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HTC Losing Ground Faster Than RIM or Nokia
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."
So that means its volume increased by 43%?
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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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
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!
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
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.
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.
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.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Yes, really, by a large margin.
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.
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.
By having many more consumers subject to ubiquitous ads and tracking for their analytics platform...
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.
Sony:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/02/sony-loses-312m-in-last-quarter_n_1731696.html
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
ZTE Warns of Upcoming Losses
Huawai:
They don't report profits AFAIK.
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.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Releasing 11 different models between April 2012 and July 2012 probably has something to do with it aswell: Source. 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.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
for all those urging Nokia to go Android, or lamenting they didn't ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I believe they also dabbled in locked bootloaders which didn't help. While the root/rom enthusiast community is small, they are influential.
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
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.
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).
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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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.