The Taiwan-based company built a following in the U.S. by being one of the first to sell smartphones powered by Google Inc.’s Android operating system. It was the top seller of Android-based smartphones in the U.S. in 2010, with a market share of 11.8 percent, but lost the top spot to Samsung Electronics this year.

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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.

Its U.S. presence has become more common at the low end of the Android market and at prepaid carriers as the high-end market has been dominated by the likes of Samsung and Motorola.

LG is hoping to improve its fortunes, starting with the Viper, a $99 LTE phone for Sprint. Among the markets LG hopes to target is busy parents.

“This is really easy to use and still has a ton of features,” LG spokesman Chaz Abbott said, showing off the phone.

To highlight its family-friendliness, LG has come up with a storytelling app that lets parents record a fairy tale using their own photos, sounds and words — sort of a Mad Libs for the digital era.

The Life’s Good Fairytale will eventually be free for all Android phones, though Viper owners will get first crack at the app, which is slated to be available for them starting April 27.

LG is showing off the phone and app later today at an event in New York. Unfortunately for LG, the N.Y. launch party market is almost as crowded as the Android smartphone one. Its event is up against both T-Mobile’s HTC One S launch and a party for Spotify.

The Viper, too, will find itself challenged to stand out. It launches at the same time Sprint is pushing out the Galaxy Nexus, a more high-end phone that also runs on the carrier’s nascent LTE network.

LG faces similar challenges outside the U.S. amid a host of Android competitors at all segments of the market.

Globally, LG is counting on a new lineup that includes a quad-core phone, a “phablet” and a new-look mainstream line.

Abbott said that LG has yet to announce U.S. plans for any of these devices, which were shown off at February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

In a statement, HTC said it had named former Goldman Sachs partner and onetime Motorola engineer Chia-Lin Chang as its new numbers executive, replacing Winston Yung. Yung, who has been with HTC since 2011, will remain with the company and will focus on corporate development, Chang said.

Following the move, shares of HTC fell as much as 6 percent in Taiwan, according to Reuters.

The company has had more than its fair share of issues in the last few months, after several quarters of impressive growth. The company said earlier this month that its most recent quarterly results showed sales off by more than a third.

Among respondents who plan to buy a smartphone in the next three months, 56 percent said they’ll purchase an iPhone. That’s two percentage points more than ChangeWave’s last survey, taken in December of 2011.

It’s also a better performance than all Apple’s rivals, save one. According to ChangeWave, interest in Samsung handsets held steady at 13 percent between both surveys. HTC’s also stayed flat at 3 percent. Meanwhile, Motorola fell by one point to 6 percent. And Research In Motion? The interest in the beleagured BlackBerry maker’s smartphones actually rose — from 2 percent to 3 percent.

The party will feature the band Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. and presumably offer some more details on T-Mobile’s plans for the phone, which was announced along with a pair of siblings at February’s Mobile World Congress.

HTC said at the time that T-Mobile would be the launch partner for the slim HTC One S, while AT&T is getting the flagship HTC One X model. Sprint has since announced its new high-end HTC phone, which will be sold as the HTC Evo 4G LTE.

T-Mobile has yet to announce pricing and exact availability for its One S, though HTC has said that the product family is going on sale globally this month.

HTC is counting on the One lineup to help turn around a steep drop in sales, while still-iPhoneless T-Mobile is looking for alternatives to Apple.

T-Mobile could benefit from a massive marketing push HTC is planning for its One line.

And so you can feel like you’re at the party yourself, here’s a bit of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.:

The Taiwanese cellphone maker said that first-quarter revenues were NT$67.8 billion (U.S. $2.3 billion), a nearly 35 percent drop from a year ago. HTC had predicted it would be a rough quarter when it last reported earnings in February, and the revenue figure was in the range of what the company had said to expect.

The company had been seeing its sales doubling from year-ago levels until hitting a wall in the second half of last year.

HTC is hoping to turn things around with its new One line of high-end Android phones, due to hit the market this month. The company has a major global ad campaign around those products.

This week, HTC also announced an Evo-branded variant of the line that will be among the first phones for Sprint’s new LTE network.

The smartphone’s specs are pretty much based on the recently-unveiled HTC One phones, though the word “One” wasn’t uttered, well, once.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse unveiled the new 4G LTE Evo, calling it “the gold standard” of Sprint phones, running the latest version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and the latest version of HTC Sense, called Sense 4. It will be the first HD voice-capable phone, which is supposed to make voice quality extra clear.

The smartphone also brings back the kickstand, for propping up the phone when you’re taking advantage of viewing the massive 4.7-inch LCD HD display. It’s got an 8 megapixel camera and Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.5GHz dual-core processor; no word yet on expected battery life. Oh, and it’s got Beats audio, that audio technology that pops up in select HP products.

The phone is expected to retail for $200 sometime in the second quarter of the year, with pre-orders starting on May 7.

The phone will be among the initial stable of phones that work with the LTE network that Sprint will roll out in the coming months. Sprint has already said it will have a version of the Galaxy Nexus as well as an eco-friendly phone from LG.

The carrier is in the midst of a major shift. After having spent the past several years focused on a different 4G technology–WiMax–Sprint is now adopting LTE. The company has said it has introduced its last WiMax phone.

For the moment, though, that makes things a bit awkward as the company will be introducing new 4G phones but it will have service in just a handful of cities.

Sprint has announced the first half dozen cities that will get LTE, a list that includes Baltimore, Kansas City, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta.

For HTC, its new One line is an attempt to regain lost ground at the high-end of the Android market. HTC plans to put nearly all its marketing weight behind the One line.

The company announced the One line and the first three devices at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. AT&T will sell the flagship HTC One X while T-Mobile will sell the narrower HTC One S. The first HTC One devices are expected to go on sale globally this month.

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried contributed to this report.

The research firm estimates that just over half of the 104 million smartphones in America run Google’s operating system, up 17 percentage points from a year ago.

Ownership of iPhones continues to grow in the U.S. as well, representing 30 percent of the smartphone market — up 5 percentage points from a year ago.

Google and Apple’s gains have come at the expense of the other players in the market, which include Research In Motion at 13 percent and Microsoft at just under 4 percent share.

In terms of the overall market, including non-smartphones, Samsung is the top individual hardware maker, accounting for just over a quarter of the 234 million phones owned by those 13 and older. That’s essentially the same share it had a year ago.

Korea’s LG is next with 19.4 percent share, followed by Apple at 13.5 percent of total handsets, Motorola at 12.8 percent and HTC at 6.3 percent.

The HTC One phone will come in a lot of different flavors, models different enough that last year they would have each gone by a different name. But, conscious of the already crowded smartphone market, HTC is looking to try to focus its limited ad budget around the One brand. Executives say that while there are multiple One models, they are unified by their focus on great sound and great camera technology.

The One brand and its first three phones were announced at Mobile World Congress in February.

The initial One phones are due to go on sale globally this month, with HTC launching its biggest-ever ad campaign to push the new brand. The print, online and video spots are designed to feature customers pushing the new phones to their limits. In one spot, HTC had two photography students jump out of planes to capture a fashion shot in midair.

Nick Jojola, who was a skydiving novice, spent a week practicing, doing two jumps a day and then three days the next week doing the actual photography with a model plummeting at 126 miles per hour.

“He has literally .8 seconds of free fall to get that perfect shot,” said Greg Fisher, HTC’s VP of marketing. And because the company wanted to show off the One’s low-light capabilities, it did the photography only in the morning and evening. In all, about 120 seconds a day was all that the photographers had to work with.

“It was the strangest shoot I’ve ever been on,” Fisher said. “The rest of it (was) dead time.”

HTC is counting on that footage to go a long way. After experiencing huge growth through most of last year, the Taiwanese cellphone maker hit a wall as it struggled with increasing competition from Samsung, Apple and others.

Even as it aims to unify its efforts, HTC will have to deal with big marketing campaigns from rivals, including Nokia’s Lumia 900 campaign, as well as omnipresent Apple ads.

The One campaign will kick off in Europe and Asia starting this week as the first models are going on sale, followed by the U.S. in some weeks’ time. A second spot, which highlights the phone’s sound capabilities, will kick off in the U.S. later in the second quarter, and head to other parts of the world in the third quarter.

Here in the U.S., AT&T plans to sell the flagship HTC One X, while T-Mobile has said it will be the launch partner for the narrower HTC One S. Pricing and timing for the phones has yet to be announced.

Another One phone might not be that far off. HTC and Sprint have an event scheduled for Wednesday in New York, though the companies aren’t saying what is coming.

Speaking at the Competitive Carriers Global Expo in Orlando, Sprint’s Bob Azzi said that the carrier is in the final stages of testing that LTE network.

“We are wrapping up final field integration tests,” Azzi said, according to Fierce Wireless. “The technology works and delivers more benefits than we expected.”

The statement all but guarantees that HTC and Sprint plan to release an LTE-based phone at an event next month.

Sprint plans to launch LTE service around midyear in Baltimore, Kansas City, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Atlanta.

By going with WiMax, Sprint was first to the U.S. market with a next-generation network. However, with the rest of the market coalescing around LTE, the carrier decided to shift gears and build an LTE network of its own.

(For those who want a primer on WiMax, LTE and all the other acronyms related to 4G, check out this piece by Walt Mossberg.)

The update, which AT&T says is the first to be made available by a U.S. carrier, is for owners of the HTC Vivid phone. In the coming months, AT&T said it will also update 10 other phones and tablets, including the LG Nitro, two versions of the Motorola Atrix, Pantech’s Burst and Element, as well as five Samsung devices.

Google released Ice Cream Sandwich some time ago, but few phones — other than its Nexus series of devices — are actually running the software. ICS adds a number of features to Android, including a revamped look, support for phones and tablets with the same operating system and improvements to voice recognition.

Customers can download the update directly to their phone via Wi-Fi, or pull it down to a PC and then install it on their HTC phone. AT&T said it plans to notify users of the update via text message starting on Friday.

Beats’ majority owner is HTC, the Taiwanese cellphone maker, which put $300 million into the company last year.

MOG is one of several subscription music services that have cropped up in the last year, most of which offer some combination of free music and a paid version that works on mobile phones like iPhones and Android handsets. With the notable exception of Spotify, most of them have struggled to gain much traction.

MOG CEO David Hyman has told reporters that MOG has 500,000 active users, but he also told reporters last month that MOG was not trying to sell itself.

MOG’s most recent push to acquire users has been through Facebook and its “frictionless sharing” program, which is supposed to help digital services acquire users. Facebook-data tracker AppData says that MOG has 130,000 people using the service via Facebook at least once a month, though it’s possible that Hyman has several thousand other users that he’s acquired outside of the social network.

Business Insider reported MOG’s sales talks yesterday.

I don’t have a price on the transaction, and I’ll be very curious to see where it ended up. MOG raised a reported $25 million over the course of its corporate history, and $15 million in the last few years, as it bolted a music service onto an ad network, its original business. Last spring, it went looking for another $25 million to $30 million, and apparently ended up with this deal instead.

I’m assuming that Beats and HTC aren’t very interested in running a Web-based advertising network, so the real business they’re buying here is the music service. The subscriber base won’t be material, say people who have looked at the MOG deal recently — instead, Beats’ main interest will be in MOG’s deals with the major music labels, and the front end of the music service it has built.

If Beats wanted to hammer out those deals and build that service on its own, it could certainly do that (particularly since Jimmy Iovine, the powerful Universal Music Group executive/producer, is a Beats investor, along with Dr. Dre, whose name graces the product itself). But buying MOG will save it time. How much is that time worth?

“You want a phone that is sleek and eyecatching, so that when you pull it out, your friends go, ‘Wow, what is that?’” CEO Peter Chou said, at an event in Barcelona. “Today, I am proud to introduce just such a phone — the HTC One.”

Chou noted that taking photos is the No. 2 thing people do with their phones (after making calls), and promised that the HTC One will be good enough to replace the standard camera.

“It is the one phone you will need,” Chou said. “It is the one camera you will need.”

The flagship HTC One X device will pack a 4.7-inch screen along with a quad-core Nvidia chip in most models, and a Qualcomm chip in its LTE variant.

“HTC One is a speed and performance beast,” Chou said.

Despite its name, the HTC One will come in different shapes and sizes, including a thinner HTC One S model with a 4.3-inch screen and the HTC One V, a model aimed at a broader mass-market audience.

AT&T will carry the HTC One X “in the coming months”; while T-Mobile said in a statement that it will be the U.S. launch partner for HTC One S this spring. Prices were not announced.

The phones will begin shipping globally around April, Chou said, with 150 carriers across the globe committed to carrying the device.

Chou said that the new phone boasts improved software and optics, and a custom image-processing chip. Among its camera bona fides, the HTC One X can take video and shoot pictures at the same time. Other features include improved low-light shooting, thanks to an f/2.0 lens and other abilities.

Among its features are the ability to take a picture within 0.7 seconds — the time it takes people to react to something they see. The camera can autofocus in 0.2 seconds, and can keep taking pictures as long as you hold down the shutter.

“You will not miss another shot,” Chou said. “You can keep them all, or pick a favorite.”

“It is literally faster than the blink of an eye,” he said.

HTC is also integrating Dropbox into its HTC Sense software, with 25 gigabytes of storage included for two years — enough to store 10,000 images, Chou said. He promised improved sound and music management, as well.

“Getting music on a phone is still hard for people,” he said. “HTC One makes it easy.”

Chou said that one only has to sync with their PC once; music will sync over Wi-Fi from then on.

Chou also drew a contrast between HTC and other companies like Samsung and Sony, noting that its Media Link software works with any brand, as opposed to rivals whose strategy focuses on direct ties with their own TVs.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120226/htc-introduces-the-one-phone-it-hopes-will-help-it-regain-footing/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120213/saturday-night-live-has-verizons-number-in-4g-lte-spoof-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120213/saturday-night-live-has-verizons-number-in-4g-lte-spoof-video/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:30:52 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=173798 Verizon has spent quite a bit of time and money trying to teach Americans the term 4G LTE.

“Saturday Night Live” spent 30 seconds pretty much destroying those efforts.

In a commercial spoof, SNL has a Verizon sales person touting LTE without really saying what it does, and also mocking the company for just throwing out all kinds of device names. What, a customer wonders, does all that really mean?

“Let’s say you’ve got the new HTC Thunderbolt, or even the LG Vortex. You can hook up your HTC or your LG to your 4G LTE and you’ll have Verizon’s 4G LTE in over 190 cities.”

“So, it’s faster?” the guy asks.

“Well, let’s say you’ve got the new Droid Razr by Motorola or the HTC Rezound or even the Samsung Galaxy Nexus,” the salesman says. “You are talking 4G LTE on almost our entire 3G footprint.”

One song is four seconds, the salesman continues. “The song is four seconds?” the confused customer asks, before the sales guy throws out more stats.

Verizon, the ad concludes, “It’s an old person’s nightmare.”

Anyway, it’s worth a watch:

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