HTC Losing Ground Faster Than RIM or Nokia 280
zacharye writes "How bad is HTC's current tailspin? So bad it makes Nokia look like a growth company. HTC's handset volume declined by -43% in the autumn quarter vs. Nokia's -23% volume decline. This is very interesting because HTC is using Android, the world's most popular smartphone OS, that is powering 40% annualized growth among its vendors. Nokia is limping along with an unholy mix of the obsolete Symbian platform, the moribund S40 feature phone platform and a niche OS called Windows Phone."
HTC's handset volume declined by -43% (Score:4, Insightful)
So that means its volume increased by 43%?
European-style negative percentages (Score:5, Insightful)
For some reason in Europe, you tend to see a lot of stores advertising "-50% off!" sales and such.
Apparently double negative percentages have the opposite meaning in parts of the world.
Re:European-style negative percentages (Score:5, Informative)
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You must be young here. No need for a history lesson, I was born before the Internet. Checks still exist. Part of writing a check is writing the amount. The value goes in two different places -- once numerically and the other spelled out on the line. At the end of the spelled out amount you write a line to the end of that area, pretty much like you were saying about the ancient accountants of old and for the exact same reasons.
Now, get off my patch of cracked and scored dry earth.
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For some reason in Europe, you tend to see a lot of stores advertising "-50% off!" sales and such.
No, you get either "–50%" or "50% off". I've never seen both — but perhaps a particularly illiterate or innumerate trader might do it.
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I know in the Spanish world, you can add as many negatives as you want to a sentence, and it always results in a negative. I imagine this to be the same for other romantic languages (e.g. French, Portugese, Romanian, Italian) though I've never studied them in detail. It is worth pointing out though, that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world.
Then again, English is Germanic in origin, with a lot of French and some Latin added. German shares a lot of traits with Scandinavian languages and su
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This is why playing the percentages game is stupid.
HTC's volume: 7 million units during the quarter
Nokia's volume: 6.3 million units during the last quarter.
So HTC is "losing ground faster" but they're still selling more phones.
Why is this actually an article anywhere, nevermind here on slash-- oh, wait. BGR - I understand now. Weekly World News of the tech world.
The iPhone effect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, so HTC took a 43% hit on total units shipped in the Autumn quarter...the same quarter that the iPhone 5 came out. How heavy a hit did they have in Summer and Spring? It's happened before that when a new iPhone comes out, that's pretty much all anyone buys for a short while. Nokia's decline, on the other hand, has been going on consistently for some years now. A 23% drop for them means, what...that they delivered 23 less phones than the previous quarter?
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Don't forget Meego (Score:4, Insightful)
Nokia is still limping along with Meego remnants, (and did that team kick-ass to deliver the N9 on-time, just before they were fired). There must still be some semblance of a paper trail left! Do not forget Meego! (the other OS).
Godspeed Jolla!
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No, it wasted time and effort spinning its wheels going nowhere. Sometimes going backwards. Sometimes taking out water hydrants as they span out of control. Some real examples have been talked about on the forums (beware, almost everyone doesn't have a clue what they're talking about), but alas Nokia's still around to sue if I breach my NDA.
But thanks for calling us kick-ass, it's nice to see people happy with what I devot
Keyboard (Score:5, Informative)
I stopped paying attention to HTC the day they declared they wouldn't make any more phones with keyboards. That was what they had over Samsung and Motorolla. Now they are just make the same kind of phones with lesser build quality.
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They had some great keyboards, too. The Touch Pro 2 (from the days of WinMo) had one of the best keyboards I'd even seen on a smartphone, if not *the* best. They produced a Windows Phone 7 model on the same basic chassis, and I think an Android phone too, but those were both some time back.
HTC made great qwerty phones. (Score:5, Insightful)
That could and should have been *their thing*. If they are just making the same type of phone as everyone else, may as well buy a Samsung.
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Exactly. I don't want a touch phone, I want a slider keyboard phone. HTC made great ones and now I can't find any.
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Exactly. I don't want a touch phone, I want a slider keyboard phone. HTC made great ones and now I can't find any.
I just picked up a refurbished Droid 3 from eBay for $199. Decent.
Good? (Score:2)
New players enter the market, change the landscape, the old players adapt or die. Isn't this how it's supposed to work?
That reminds me, the ol' HTC Touch Pro is due for retirement soon...
HTC underestimated geeks. (Score:5, Insightful)
HTC seriously underestimated the power of their Android enthusiasts. They went the direction of Moto and started locking everything down. Every Android enthusiast before that point went around telling _everyone else_ to get an HTC. Once they screwed that vocal minority, everyone started pushing Samsung. Samsung doesn't cryptographically sign their bootloaders, meaning they can be unlocked without some big-brother style registration. This means Android enthusiasts push Samsung now.
Never underestimate the power of an enthusiastic geek.
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Alternative model of causality: Samsung advertises several times as much as HTC.
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What would you do if you were a non-techie, you ask the one computer guy you know which phone to get, and he tells you HTC, hands down? Versus seeing a TV commerical with a spiffy-looking unknown phone?
Word-of-mouth advertising is the best advertising. Plus, it's free.
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You do realise you can just go to HTCDEV.com and unlock bootloader with the code they give you?
Unless you're 'murican and speaking about the Verizon BL locked HTC OneXL in which case you do know thats Verizon's fault not HTC's?
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sorry I mean AT&T (I think! apologies in advance)
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You do realise you can just go to HTCDEV.com and unlock bootloader with the code they give you?
Sorry. No go. I will never buy hardware that requires me to get permission from someone before I install my own software on it. Let me tell you a little story about websites: They're transient.
It doesn't pass the Zombie test, then I don't buy it: If you find a crate of something and can't use it for survival for any reason, including DRM, then it's not worth anything at all and should never be manufactured in the first place.
Awesome! Smart Phones! I can get root, create a mesh network via tether
Pricing Power (Score:2)
A lot of business writing is poor, but Michael Porter is the exception to the rule – and I think his 5 force analysis comes into play here.
Basically, HTC is in a highly completive market with low barriers to entry. It’s hard to make their phone unique – anybody can use Android – so basically they are in a commodity market where they have to compete on price. (and by price I mean value. Honda and Toyota thrived for years offering basic, commodity cars. Nothing exciting but they did gi
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That's all good and whatnot, apart from the fact that HTC also makes Windows phones... And so does Samsung, LG and Nokia... So that argument gets blown out of the water as well...
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Fredprado: The number of items that HTC can differentiate itself is small, and those points are basically hardware.
For example, Sliding Keyboards. People loved their BlackBerry because it had an excellent physical keyboard – but it’s not much of a moat. Anybody could do sliding keyboards. Heck, Apple could do sliding keyboards if they wanted to.
I am going to argue that the OS is different. Anybody can use Android – there is no moat. I understand Microsoft is a bit picker. iOS, of course, i
The problem with using a commodity OS... (Score:2)
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The problem with using a commodity OS is that you do not get much, if any, slack when you start doing stupid things. HTC's stupid things were locking bootloaders, getting rid of replaceable batteries, and getting rid of microSD slots.
This resulted in everyone knowledgeable, who previously recommended HTC devices to everyone, dropping them like a bad habit and instead recommending Samsung.
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The problem with using a commodity OS is that you do not get much, if any, slack when you start doing stupid things. HTC's stupid things were locking bootloaders, getting rid of replaceable batteries, and getting rid of microSD slots.
This resulted in everyone knowledgeable, who previously recommended HTC devices to everyone, dropping them like a bad habit and instead recommending Samsung.
Among geeks perhaps, but the vast majority of market doesn't care much about that stuff if at all. They'd rather replace their phone every few years than worry about the battery and they have no concept of what a bootloader is.
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Not every Cousin Nerd is truly knowledgeable on these things. He's just a little bit more savvy than Joe Sixpack because he's younger and follows trends better and is a l33t hax0r because he cleverly found a way to hack the firmware of the his phone by downloading an program off the Internet.
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yes.. you actually have to compete on quality and features instead of artificial lock in.
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yes.. you actually have to compete on quality and features instead of artificial lock in.
What lock in? I know lots of people that have gone back and forth between an iPhone and various Android phones.
All I'm saying is that it's a lot harder to compete on features when you've tied yourself to the same OS that most of the rest of the market is using.
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You're limited as to what you can do on the hardware side by an OS you don't control.
WTF are you even talking about? The MFGs control the OS -- It's open sourced and even re-skinned quite frequently. Hell, you could create a whole new chipset and instruction besides x86 or ARM -- Completely change the hardware, and still put Android on it. That's why C compilers exist. Apple has the same luxury...
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You're limited as to what you can do on the hardware side by an OS you don't control.
WTF are you even talking about? The MFGs control the OS -- It's open sourced and even re-skinned quite frequently. Hell, you could create a whole new chipset and instruction besides x86 or ARM -- Completely change the hardware, and still put Android on it. That's why C compilers exist. Apple has the same luxury...
The MFGs control the OS? Really? So they can change whatever they want? Even the kernel? What if they don't want to release the source?
What happens if HTC makes significant tweaks to the OS to accommodate some fancy new feature (not just a new processor) like a foldable display? Then Google releases "Grape Yogurt" or whatever they want to call the latest and greatest version of Android which features an updated kernel. Are the HTC users just going to be able to upgrade and still have the display work? D
Okay...so what's the bottom line? (Score:2)
Losing volume is bad and all, but what effect is this actually having on their profits? When the numbers were reported last quarter, it was estimated that Apple was bringing in 77% of smartphone profits, Samsung had 22%, HTC had 1%, and the rest were in the red with a net loss. If HTC is still profitable then they may very well still be in a better position than some of their competitors who have been losing money hand over fist despite (and in some cases because of) shipping more units.
Note: I'm not defend
Just one point. (Score:2)
Fast + Carriers (Score:2)
What is killing HTC is that:
1) They did not get their flagship devices out fast enough.
2) Their high-end devices are not on enough USA carriers.
3) They didn't advertise enough.
They make really good phones both in the past and present. Samsung is just railroading them by getting their high end model on almost all the carriers and then absolutely blanketing the market with effective advertising.
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4) Churning out too many phones (they've released over 12 models/variants so far this year).
5) Not supporting existing phones with updates
6) Beats audio (they spent $300 million buying Beats by Dre, what a massive failure).
7) Locking down their phones
8) Non-removable battery and no sd cards
9) Focusing on thinness instead battery life
The original HTC Evo was nice, and the new One X looks nice, but they made too many variants. They also don't properly support any of them with updates.
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Response to your numbers
4) It is odd that they stated they were going to release less models, which sounded great, and then didn't quite follow that rule.
5) They support their high-end devices very well. No vendor does well with mid/low end phones, period.
6) Beats is a total waste of time, agreed.
7) HTC phones are not locked down more than any other non-Nexus phones.
8) The battery *is* removable, it takes 5 min on the Evo LTE to swap the battery. Sorry again, the Evo LTE has an SD card. But the new Nexus
bummer (Score:2)
Carrier and handset switch ... (Score:2)
Good (Score:5, Informative)
It serves HTC right. Hopefully they OneX taught them a lesson, and next year's models will have batteries that end users can swap/upgrade, microSD sockets, and real two-stage camera buttons.
Seriously. Name one single thing that makes the HTC OneX a better phone than the Galaxy S3. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. If HTC had given it a two-stage camera button, or even any dedicated camera shutter button AT ALL, at least some people would have been left wringing their hands and agonizing between it and the S3. They didn't, so that's one opportunity to differentiate themselves for roughly 17 cents that HTC squandered.
The OneX has a sealed battery. Right there, they've instantly written off anyone who won't buy a phone that can't be used with a 2800mAH+ battery, and anybody who expects to be able to swap batteries at will. The Galaxy S3 allows you to do both. The OneX allows you to do neither. Strike two.
The OneX doesn't have a microSD card. The Galaxy S3 does. Once again, for the price of something that costs about 12 cents in HTC quantities, they blew it with a large segment of the Android market who won't even give a phone that lacks microSD expansion capabilities a second look.
Let's not forget HTC's nasty habit of releasing monolithic kernels that can't be built from source because the proprietary bits were just ripped out before they shat the source onto the curb and said "here it is". Samsung cleanly separates out their proprietary kernel code as proper loadable kernel modules, just like god and Linus intended. However, I'll only count this as a half-strike against HTC, because historically, they DO at least tend to release new kernels in half the time (or less) that it takes Samsung to release new loadable kernel modules for new kernels. This is a prime example of an area where HTC could spank Samsung... if they were to commit to separating out all of their proprietary bits as proper loadable kernel modules and released automated builds more or less immediately upon getting their hands on Google's new source (and in a "rapidly timely manner" if changes had to be made to fix problems with the automated builds), they'd have a HUGE competitive advantage over Samsung in this regard. They could just release them as unsupported early-access betas, and treat the users at XDA like a vast unpaid QA program.
It's not like HTC is uncreative. The Evo 3D had a very cool & compelling feature. It might not have been all that useful in daily life, but it was definitely a cool feature to have. I know lots of people who didn't really USE it, but I know of very few who genuinely wished their phone didn't have that feature at all. Most of the complaints about it were due to some of the hardware design compromises that were made to keep the cost down by limiting the resolution and bitrate at which you could capture in stereo.
Anyway, the point is that HTC decided to rest on its laurels and release a phone that doesn't suck, but doesn't really do anything BETTER than the Galaxy S3 does. It's basically the same price, targets the same market, and offers nothing to let its owners stand in front of a group of S3 owners and proudly say, "My phone does ______ better than yours does." In the Apple universe, annual incremental upgrades are doled out as the norm, and users applaud politely & line up to buy this year's refinement. In the Android universe, you have to either knock people's socks off and delight buyers every single year, or be content to sell phones that are basically 'free' no-name commodities.
Lest anybody accuse me of being a Samsung fanboy, I'll be the first to say that I *want* HTC to make phones that beat the crap out of Samsung's, because then Samsung will turn around and try harder to make phones that beat the crap out of HTC's. Then I want Google to use Motorola as its bully pulpit to pull the rug out from under both, and raise the hardware stakes even higher with phones that have unlocked bootloaders & make Samsung's and HTC's flagship models look like antiques, the same way the Nexus One did to the phones that came before it.
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Seriously. Name one single thing that makes the HTC OneX a better phone than the Galaxy S3. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.
The Camera. Being able to record 1080p video and take 8M photos is huge if you have a kid. Trust me, you want nice photos you can blow up or view full screen but you also want to record incase they do something cute? Now you can do both. Single biggest reason I can not move to another phone. My wife has the XL with 4g, and I'll admit that is probably a better buy than my One X since I don't seem to get as much benefit from the quad core chip but it is a pleasure to dev for too. Other "better" things start
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Seriously. Name one single thing that makes the HTC OneX a better phone than the Galaxy S3.
The screen. amoled screens suffer from colour shift, burn in and a lesser overall life. The htc one x has an IPS screen that gives far better colour reproduction.
Build quality, the thing feels far sturdier than an s3.
My last 4 phones had been HTC (Score:2)
From the Windows Mobile, generic brand days of the HTC Universal (T-Mobile MDA Pro), HTC Advantage (T-Mobile Ameo - 5 inch touch-screen device with a built-in 1.8 inch hard-drive), HTC Touch Dual, and then I moved to Android with them - onto the HTC Desire HD.
All have been great phones in their way (Except the Ameo, which was a lousy phone, but an awesome smartphone in a pre-smartphone world) - and I loved my first step into Android with the Desire HD - a proper flag-ship phone for them, at the time of laun
Cautionnary tale (Score:4, Insightful)
for all those urging Nokia to go Android, or lamenting they didn't ?
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for all those urging Nokia to go Android, or lamenting they didn't ?
People say that Nokia should have gone Android because its the Winner OS as opposed to Windows Phone the Loser OS. Even Apple has losing Marketshare to Android 23% to 8%
Maybe Samsung should be a regretful tail to Nokia of what they could have been.
Personally I say no reason why Nokia should have gone exclusive to windows phone not even HTC made that mistake which is why they are still profitable.
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for also LG, Huawai, ZTE, Sony, and many others. The only one i know that doesn't make any money for anyone is Windows Phone
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:4, Informative)
Sony:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/02/sony-loses-312m-in-last-quarter_n_1731696.html [huffingtonpost.co.uk]
Sony Loses $312m In Last Quarter On Weak Gaming And Mobile Sales
ZTE:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/10/15/zte-warns-of-upcoming-quarterly-and-9m-loss.aspx [fool.com]
ZTE Warns of Upcoming Losses
Huawai:
They don't report profits AFAIK.
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Informative)
It's also interesting to note that this guy implies that HTC is only an Android platform, when in fact, if you just take look at HTCs' actual home page [htc.com].
What comes front and center of that main page is their failed HTC Windows phones and their failed 'Beats Audio' music platform, with their Android phones being relegated to the right-side menu, and completely stripped out of all Android branding, or markings (as if it had been purposefully done that way).
So if you ask me, what's dragging down HTC is not the fact that they've stopped having replaceable battery covers, and stopped having sdcard slots, in one of their lines, it's more the fact that they've repeatedly launched and relaunched Windows Phones and 'Beats Audio' -- wasting all their efforts and money on these ventures, when in fact, they should just have focused on promoting their Android offerings with one or two focused messages (that people actually cared about).
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Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:4, Informative)
By having many more consumers subject to ubiquitous ads and tracking for their analytics platform...
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According to this [guardian.co.uk] article, Google only generated $500 million in revenue from 2008-2011. Granted, things may (probably) have sped up since then, but I think what Android really does for Google is that it locks people into the Google ecosystem--that is, the earnings are more indirect than direct.
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HTC is losing more ground than Nokia or RIM simply because of bad designs.
I have to disagree with you there. My oldish HTC Desire is a marvel of sturdiness and build quality. I also had a Samsung Galaxy S for a while, it's a good phone, but it felt like a cheap, creaking toy compared to the Desire. My next phone will surely be an HTC (probably a One S).
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Insightful)
They were doing fine selling Android last year.
Then they got the brilliant idea that people don't want replaceable batteries or expandable storage and created the One line around that.
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Yeah, just occasionally, products do poorly because they're not the best products.
Crazy, I know! ;)
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Interesting)
While shopping for a new phone during the summer nearly every store tried to talk me out of HTC
I had researched extensively and found the HTC One V had the best camera on the market for a phone under $200 (with no contract), and was small in size (contrary to the current trend I prefer small phones) and had Android 4 out of the box.
I walked out of one store because the pushed samsung so hard, and out of another store since they no longer carried HTC. Only at the third store did I find the phone.
Incidentally this phone's camera is amazing if you're a photographer and like to tinker. It gives you true autofocus. Exposure control to plus or minus two stops, and a mode that brackets exposure (-1, 0, +1) and puts the three images together to give high contrast scenes beautifully smooth detail.
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I seriously considered the One X, but the lack of removable battery and storage put me off and i got the Galaxy S3 instead. It's a shame, because i'm sure the One X is a better phone in many ways.
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I seriously considered the One X, but the lack of removable battery and storage put me off and i got the Galaxy S3 instead. It's a shame, because i'm sure the One X is a better phone in many ways.
I went through exactly the same thought processes, and came to the same conclusion. The HTC One X with 32GB was about the same price as the Samsung Galaxy S3 with 16GB (the small price difference was not an issue). The HTC was rated as having a display at least as good as the Galaxy, but the HTC Sense interface was a minor put-off. The killer in my decision making was that the HTC has no SDHC card slot and is lumbered with an unreplaceable battery, while the Samsung has both SDHC and a replaceable battery. I bought the Samsung and a 32GB card, which together cost more than the HTC.
The other dumb thing HTC did was discontinue phones with keyboards. My daughter has a Desire Z, and probably won't replace it for a long time because there is nothing on the market to compete with it. If any phone were available with a good display and a keyboard, I'd probably have bought one, even if its price were higher than the Galaxy S3.
If anyone from HTC is reading this, they have a few things to take home and beat into whatever remains from their marketing department: (i) expandable storage is life or death for a phone, (ii) a replaceable battery is very very attractive, (iii) physical keyboards get customer loyalty.
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I went through the same evaluation and looked at the fact that i had never even once swapped batteries in any phone I've ever owned.
I found a $50 external battery pack that can recharge the phone four times on a single 5 hour recharge. Then i found the phone gets 18 hours of run time on a single charge, so the number of times I would actually need the battery pack were vanishingly small.
So I dismissed all the swappable battery posers, bought the HTC One X, and it is the best phone I've ever seen.
Battery swapping is seldom necessary, and when you do need more power an external battery pack make way more sense. It has a lot of other uses.
HTC is on lean times because it doesn't have the marketing clout of Samsung. Not because their phones are inferior.
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:4, Interesting)
In my opinion, HTC has dramatically fallen out of favor among the enthusiast community due to heavy lockdown and closed source drivers. This is in fact the reason I have sworn off ever buying another HTC phone again. That might be spilling over to the regular consumers.
In my case it has, because I've recommended to everybody that I have talked to android about to stay away from HTC.
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In my opinion, HTC has dramatically fallen out of favor among the enthusiast community due to heavy lockdown and closed source drivers. This is in fact the reason I have sworn off ever buying another HTC phone again. That might be spilling over to the regular consumers.
In my case it has, because I've recommended to everybody that I have talked to android about to stay away from HTC.
But you are talking about one one hundredth of one percent of the Android user base.
In relative terms, that issue matters to nobody. The vast majority of android users never give that a second thought.
Further, you place the blame on the wrong party. Blame the carriers.
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Informative)
You've never swapped a battery in phones so you made the decision that felt right to you. Most people seem to prefer being able to swap batteries out so HTC made a decision that was bad for them and HTC. I happen to love linux but if Dell was to decide tomorrow to stop shipping windows and put linux on all their computers I think Dell would tank quickly. Just because I love linux doesn't mean squat to 98+% of the people out there.
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Uhh, I've had to replace batteries in multiple phones. For the amount of travel I do, I often have to charge when the power is getting too low and I don't get the recharge cycle life out of the lithium cells. For my HTC EVO (Replaced earlier this year with a Galaxy S3) Two extended life batteries in two years, so one year per battery.
If I were to get the HTC One X I'd be replacing the whole phone every year and that just doesn't make any sense unless I like Apple Products.
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(i) expandable storage is life or death for a phone, (ii) a replaceable battery is very very attractive,
There's some caveats here. The iPhone has never had these features, and it's always sold like hotcakes. Obviously, HTC looked at Apple, did a "monkey see monkey do", and decided they could reduce costs on this phone by copying Apple. What they failed to realize is that Apple's market is very different from their own, and that Android shoppers, unlike most Apple ones, actually care about these features.
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I've seen lots of reviews of the One X and One V, and while many have praised the cameras, the photos they've shown off have all had serious issues with over-saturated colours. Granted, over-saturated colours is what the iPhone 4 got all its praise for: it's eye-catching, even though distorted. My colleague bought a One X for the camera, and is very unhappy with it. Samsung's cameras are far superior.
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I can't say one way or the other about the cameras. I've never bought a phone for a camera or a camera for a phone. I can see that many people, maybe even most, use their phone as their camera but I really haven't seen any phone that takes pictures as good as a good camera.
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Are you serious? Everywhere I went they were pushing the HTC One. I kept having to tell them no SD card was a deal killer for me. If I wanted a phone with no replaceable battery and no SD card slot I'd buy an iPhone. I finally found someone that still had the Samsung I wanted. Strangely everyone had plenty of HTC Ones.
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(contrary to the current trend I prefer small phones)
Interesting that you mention that. I had completely failed to notice, but after years of smaller and smaller phones, the trend for at least smartphones is now larger and larger.
Incidentally, if you already knew which phone you wanted, wouldn't you have been better off buying it online instead of in a store?
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Informative)
Releasing 11 different models between April 2012 and July 2012 probably has something to do with it aswell: Source [wikipedia.org]. That's what really killed HTC, releasing too many phones and not supporting any of them.
Two of my friends bought HTC phones a year ago, one bought the original HTC Evo, the other bought an HTC Evo 3D. Now both of them say they'll never purchase another HTC phone again. I was lucky, I almost bought the original HTC Evo when it came out but I ended up waiting and getting a Nexus S instead. Now I'm running official Jelly Bean while my buddies are forced to use custom firmware to get updates.
HTC did this to themselves.
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No upgrades after about 9 months was my problem too but I stuck with it on Android 2.3.. but most of that was caused by the lack of memory that came with the EVO. I still like HTC Sense and the weather widget, especially the wiper arms that would come across the home screen when it was raining or snowing. That kind of humor you just don't get on a Windows Mobile device. Too bad they don't have it as something you can buy on Google Play.
Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe they also dabbled in locked bootloaders which didn't help. While the root/rom enthusiast community is small, they are influential.
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I've seen this a lot. Guys that are enthusiasts have a lot of influence. I came late to the smartphone market but a friend of mine sold a lot of iPhones for Apple by showing off what his could do. It didn't help that he had owned the original droid and ditched it for the iPhone the minute Verizon started selling it. When a guy that's obviously very knowledgeable starts telling his friends how much better he likes the iPhone than the Droids it is better than any TV ad.
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it's interesting because just some 6 months ago people were having htc as a poster child of why embracing winphone is good for nokia. no failure possible there, just look at htc !
meego was nokia's winning ticket. they traded it for another dose of "free" drugs.
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HTC is basically an example of why Windows phone might be good for nokia. If Nokia can't compete with samsung on android they need to do so elsewhere.
Nokia's problem was that they really didn't have compelling software for the future. That was clearly iOS, Android or Windows phone (and probably not all 3, and probably not anything else). They can't do iOS. So that left 'just another android maker' which, while certainly possible, didn't seem like a great strategy - and it hasn't worked well for HTC, or
Broken Window? (Score:2)
Android is not making money
You know, this is an interesting inversion of the Broken Window fallacy.
In the former, you destroy real value to make imaginary dollars move around. In this case, we have real value being created each time someone finds the software to be useful, even though most players don't earn more than a sliver of profit.
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Samsung didn't kill HTC, HTC killed themselves.
When HTC came out with the original Evo they had arguable the best phone on the market. That success was short lived though. They started churning out dozens of phones and they didn't support any of them with updates. They burned their own customers and people turned elsewhere (mainly Samsung).
If they were smart they would've released 1-2 phones a year at most. The Evo was a decent phone, they could've made that their flagship with yearly updates. The new One X
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Why's that? so that way there are 100 million starving children 10 years from now instead of 20 million? Your entire argument is a fallacy.
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That and dont they have locked bootloaders?
Yes, though there's an official method available to unlock it for most devices.
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You can unlock all HTC bootloaders - officially, there is a website by HTC dedicated to this.
Not so bad (Score:2)
I love my HTC One. For many years now, when my cell phone battery goes bad I cannot find one from qualified sources, and the made-in-China crap available on eBay doesn't last a month. Besides, the phone tech is soo outdated I want a new phone, and my provider's plan "forces" the upgrade to be almost free. As in beer, anyway. The One has more memory than I'll ever use, and I have it automatically uploading to Google and DropBox so if I have to delete photos I already have them saved in multiple places.
One re
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Htc one x could of been a contender to the galaxy s3 if they didn't go full retard on design and put a non removable battery and no expandable memory on their flagship phone.
I don't care for either, but opted for the better screen, camera and a thinner but way stronger case at a lower price. HTC is simply outmarketeered.
Re:Android is the most popular mobile OS? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, really, by a large margin. [theverge.com]
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Really? Last numbers I saw put the iPhone ahead of Android.
Was that in 2008?
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Not to mention there are lots of (relatively) low-end Android phones - a space Apple refuses to compete in. You can now get non-subsidized Android phones for under $100.
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The iPhone 4 is still for sale, and it's low-end compared to most Android phones at a comparable price.
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Do you not understand what non-subsidized means?
You just compared an Android sub-$100 phone to an iPhone for $2475 ($99 + $2376 contract)....
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I argued with them for like 5 hours over several phone conversations. (All of which I recorded).
You need a life, a job and a girlfriend (in more or less that order).
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