HTC, oh how have ye fallen; finalizing negotiations to sell smartphone business to Google

HTC may not be the most popular smartphone now, but I still remember the days when they were the only Android smartphones to even be considered as a daily driver, to a time when it was competitive with Samsung. A time where OPPO, Huawei, vivo and the myriad of smartphone brands were still in their infancy. Heck, my first Android smartphone was the HTC One X. HTC was definitely a top dog back in the day, and they showed it with innovation in hardware and software. But oh well, those times have come and gone.

Now, they seem to have lost their edge despite thinking up of new stuff like the Edge Sense on the HTC U11. It is no coincidence that the HTC U11 is the highest rated smartphone camera to date on DxOMark, with the older HTC 10 still standing strong as the third best on DxOMark’s charts. While they may be good at designing great smartphones, their marketing is another story altogether.

Failing to push through the hype built on other devices, the HTC U11 isn’t selling that well despite having sporting interesting features as mentioned above. According to reports, HTC’s revenues have dropped 54.4% from a year earlier, a year which wasn’t too good for the Taiwanese company either. Sales has dropped 14.4% on a year-on-year basis for the first eight months of 2017, which shows that the HTC U11 was just not a game changer capable of fixing their dire their financial condition.

HTC is supposedly going to build the second generation Pixel devices for Google, so they may be able to pull through the year. However it seems that HTC isn’t going to want to just survive. They are reportedly entering final negotiations with Google to sell their smartphone business unit. All I can say is I hope HTC will not be treated like Motorola. Bought for the patents, and discarded once Google was done.

Pokdepinion: If this goes through, we will only see HTC devices branded as Google’s Pixel devices. That’s better than HTC totally disappearing from the map. But history has a bad precedence for such brands. Look at Microsoft buying Nokia. But then Nokia looks set to be back for good, so there is a silver lining to the story here.