In 2002 we still didn’t have smartphones, but I was lucky enough to see a preview of that future. I traveled to London with Microsoft and at that event the company presented the Orange SPV, a big-headed and different mobile because it was based on Windows Mobile 2002.
In it you could surf the Internet, write emails or listen to music, although in a limited way because neither the software nor the hardware were very competitive at that time. And yet, the vision was clear: everything was going toward those devices. What was surprising was not only that, but who manufactured that device was HTC.
The Taiwanese firm was already beginning to be known for manufacturing devices for others, but it would soon end up launching into the smartphone market taking advantage of the push of Android.
In 2011 its market share in the US became superior to Apple’s or Samsung, but after that achievement, the firm began to make bad decisions, and other manufacturers joined in—especially from China—who began to make the competition much more difficult.
HTC never recovered from that and although it experimented with other segments such as virtual reality, it faded to a role totally secondary in the technological field. We talk about all this in a new episode of Crossover in which we remember the great milestones of the company and that singular fall almost into oblivion.
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