The HTC One is yet to hit the store shelves, and seems to be competitively priced, apart from being beautifully designed. Yet, it is faced by a significant threat which might not allow HTC to breakthrough to the market.
The HTC One just received its official price, Rs. 42,900 for the 32GB model. So far, what we’ve seen of the phone looks mighty impressive. The HTC One has a chic unibody design with brushed aluminium back. It is deceptively thing and incredibly light, all while packing some very impressive specifications.
The One is powered by a Snapdragon 600, 1.7GHz quad-core ticker, along with 2GB of RAM to keep those little bits of information pumping through its circuitry real fast. It has a gorgeous 1080p screen with 4.7 inches of real estate, pegging its pixel density at a whopping 469 ppi. If that wasn’t enough to draw you in, HTC has also developed this new imaging tech called “UltraPixel”, which it says blesses the 4 megapixel rear camera on the HTC One with the ability to shoot some incredibly stunning photos. The sensor for this technology is a 4 megapixel slab of silicon, measuring 1/3-inch diagonally, offering a pixel pitch of 2 micrometres.
All this for Rs. 42,990 seems like incredibly competitive pricing. By comparison, the iPhone 5 costs 45,500 and that is only for the 16 GB variant. The Nokia Lumia 920, which offers incredible imaging performance, is now priced at roughly Rs. 38,500, but when compared to the build of the HTC One, it is bulky and heavy. Therefore, when gauging the price of the HTC One in leiu of the features it comes with and seeing the competition, we can’t help but feel that the HTC One has an incredibly competitive price.
However, is a logically competitive price enough for HTC to recover from its latest fiasco? The Taiwanese company just reported the worst quarter earnings in 2013. Partly, this is due to the embarrassingly delayed shipments of their new flagship and partly because the Galaxy S4 from Samsung is just around the corner. The Korean giant has witnessed unprecedented success in the sales numbers of its Galaxy S and Galaxy Note series of devices, with the S4 being almost as hotly anticipated as an iPhone is. It is very much possible that many people are holding off on upgrading from their current phones just to see how good the Galaxy S4 will be in real life, and more importantly, how Samsung is going to price it. If Samsung was to price their Galaxy S4 anywhere between Rs. 45,000-48,000, the uphill battle HTC is already facing might get even tougher.
But all hope is not lost for HTC. The recent tie-up with Facebook to produce the highly social phone, the ‘HTC First’ just might help the Taiwanese phone maker reclaim some of its lost market share. The First has a 4.3-inch Super LCD display with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels (341 ppi). It will support 3G, Wi-Fi, 4G LTE, NFC and Bluetooth 4.0 and will be powered by a dual-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon 400 processor and a 2000mAh battery. The phone will have 1GB of RAM but HTC did not reveal the internal storage specs of the First. Imaging will be handled by a 5MP camera that’s able to record 1080p full HD videos; the First will also sport a front 1.6MP camera. HTC will launch the First with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean).
The HTC One, the new flagship from HTC is supposed to hit store shelves in India by the end of April, while the S4 is also going to be coming out around that time. Interestingly, the HTC One’s success seems to be heavily dependent on the price at which the Galaxy S4 will retail, but if HTC does launch the First into the Indian market as well, chances are that the company will be raking in more money sooner than it anticipated.