HTC has revealed it will try something of a new approach with the release of its smartphones in 2013. Unlike Samsung, which releases more than one flagship smartphone per year, HTC will only be releasing the HTC One as its one and only flagship smartphone for 2013, and it has a reason for doing so. It does not want to confuse customers.
In an interview in January 2012 HTC revealed it would reduce the number of smartphones it releases so it could focus on quality and not quantity. That plan didn't really help the smartphone maker in 2012, so the fact that it is now confirming its latest flagship smartphone, the HTC One as the only flagship smartphone in 2013 is a big risk.
HTC's head of UK and Ireland, Phil Robertson, made it clear in an interview that HTC plans on releasing one flagship smartphone per year and that smartphone is the just-announced HTC One.
When asked why only one smartphone was announced, Phil Robertson revealed: "HTC One is the flagship device. Last year we had the X and the S, where people had different personal preferences between the two. We just said; let's just create one flagship device for this year."
The good news for HTC is that after it announced the HTC One at its media event, the tech world came away very impressed with the smartphone.
HTC wraps the HTC One in a machined-aluminum unibody design, a 4.7-inch 468 ppi (pixels per inch) 1080p Super LCD 3 display protected by Gorilla Glass 2, 1.7GHz Qualcomm quad-core Snapdragon 600, 2GB of RAM, 32GB or 64GB of internal memory, 2GB of RAM, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/ac/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC (near field communications), Ultrapixel camera, Android 4.1.2, HTC Sense 5, 2,300mAh battery and is available in a choice of "stunning silver" or "beautiful black."
If HTC can keep releasing devices with the quality and attention to design found on the HTC One, it might have a shot at regaining some of the market share it lost over the years to Apple and Samsung. U.S. carriers AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile have already announced that they will begin selling the smartphone in March.
