Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

T-Mobile, HTC Hope New York Party Shows They’ve Still Got It

Sometimes the key to convincing folks you are cool is to throw a really good party.

T-Mobile and HTC did their best to do just that on Wednesday night, hiring hip band Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. and throwing a party at a hip New York City club.

They combined to fete the HTC One S — a new high-end Android phone that goes on sale April 25 for $199. The slim device is part of the One family that HTC is counting on to help it regain lost ground in the smartphone business.

It remains to be seen how far the event and resultant buzz will go toward helping T-Mobile and HTC in their bid to boost their respective images.

HTC, after seeing sales doubling year-ago levels for the first several months of last year, hit a wall and is now seeing significant year-over-year drops.

A study of mobile Web surfing shows just how far mighty HTC has fallen. According to Chitika, the share of mobile Web pages being requested from HTC devices is down 60 percent from half a year ago, though that number also reflects the rise of the iPad. Still, Samsung has gained over that period and LG has roughly held its own.

T-Mobile, meanwhile, is aiming to come up with a new strategy after last year’s failed effort to sell itself to AT&T. Parent Deutsche Telekom has promised to reinvest in the U.S. arm, agreeing to pump $4 billion into the network over the next few years in order to launch LTE service.

On the marketing side, T-Mobile plans a broader relaunch in the second half of this year. However, deciding it couldn’t wait that long, the carrier kicked off a new ad campaign this week that featured its spokeswoman, Carly, trading in her pink dresses for leather and a Ducati.

The HTC One S that was shown off on Wednesday will become a featured part of the ad campaign, starting early next month.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald