HTC Beats off loss, but shares slip after disappointing quarter HTC saw its shares slip 3.61 per cent in Taiwan as it narrowly avoided a quarterly loss, saved only by booking a profit from selling its stake in headphone brand Beats Electronics. The Taiwanese smartphone maker reported a worse-than-expected net profit yesterday, of just $300m ($10m) compared to a net loss in the previous …
The one thing that I find confusing here is why HTC is doing worse than Samsung in the smartphone market. HTCs products are very high quality in my experience (my last 4 phones have been HTC), more so than Samsung (having played with the Galaxy S2 and S3).
As far as I can tell, its all down to marketing and carrier uptake. Carriers aren't pushing them for some reason!
Samsung pumps an awful lot of money into the channel, so distributors will always be pushing Samsung over anything else and shop staff will do the same if they're suitably incentivised by their managers because of an extra £nn per box.
You'll also see Samsung just about everywhere with pop up shops in shopping centres, and promo girls in stores giving well rehearsed hands-on demonstrations to the public when a new phone comes out, or at specific times (like Christmas). If you ran a shop, you'd consider Samsung to be number one regardless of what you thought about the hardware it makes.
Samsung is currently in a position to spend record amounts on marketing and effectively use it to buy sales.
And there's no harm in that - anyone else would do the same if they could - but is it sustainable in the long term?
I owned a Desire HD and was more than happy with it. Updates come from your carrier in most cases anyway.
I've got an HTC One now and have had at least 2 updates since having it already - from 4.1 to 4.2 and last week to 4.3. So, even if they were a little lax in the past, they're doing well with their current phones.
I was a loyal fan of htc and owned many of their handsets, until they decided they would no longer support removable sd cards and batteries. To me it really dosent matter how well built the device is if its battery fails and causes that beautiful piece of metal and glass to be turned into a doorstop prematurely.
The offset was i found just how ugly BUT how good touchwiz actually is on the samsungs. It wins zero awards for looks but its got a lot more under the hood than sense has. I really didnt realise just how restrictive sense was until i got the sammy.
I have the note 2 and my wife runs my last ever htc one x, her battery is fading at 1.5 years old and very rarely lasts a whole day now, but when it does escape running out it still needs rebooting every few days as it slows down (we have reset it a number of times and its still the same) where my note 2 runs for months on end without the need of a reboot. this is purely down to sense again.
To me and a lot of my geeky friends it doesnt matter how highly rated a phone is now, if it has no removable and memory then there not the phone for me or us (this sadly goes for the nexus devices as well).
HTC need to realise that there are a lot of people that turned their backs on the iphone excatly for this reason and htc were the brand to go to originally, since they decided to remove what people wanted they have lost sales.
I really hope that HTC realise this - they dont need to shave of a couple of mm, just give people back what they removed - back the hacking community and the sales will return if its not too late.
Despite its brief shine in the market -before the big boys moved in- HTC was always the underdog.
Samsung, Apple, Sony are giants. They have the marketing muscle/budget to flog their wares. They can afford to lose and continue.
HTC was always a little bit special in its design and manufacture. I have owned the HTC Touch and Diamond (yes, Windows Mobile), the original Desire and the newest One.
They still work when charged.
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