Five years ago, in , HTC employed 19, people. HTC started as a white label device maker giving carriers an option to sell devices branded with their name. BlackBerry, or Research in Motion as it was called until , ruled this phone segment, but starting around HTC began making inroads thanks to innovated touch devices that ran Windows Mobile 6.
These were stunning devices for the time. They were fast, loaded with big, user swappable batteries and microSD card slots. The Touch Pro even had a front-facing camera for video calls.
HTC overlayed a custom skin onto Windows Mobile making it a bit more palatable for the general user. None was fantastic, but Windows Mobile was by far the most daunting for new users. HTC did the best thing it could do and developed a smart skin that gave the phone a lot of features that would still be considered modern.
Globally its share of the smartphone market has gone from So what happened? Current and former HTC employees paint a picture of tough business decisions in a challenging market, combined with misjudged innovations, and a difficult corporate culture. The products were good. But the second half of that quote tells part of the story of the company's downfall. Several HTC insiders said that the company may have misjudged its pricing strategy.
It took second place to Vodafone on the front and "with Google" on the back, but this is where HTC's identity as a power in Android really started. It offered a 3. Many of its rival devices weren't smartphones and those that were mostly offered physical keyboards. It was a raw Android experience, a slightly bumpy introduction to a full touch world for the Google OS. Sense introduced things like customisation and personality, adding polish to Android that was missing from an OS that still felt rough and experimental.
With the calendar rolling forward to , Google made a significant move: it launched the Nexus programme. The Nexus One was built by HTC and it saw Google creating a handset to run on stock Android where all other manufacturers were skinning its operating system.
The trackball was lifted from the Hero and the design shows hallmarks of HTC phones that followed, particularly the metal band reaching around the rear, reflected later in the Sensation. The Nexus One launched on Android 2. There was a 5-megapixel camera and it came with a microSD card slot. Something of a hot potato, but important both for HTC and Android. This swapped the trackball for an optical system instead, leading to a sleeker phone.
It was launched alongside the HTC Legend and next in our gallery , but there was already a hint that HTC was launching too many phones. Arriving with Android 2. It borrowed from the Nexus One design in some areas, but returned to physical navigation keys underneath the display. The Desire name still survives today as a mid-range category of devices. It was lower powered with a smaller 3. This was the first time that HTC really went to town with metal bodywork.
The results were stunning. The HTC Legend retained an insert in the rear and a removable bottom section, but essentially took the HTC Hero design, slimmed it down and made it a metal unibody. Some saw this as the company trying to design a phone to appeal more to the female market and we're not including the HTC Rhyme on this list , but the Legend made its mark, a mark that still ripples through smartphone handset design today.
The advent of 4G sees two handsets sharing this section of HTC's history. It was close to the Desire HD which launched a few months later globally. Importantly, however, the Evo 4G is credited as being one of the first 4G handsets, sitting on Sprint's WiMax network.
At this time, sticking 4G or LTE on the name was an important factor as next-gen networks pushed faster speeds and the entertainment or business benefits that came with them. But these two devices serve as an illustration of the approach that HTC was taking: it was building smartphones for individual networks, resulting in an explosion of different hardware configurations and ever-expanding software offerings. Meanwhile, HTC was looking for more adjectives to push its handsets and Sensation was the flagship for It was this model that saw the first integration of Beats Audio.
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