before that came out, but I do control my thermostat by Wi-Fi. I've got a central computer that actually controls everything. It knows when sunrise and sunset is, it knows when it's raining, all those kinds of things. You can write programs based upon all those things, but I haven't figured how to do a program that actually learns. That's a great idea, and I bet somebody could do it.

At any rate, I do a lot of speaking. I'm on a couple of government committees, the [NTIA's] commerce spectrum management committee, the FCC's spectrum advisory committee, and I write. So that keeps me occupied.

What phone are you using right now, and why are you using it?

Actually, I'm talking to you on a Droid RAZR. I have a new phone I would guess every six months, although I'm being sorely tested lately because the phones are coming out so fast. I only had a Bionic for one month until they came out with the RAZR. Each time they get a little better, and I think they're pretty much on a par now — if you know how to use them — with the iPhone.

Do you have an eye on what you might upgrade to next?

Well, I haven't done Windows Phone yet. At some point, that's going to be important. But the one thing that I'm hooked on is a big screen. I wouldn't use a phone with less than a 4-inch screen anymore.

You've done a lot of great things — not just at Motorola, of course, but since then you've co-founded companies. GreatCall is doing well. What are you most proud of?

That's a really hard question you ask, because it depends on what part of your career you're talking about. I think an engineer has not matured until he or she has conceived of a product and participated in every stage of bringing it to fruition, if that makes sense. And not many engineers get to do all of those stages. I actually did that once in my career, this was probably before you were born. We came out with would you believe a 12-channel mobile telephone. I don't know if you know what IMTS is, but that was the predecessor to cellular. It came out in 1963, and we ended up — even though Bell Labs was trying to put other people out of business — we ended up with like 98 percent share of the market. And the whole phone was mine, the mobile radio and everything, but we have a device called the channel element in the phone. Each frequency had its own oscillator, if you could imagine that. Are you a techie?