So, HTC hate their fans.
I assume they treat their less enthusiastic customers with even more contempt, so I'll give them a miss in future and advise others to do the same.
HTC is attempting to sue an HTC fansite for unpacking - 'unboxing', as The Kids calls it - the company's forthcoming flagship smartphone, the One X, on camera. The Taiwanese firm is also upset at French site HTC-Hub for giving the Tegra 3-based handset a run through and comparing it to HTC's other unreleased blower, One S. …
I honestly don't know where I stand wrt Mr (I'm fairly sure he isn't a real doctor) Dre's 'Beats' product line - on one hand, it's easy to be snobby about those that have forked out a ton of cash that could have been better spent. OTOH most people sporting Beats kit wouldn't have otherwise considered spending proper money on headphones and ordinarily couldn't care less about audio quality - disregarding the bulls*it-factor, they are at least now more open the concept of it perhaps being worth spending a little more to get better quality audio.
I'm writing this from the perspective of someone brought up to love HiFi and have feared (watched?) its demise for some time.
Fanboi logo, as that's my natural reaction to spotting a pair of the aforementioned cans...
That was Nokia's strategy, and see how big they became!
(/whisper)
Oh, I see, FIRST Nokia was big, THEN they invented this a-model-a-week strategy, THEN they collapsed and almost went bankrupt. Sorry, move along...
Anyway, naming your phone "The One" paints yourself a bit into a corner. What then "The disciple", "The disciple's follower", "The disciple's follower's manservant"?
Anyway, naming your phone "The One" paints yourself a bit into a corner
What half-witted marketing twat came up with that name? Do they not think about possible connotations of the name?
The One...
...that doesn’t work
...that I shouldn't have bought.
etc. etc.
It's nearly as good as Plenty's kitchen paper ad "Juan Sheet - one sheet does Plenty". Who the fuck thought that somebody going around introducing themselves as "Juan Sheet" in a mock Spanish accent was a good idea.
Lots of custom roms for the Thunderbolt (tried most of them) but my driver is Skyraider Zeus as Sense runs better on the phone and Skyraider is the most stable and one of the best performing Sense based roms because its is mostly Sense 2.1 without most of the 3+ bloat.
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It's only a phone, lads, only a phone.
Why are the children so excited about filming it coming out of its box?
And why the blue blistering barnacled blazes are HTC getting so bent out of shape. They make hundreds of phones. If they hadn't said we would not have know n it was not last years!
... Which makes me wonder: When Bubba is accused of a crime, who do the internet blowhards suggest -he- be locked up with? I mean, I just can't see Bubba getting arrested for opossum-buggery, and people commenting, "Just throw him in a cell with a hipster electronics reviewer!".
Are you delusional? It's not as though they STOLE the handset, there was no NDA, and you'd think that HTC might actually appreciate some fan support. Hasn't any company not learned the wisdom of not pissing off the people that actually like them, and how much the public at large hate to see an underdog picked on by a Goliath of a company?
If the handset is not freely available (and it's not) and they weren't supposed to get one (and they weren't), then I'm not sure that there was a legal way for them to obtain it. It's clear that the handset was supposed to be somewhere else and the law generally states that you shouldn't take what others shouldn't give you. In other words, whoever gave them the phone probably technically stole it, so they were technically in possession of stolen goods.
Now, HTC might otherwise be willing to let it slide, as early leaks often add to the hype, but when some site breaks NDA or publishes a leak, it screws the manufacturer's partners who are honoring the NDA and that's why they make it such a no-no.
You have a rather worrying obsession about being locked in a jail cell with Bubba who one assumes is likely to indulge in some light-hearted non-consensual buggery. Can I suggest that it is more than probable that the entire internet doesn't share your sexual fantasies and wishes you would stop going on about it.
wow, my Aging HD2 costs more new an its got a few years under the belt.
I think that should have been a good lesson to learn for HTC.
The HD2, cutting edge, simple, open and mod-able and possibly one of the most successful devices they have ever had. HTC you don't need 100 SKUs, you need 3, 4 maybe even 5 max but they need to be good and they need to let the user do whatever the hell they would like to do with them, the HD2 still costs new over £250 to £300 quid, an that's for a 3 year old phone, wake up HTC, your losing it.
I mean really; if there's one thing the average big IT companies has learned its that you should never "take it out" on fans, because fans are not only potential customers. Better yet; they may even interest other people (outside your "marketing scope") to check up on your products.
Microsoft? Was weary when it came to Mono but in the end (at least up until now) leaves the project be, even though they're "messing" with an MS flagship called .NET. Ballmer? Even though he is a fruitcake he wasn't too arrogant to sign a kids macbook (iirc). Probably running NT, but who knows. Either way; Ballmer didn't start "omg the competition!". And there are plenty of other examples to be found out there, don't get me started on how lenient Sun has always been towards its fanbase.
This is an epic fail. The big bad HTC company against the underdog; enthusiastic fans who were only trying to spread the word of the Lord, errr, phone :-) Guess what /that/ will do to your credibility ?
They should have left this alone. Better yet; during the official presentation should have /congratulated/ these guys for beating them to the punch. You can turn that into a marketing advantage for yourself easily: "Everyone wants this phone, its so bad that people even risk breaking our rules to get their hands on it. See how great it is?".
THAT is how you do it. Take your "loss" and turn it into a win. You get (positive) attention, you get sympathy and you may attract more people's interest.
This only gets you disdain, which can easily work against you. Breaking a reputation is much quicker than building one, never forget that!
I have this mental image of the Marketing department hiring a hitman to go after the Legal department, for undermining their corporate reputation....
(naturally the "hitman" is actually a front for the BOFH, who will later hire himself out to both sides and rake in money while depopulating his enemies...)
Not sure what my data points are worth, but... I bought my HTC partly on their reputation, which I now dismiss. Most of the problem was a HTC-MUST-CONTROL-EVERYTHING support mindset that seems to match with this article. If they were competent in their control, I'd be more forgiving, but it certainly seemed to me that they were just trying to make it more awkward for other people to find out about the problems and their inability to fix any of them. At least I can't remember any case where HTC was helpful, though I've mostly learned to live with the flaws.
As far as preventing me from telling other people about those problems... Hey, HTC, how's that working out for you? I've long since lost count of the number of negative public comments I've made about the company.
Another data point is that, as far as I know, NONE of the carriers in this country still offer any HTC phones, though all of them used to. My hypothesis there is that there is actually some kind of political problem going beyond the language problems. Personal evidence for me was that HTC was clearly having plenty of problem just dealing with the English side of things... Impersonal evidence is that the non-English part of the HTC website is STRONGLY separated from the rest of it. If it isn't international politics then it must be some kind of office politics within HTC.
In conclusion, my carrier now blames HTC for all of the problems I encounter, and I'm mostly inclined to agree with them. However, I still don't forgive my carrier for failing to find solutions, and it has reached the point where I'm just about ready to pay the penalty fee to kill the contract and switch carriers. Needless to say, I will NOT be considering any HTC phones even if my new carrier somehow decided they wanted to give HTC another chance.
Man... with samsung phones owning like they are now HTC really can't afford to do this. I mainly go with HTC due to their general acceptance of the xda dev community. So its their attitude towards their fans I like (cause it causes the software to become awesome, or did in the win mob days).
Maybe I'll be going samsung next time...
Or even better motorola! I loved their phones except for the evil not letting you root them thing,