I've had four phones manufactured by HTC: Google dev phone, G1, Nexus One, and a Sensation 4G.
The first three were wonderful phones. Absolutely loved them. The Sensation just frustrates me. Sense makes no sense to me; it's obviously inferior to stock Android, and leads to inconsistencies and long waits before OS updates. T-Mobile has packed it full of their shovelware, which cannot be uninstalled, and was not present on the prior three phones (I guess Google provided the OS image on those).
The Sensation has horrible battery life. If I use it heavily, it doesn't even last a whole work day. It also feels flimsier...I haven't had any issues with it, but I've also managed to avoid dropping it very often or very far, so it hasn't been tested.
I won't be buying another HTC device, and I won't be buying another device that has a custom Android image or is loaded with crapware. I had no idea the average Android experience was so poor; I thought all Android phones were as awesome as the Google-branded devices. I'm very frustrated that I paid $500 for a phone that is so disappointing (I paid full price, as I'll also never sign another two year contract), so I'm not too disappointed that HTC is taking a beating.
Maybe they'll stop wasting money on Sense, which is garbage, and instead focus on making phones as good as the G1 and Nexus One again. If they do, I might consider another HTC in a couple of years. If not, Samsung will get my next purchase (a friend's got a recent high end Motorola that's even worse than my HTC).
BTW The G2 was also an HTC phone, but without sense and only a tiny amount of carrierware. It too is a good HTC device.
My followup phone has been the GSM Galaxy Nexus which is pure Google, especially in the sense that updates come from Google and not Samsung or my carrier.
I think HTC is failing more because they've failed to understand what consumers want. The HTC One X was an incredible phone but they went with a non-removable battery that significantly held it back compared to the Galaxy S3. The locked bootloader on the ATT One X was just too bad. And for all their touting of the camera, the Galaxy S3 has the better one. The silly decision to implement aggressive process killing was just stupid. And for some people, no sdcard option didn't cut it.
And no these aren't just features geeks would want, even if they are, geeks influence buying decisions of a lot of people. So they're definitely important. Especially at a time when HTC wants to build up a strong brand with their One series. And for all their trumpeting that they would release only flagship devices, they keep releasing phones all the time. And they fail to release their devices with a consistent branding across all american carriers, or at the same time.
HTC Sense adds no features (like e.g. a notification power control widget like samsung's touchwiz has.) It's just too bloated.
Plus it's just be the fact that the mobile industry is incredibly competitive right now. I don't imagine HTC will have any better luck with WP7/8.
"And no these aren't just features geeks would want"
Yes they are. By and large no one cares about removable battery, locked bootloader, non-aggressive process killing or SD card option. You know how we know this? Because the iphone doesn't have any of that. The things these phones have that the iphone doesn't that non-Geek consumers care about are LTE, the big beautiful screen and perhaps the price.
The reasons the One isn't selling like the Galaxy S3 are pretty clear:
(1) bigger screen
(2) better battery
(3) walk into a Verizon store and see which phone get's shoved into your face.
The apple comparison can't really be made on the android side because the apple brand is a very strong one. iPhones can sell based on brand alone whereas HTC can't really rely on that.
I think for the first in a series like the HTC One to really take off, it has to appeal to the early adopters and those are the geeks surely. And then if they like it, they'll recommend it to their friends. If you build up some diehard fans, surely it will be better to iterate ensuring the relative success of a HTC One X successor.
I think the whole notion of customers weighing specs carefully and choosing one high end Android phone over the other is overblown. If the salesman really wants to sell you the EVO you'll probably end up with the EVO.
Of course some people do come in with their heart set on something they or a friend had so I'm sure the brand thing you're talking about is real. I don't think it's the reason for the magnitude of what's being claimed for it here. Intending to buy a Samsung phone only works if the store is selling Samsung phones and we saw a nice version of this math play out while the iphone was only on AT&T and at 17% US market share. It's a tribute to Samsung's marketing staff that pretty much every store has a bunch of Samsung phones at all price points in it.
In another post here I demonstrate even if demand were even for the two of them the absence of the HTC One at Verizon would result in a huge sales disparity.
There's an oft cited idea that I don't entirely agree with but seems useful here: the real customers for Android phones are the carriers.
Sorry, but I'm going to strongly disagree with your assertions here.
I owned an HTC One X (AT&T-branded) briefly (about a week) and most of my co-workers have Android phones. One of them had the Galaxy SIII. The screen sizes are almost identical. The actual battery life achieved was roughly the same.
Everyone agreed the One X has the better screen; the blue tinge on the SIII (thanks to pentile) was quite noticeable, especially in flesh tones in photos.
There were only three ways in which the Galaxy SIII was obviously better than the HTC One X:
* twice the memory (2GB vs 1GB)
* sdcard expandable
* camera (SIII's clearly superior)
Customers generally don't see an entire selection of working Android models. They see a plastic card representing the screen for most of them and maybe 1 working one that the salesman is using.
If you walk into Walmart and compare One X and Galaxy 3 the only reference you get for the quality of the screens is that the 4.8 inch Galaxy S3 is a bit bigger then the 4.7 inch HTC One X.
Too bad, my One X is a great phone. Best camera I've had in a phone by a wide margine, and has permanent nav buttons so it doesn't need to waste screen space on that. Also better battery life than the Galaxy Nexus I tried first.
The nav buttons are not a good thing, as evidenced by the menu button mess they've now gotten themselves into. Soft buttons don't waste space. They go away when you do things like watch a movie.
The One X is a great phone. But it's got that Sense garbage on it and the hardware buttons. Plus its tendency to close every app that's not in the foreground.
Almost every review I've read has made the case that the One X is superior to the Galaxy SIII, yet the Galaxy is outselling the One X by quite a huge margin.
I am unable to remember ever seeing a single One X commercial, but know I've seen quite a number of Galaxy SIII ones.
humans disproportionately weight the possibility of negative experiences over positive experiences. If people have no bad experience with one product they will purchase its sequels over the unknown. No one is going to shoulder the psychological costs of switching unless the expected benefit is really big.
This is why branding is so important, and why samsung is smart in their naming scheme. HTC will reap similar benefits by continuing to put out slightly better phones under the same moniker for several iterations, but it will take time for those benefits to accrue. (they should probably call the successors the HTC Two line or something similarly easy to understand).
I think you're spot on, and a consistent branding scheme will improve their fortunes, but I'm sceptical that the branding they have chosen is going to help much. Samsung is a brand. Galaxy is a brand. Droid is a brand. HTC1X is a model number, something that should be relegated to FCC filings, not a brand you can rely on to sell millions of handsets. I dont blame Sprint for re-branding their One X as the Evo LTE.
This is so not true when comes to the biggest AAA video-games, and fan-boys never happy with them :) - like boycotting them months before the game is released, even making their avatar with a picture of the Boycott, and then later seeing them buying it with the avatar unchanged...
Or maybe even movies - well it might work - for Friday bad movie night :)
Agreed though on a lack of marketing. My GF has an HTC Evo 4G design, which most have never even heard of. And it's a damn good phone - even at a year old.
The One X is a very well designed phone. Distinct, yet familiar and instantly recognizable as a HTC phone.
Personally I wish they'd went with soft buttons rather than hardware ones, but even the hardware buttons look good compared with ones present on other phones.
Maybe Google will throw them a bone and hit them up for the Nexus One X...
I've had the HTC Incredible for two years. Up until a few months ago I would have said it was a great phone with no problems. Then HTC pushed out a new release that broke it, such that it reboots itself randomly between 2:00AM and 6:00AM (some nights just once, other nights many times), and they still haven't pushed out a fix. And of course every time it boots you hear "Droooooooooiid".
I have to turn my phone off when I go to bed now, which is lame.
I have a desire HD and I have to say Sense UI is poorly programmed garbage. I would really much rather have stock android UI. Maybe slapping an inferior memory eating solution to a non-problem on top of android is their problem? They could save money on dev and have a better product by getting rid of it.
I have a Desire HD and a week ago they announced they will not be releasing an ICS update for it, citing a lack of flash storage. It took them about a year to find that out, about the same amount of time that ICS has been running on my device through a custom firmware, and just a few days ago, I installed a jelly bean image.
It mostly works fine, but the biggest problem with custom firmware is the bad/unstable hardware support. You need the propietary driver blobs, and only HTC has the means to get them.
Personally, I hope they go bankrupt. I would never buy another HTC product, from the complete lack of software support for what is supposed to be a smartphone, the defective included SD card to the completely closed down bootloader and inane protection measures. It has been a complete disaster.
I really hope there is an HTC nexus phone in the pipeline. It seems to me that their Sense skin is what strays people away from their phones. Their hardware, on the other hand, is incredibly beautiful and well built.
Another Nexus One might be exactly what they need.
If HTC (or someone) would make a line of phones that offered vanilla Android, OTA updates within 30 days of google releasing them, and a two year update guarantee, I think they'd find themselves selling a a lot of phones. Compete on hardware and service and sell skins as a premium upgrade if you really want to be in that market
Assume that if a user walks into a store he has an equally likely chance of buying the HTC One and Galaxy S3 if both are present. If neither is present give half the missing sales to the other.
Assume Verizon, ATT, Sprint and T-Mobile have 40%, 34%, 14% and 10% of the US market respectively.
Observe that HTC One is not available at Verizon.
Now in our admittedly simplified marketplace we find the HTC phone is outsold by a 2 to 1 margin.
If they would just put AOSP Jelly Bean on a phone like the One X, it would probably fly out the door. Instead they put all this effort into hardware, then make it all worthless with horrible software. But you have to "differentiate your brand!" I like Samsung just because their shitty Android modifications are less intrusive and heavy handed than HTC's even shittier modifications.
I strongly disagree. I actually owned an HTC One X briefly. The sense UI was perfectly fine, and I don't think the average consumer would care one whit about the AOSP interface differences.
The things that ultimately made me return it were:
* camera inferior to Galaxy SIII
* bluetooth caused my car's bluetooth module to crash
and reset constantly rendering hands-free mode useless
Now with that said, I haven't tested the Galaxy SIII's bluetooth yet. It could have the same issue, but the two above were enough to make me return it. For now, I'm just waiting until my old phone dies before I bother getting another Android phone.
HTC is dead in the water. They don't control any part of the supply chain (like samsung) and don't have an ecosystem to monetize (like amazon, apple). HTC is not going to survive another two years in a market where these devices are becoming more and more commoditized.
HTC is nice, but my last phone HTC Desire S has some bugs that will make not buy from this brand again: the GPS takes 10min to get a signal, I have random reboots from time to time , and sometimes it gets frozen when updating software through the google store.
HTC was one of the first to manufacture smartphones. Their old windows phones were nice but the new HTC surround and a couple other android phones too don't really stand out.
The first three were wonderful phones. Absolutely loved them. The Sensation just frustrates me. Sense makes no sense to me; it's obviously inferior to stock Android, and leads to inconsistencies and long waits before OS updates. T-Mobile has packed it full of their shovelware, which cannot be uninstalled, and was not present on the prior three phones (I guess Google provided the OS image on those).
The Sensation has horrible battery life. If I use it heavily, it doesn't even last a whole work day. It also feels flimsier...I haven't had any issues with it, but I've also managed to avoid dropping it very often or very far, so it hasn't been tested.
I won't be buying another HTC device, and I won't be buying another device that has a custom Android image or is loaded with crapware. I had no idea the average Android experience was so poor; I thought all Android phones were as awesome as the Google-branded devices. I'm very frustrated that I paid $500 for a phone that is so disappointing (I paid full price, as I'll also never sign another two year contract), so I'm not too disappointed that HTC is taking a beating.
Maybe they'll stop wasting money on Sense, which is garbage, and instead focus on making phones as good as the G1 and Nexus One again. If they do, I might consider another HTC in a couple of years. If not, Samsung will get my next purchase (a friend's got a recent high end Motorola that's even worse than my HTC).