October 14 will be marked as the day when HTC lost its soul – the day when the One max was announced. The One max is the anti-thesis of everything that HTC stood for. Every smartphone that HTC ever launched had a reason to exist. It had a purpose and a lot of thought went into executing the design of every single product. I vividly remember Peter Chou showing off the Touch Diamond in 2008 and how easy it was to use it with a single hand. More recently, the One with its BoomSound speakers on the front and a 4.7-inch display that was just about big enough to compete with rival flagship phones without having to stretch your hand to hold it. The company took care to think of minute user experiences and unlike some other brands, it appeared that they indeed used their own product before launching it to people who’d be paying a premium to buy them.
HTC has had a string of bad quarters culminating in its first-ever loss in the last quarter. The Taiwanese ODM-turned-smartphone brand’s recent misery has been pinpointed to a few reasons – poor marketing, poor pricing and poor timing of product launches. While HTC hopes that its $1 billion marketing campaign with Robert Downey Jr would help revive its fortunes, the stark reality is that nothing will change for the better unless HTC gets its product right in terms of execution, pricing and timing. Unfortunately, recent launches have proved that HTC is still struggling to get it right.
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