Android Whatever happened to HTC?

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thegoodsamaritan

thegoodsamaritan

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Remember HD2? G1? G2? HTC Nexus? HTC One Series - One X, XL, M7, M8, M9, Butterfly!

They had the finest phones in the market for a long period of time, enthusiasts swearing by them!

And today, you can't find a single person using their devices, or if they are even manufacturing any!
 
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I have had HTC One X, HD2, G1, the Nexus phone with scroll ball, One M7, One X, One S, One XL, Butterfly S among others, and honestly they were all lovely devices.

From that to this extinction is very surprising indeed.
 
I had One XL for about 3 years before jumping to Oneplus One. It was a wonderful phone both hardware and software wise. I wish they come back someday and bring back their Sense 4.5 weather animations. It is easily the most loved phone I have used till date except maybe the S8 (only design wise but crappy software).
 
Started putting itself as on same level as Samsung and price themselves out of competition.

Same thing with LG
 
IMO, they were not prepared for the onslaught of the cheap paper tigers from Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Oppo across Asian and EU markets.

Owned HTC One X back in 2012-13 and a crappy Desire U in 2014.

One X, easily the best android I owned, snappy camera, polycarbonate body, NVidia Tegra chipset, sweet display, and the Sense UI was way ahead of time, particularly widgets, animations, etc. However, bogged down by lack of OS updates (for a premium phone back then) and slowing down of the device after a year. Sadly I lost the device to water damage.

Desire U was a complete U-turn lol. Bought it as a stop-gap arrangement after losing One X as I couldn't get over Sense UI. The device was slow out of the box, I couldn't use it as a secondary device either. Again, no OS updates, performance drops over a year, bad battery saw it being retired early.
 
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Yeah I think their India specific products su**ed hard, no wonder why they never got popular here as they were in US. Nvidia Tegra used to heat up a lot and got no proper support from Nvidia, on that contrary XL got regular updates because of Qualcomm. Guys on XDA had a popular tagline for it 4G > 4 Cores iirc at that time. It was used to show supremacy of XL over X.
 
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They became very difficult to repair after the M7. And they were in huge losses too at the same time. Plus, they didn't have huge marketing budgets like Samsung did. I sold so many M7 and M8 when I was importing and reselling phones. They were my bestsellers along with the huge One MAX as they were nearly 40% cheaper than the Indian price. And yes, the Gunmetal M8 is still one the most beautiful phones I have seen. But I was also enamored and using the LG GFlex and GFlex 2 at that moment, so didn't use the M7 and M8 too much myself. The LGs had much better battery life as well. But the Sense clock and weather widget was a staple for me on almost every phone I owned.
 
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I remember people here on TE hating it's unibody design back then when it was just launched. Many said they only buy phones on the basis of performance alone.

HTC was the best Android OEM of its time and they knew it and got arrogant about it, rest is history.
 
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I think Sony met the same fate as HTC. They had some cool models like Xperia Play and Arc S. Both players kind of ignore the budget and mid-range space which was promptly scooped by Xiaomi and OP.
 
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kalph09 said:
I think Sony met the same fate as HTC. They had some cool models like Xperia Play and Ars S. Both players kind of ignore the budget and mid-range space which was promptly scooped by Xiaomi and OP.
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ya, the Xperia Play was ahead of its time.

Xperia X, S and the others were also lovely.
Sony's pricing was always a factor for poor sales. and their phones overheated like crazy!
rdst_1 said:
They became very difficult to repair after the M7. And they were in huge losses too at the same time. Plus, they didn't have huge marketing budgets like Samsung did. I sold so many M7 and M8 when I was importing and reselling phones. They were my bestsellers along with the huge One MAX as they were nearly 40% cheaper than the Indian price. And yes, the Gunmetal M8 is still one the most beautiful phones I have seen. But I was also enamored and using the LG GFlex and GFlex 2 at that moment, so didn't use the M7 and M8 too much myself. The LGs had much better battery life as well. But the Sense clock and weather widget was a staple for me on almost every phone I owned.
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M7 was a lovely device! One of my favourite..

One X - the design and style was beautiful, I bought a number of them - imported in the 12k range at that time.

The desire series was a failure indeed, and they failed at 2 major and crucial factors - premium device that was better than the best of Samsung or Apple, and midrange device that was better than the cheaper competition. Theirs was neither, and thus a market share that was too low, devices that were too similar to earlier models, and not much in terms of appeal.
 
thegoodsamaritan said:
ya, the Xperia Play was ahead of its time.

Xperia X, S and the others were also lovely.
Sony's pricing was always a factor for poor sales. and their phones overheated like crazy!
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Sony was always coasting.
They used to charge a huge premium and market screen quality as the strength of their Xperia devices, saying "we make the best TV screens, and now we brought that tech to phones as well".
In reality their screens were markedly inferior compared to what Samsung and others were offering...
 
HTC was an OEM for many US carriers, they made awesome windows phones back in 2006 for O2 like XDA Atom. They was way ahead of their time, it's only after Android came they formed a separate company with their own name.
 
Google bought HTC's mobile devision along with it's employees (around 1000 iirc) so the ones making the pixels are essentialy the same core team as old HTC
 
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Yes they are back to their OEM business again, only difference is that they now have only 1 customer which is Google.
 
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