What squeeze? HTC is alive and doing well
Htc has been experiencing some tough times as of late, but that won’t stop them from continuing to release devices ready to challenge the rest of the field. The Taiwanese technology company unveiled its newest flagship smartphone, the HTC U12+. And at a price of Dh3,449 — at par with Samsung’s latest Galaxy S9 device — it could be safe to say HTC has thrown everything to make the U12+ worthy of its tag, showing it off during a launch event in Dubai late on Wednesday.
There are two notable specs listed for the smartphone. The first is Edge Sense 2, which is the upgrade to the original found on last year’s U11. Basically, it allows a user to perform certain functions — taking photos pr zooming in on maps, for example — by simply squeezing the phone’s edges like you would do with a lemon (not too much, though).
The second — and this is no surprise, so to speak, considering the fact that HTC had already impressed in this area some years ago — is its camera. The dual-lens snapper has technologies including a full-sensor phase detection autofocus and HDR Boost 2 for any lighting condition. Oh, and its front camera is also of the duallens variety — so that’s 4 of them.
This early, the U12+ has already notched some sort of victory: its camera has been given a score of 103 by image quality ratings site DxOMark, the highest for a smartphone with a dual-lens camera and second overall, just behind the 109 of the Huawei P20 Pro (which is on a league of its own since, in case you missed it, has 3 lenses). It’s apparently even better than the Samsung Galaxy S9+ (99), Google Pixel 2 (98) and Apple iPhone X (97).
HTC also included a face-unlocking feature, its best sound by far (including 24-bit Bluetooth audio) and active noise-cancelling earbuds.
The boost it needs
Recent history has been challenging for HTC. The company was among the leaders in the Android smartphone realm in 2010, reaching a peak market share of 10.7 per cent in 2011, according to Statista data.
Since then, its slice of the pie dwindled; Statista says its last meaningful share was 4 per cent in the third quarter of 2012. This was despite the fact that it launched well-received devices each year from 2012 to 2015 — the HTC One X, the critically-acclaimed One M7, One M8 and One M9.
A Strategy Analytics report, meanwhile, says that 345 million smartphone units were shipped in the first quarter of 2018. HTC was among the 7 per cent in the ‘others’ category.
That said, HTC is doing the right move by shifting its strengths to emerigng technologies — specifically, virtual reality. In early April, the company launched the latest version of its VR headset, the HTC Vive Pro, and partnered with Emaar Properties to install the Mission 828 game that gives players the chance to virtually scale the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa.
But HTC has a proud history when it comes to mobile devices. Its PDAs such as the TyTn and Wizard were popular in the mid-2000s — and we shouldn’t even forget that it was the first company to brandish the first commercially-available smartphone running Google’s Android OS, the HTC Dream in 2008, in a bid to counter, at that time, Symbian, BlackBerry OS and, of course, Apple’s iOS.
And with the rather high-cost U12+, HTC is betting that the device can put it back on the radar of today’s increasingly-demanding consumers.