The Taiwanese phone maker has had a rough time of it for the past two years or more. Recently, it's financials revealed a drop of 64 per cent in revenue. How do you recover from that? Especially when your flagship products are roundly and soundly ignored in favour of others'.
Not easily, but HTC is going to have a jolly good try. And good luck. The company has just launched some a number of phones in India, among them, the flagship HTC 10, competitor to Samsung's Galaxy S7 (and I suppose the S7 Edge), LG's soon-to-launch G5 and Apple's iPhone.
HTC says it's Apple that borrowed from its design and others think it's the other way round, but suffice is to say that HTC's top end phones have been very admired for their all-metal design. The HTC 10 is no exception. First impressions peg the HTC 10, which the CEO Cher Wong says stands for perfection, as not being one bit disappointing in the design department. It has chamfered sides and edges and is metallic and looks sophisticated.
On the inside, the HTC 10 is packed with power specs. It runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, as do other flagships which use this processor or equivalents. It pairs with 4GB RAM and 32GB storage. Obviously it runs on the latest version of Android and HTC's Sense UI 7 -- with quick upgrades promised. The battery, surprisingly, is just 3,000mAh. But then any more and it would have made the device weighty and clunky.
It's not a huge phone but one with a 5.2-inch Quad Core SLCD display which is crisp and has good colours. It also has Boom Sound and the ability to play hi-res audio as well as record it. HTC has always done wonderfully well in the sound department.
A unique feature of the HTC 10 its 12 UltraPixel rear camera and 5 UltraPixel front-facing camera with OIS at both ends. The aperture is f1.8.
The HTC 10 costs Rs 52,990. While it may stand up to the level of the flagships from companies that are doing better, it's become widely known among consumers that HTC has been struggling and this fact has brought impacted expectations of the price. Consumers feel a company that is in trouble should lower its price as much as possible. How well it the HTC 10 will sell remains to be seen, but much also depends on HTC's marketing efforts which have lagged other companies.
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
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