HTC saw its shares slip 3.61 per cent in Taiwan as it narrowly avoided a quarterly loss, saved only by booking a profit from selling its stake in headphone brand Beats Electronics. The Taiwanese smartphone maker reported a worse-than-expected net profit yesterday, of just $300m ($10m) compared to a net loss in the previous …

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Tuesday 7th January 2014 09:28 GMT Anonymous Coward

The only ones making money seem to be Apple and Samsung. Apple have a loyal base of customers and multiple revenue streams - Samsung will still be able to flog tellies and fridges when people start buying HTC, Sony or ?? Android phones and Google is smiling.

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Tuesday 7th January 2014 10:45 GMT localzuk

Confusing

The one thing that I find confusing here is why HTC is doing worse than Samsung in the smartphone market. HTCs products are very high quality in my experience (my last 4 phones have been HTC), more so than Samsung (having played with the Galaxy S2 and S3).

As far as I can tell, its all down to marketing and carrier uptake. Carriers aren't pushing them for some reason!

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1. Tuesday 7th January 2014 11:24 GMT auburnman
  
  Re: Confusing
  
  My last two phones have been HTC, and while the hardware is pretty decent I've found the Sense UI pretty slow at times, and just 'meh' the rest of the time. I actually saw a fair speed improvement from installing a new launcher from t' store.
  
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2. Tuesday 7th January 2014 12:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Confusing
  
  Samsung pumps an awful lot of money into the channel, so distributors will always be pushing Samsung over anything else and shop staff will do the same if they're suitably incentivised by their managers because of an extra £nn per box.
  
  You'll also see Samsung just about everywhere with pop up shops in shopping centres, and promo girls in stores giving well rehearsed hands-on demonstrations to the public when a new phone comes out, or at specific times (like Christmas). If you ran a shop, you'd consider Samsung to be number one regardless of what you thought about the hardware it makes.
  
  Samsung is currently in a position to spend record amounts on marketing and effectively use it to buy sales.
  
  And there's no harm in that - anyone else would do the same if they could - but is it sustainable in the long term?
  
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  1. Tuesday 7th January 2014 13:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: Confusing
    
    I reckon at least 25-50% of the cost of many Sansung phones must go in marketing of sorts - they surely make a loss on their lower end / cost phones as a result if people like HTC (who also sell cheaper phones) can barely scratch a profit.
    
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3. Tuesday 7th January 2014 22:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Confusing
  
  A few reasons. Samsung phones have removable batteries and memory card slots.
  
  Samsung pays people to downrate and criticise HTC on the web.
  
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Tuesday 7th January 2014 11:21 GMT JMPiggy

It must be so frustrating because the HTC One is such a good handset, yet people blindly buy Samsungs instead as they trust the name more.

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Tuesday 7th January 2014 11:24 GMT Anonymous Coward

Well what do they really expect? I imagine that anyone who owned a desire or similar with it's no updates and poor longevity won't buy another htc

</bitter>

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1. Tuesday 7th January 2014 12:07 GMT localzuk
  
  I owned a Desire HD and was more than happy with it. Updates come from your carrier in most cases anyway.
  
  I've got an HTC One now and have had at least 2 updates since having it already - from 4.1 to 4.2 and last week to 4.3. So, even if they were a little lax in the past, they're doing well with their current phones.
  
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2. Tuesday 7th January 2014 22:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  HTC explained why updates were limited. It costs them money to pay for new drivers etc for the SOC and other chips they use in phones, these are supplied by 3rd parties. They can't just get the latest Android code and recompile.
  
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Tuesday 7th January 2014 13:25 GMT Anonymous Coward

HTC, Motorola, Sony and others will quickly fill the gap when Samsung make too many mis-steps or people get too bored. Samsung as a brand means nothing to me - I'd rather a Motorola, Apple or Sony by a mile - just reminds me of the cheaper end of the market 'white goods'. </snob>

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Wednesday 8th January 2014 10:25 GMT roy lovelock

Real shame

I was a loyal fan of htc and owned many of their handsets, until they decided they would no longer support removable sd cards and batteries. To me it really dosent matter how well built the device is if its battery fails and causes that beautiful piece of metal and glass to be turned into a doorstop prematurely.

The offset was i found just how ugly BUT how good touchwiz actually is on the samsungs. It wins zero awards for looks but its got a lot more under the hood than sense has. I really didnt realise just how restrictive sense was until i got the sammy.

I have the note 2 and my wife runs my last ever htc one x, her battery is fading at 1.5 years old and very rarely lasts a whole day now, but when it does escape running out it still needs rebooting every few days as it slows down (we have reset it a number of times and its still the same) where my note 2 runs for months on end without the need of a reboot. this is purely down to sense again.

To me and a lot of my geeky friends it doesnt matter how highly rated a phone is now, if it has no removable and memory then there not the phone for me or us (this sadly goes for the nexus devices as well).

HTC need to realise that there are a lot of people that turned their backs on the iphone excatly for this reason and htc were the brand to go to originally, since they decided to remove what people wanted they have lost sales.

I really hope that HTC realise this - they dont need to shave of a couple of mm, just give people back what they removed - back the hacking community and the sales will return if its not too late.

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Tuesday 14th January 2014 23:22 GMT Nick De Plume

People buy what they see.

Despite its brief shine in the market -before the big boys moved in- HTC was always the underdog.

Samsung, Apple, Sony are giants. They have the marketing muscle/budget to flog their wares. They can afford to lose and continue.

HTC was always a little bit special in its design and manufacture. I have owned the HTC Touch and Diamond (yes, Windows Mobile), the original Desire and the newest One.

They still work when charged.

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