It hopes that new software features will help to
make its new handset stand out.
Searching on for a decent 'stock' device..
Saying this on hacker news feels a bit sacrilegious, but don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. The well supported phones have good wiki pages and rooting/flashing them isn't all that hard. But you will only have yourself to blame if it goes sideways.
Meanwhile, 4.2.2 is already out in the wild. HTC's attitude towards updates is not something that I imagine as reasonable time.
Do you get reasonable fast upgrades for old (like, month old) phones though, if Android moves forward? Do you get updates at all? Does it (the 'improved' ROM) include unremovable crapware?
Even if all answers to the questions above are positive (as in, the 'right' answer): Do you buy a phone for the software improvements on top of a widely available platform?
I buy decent hardware (sturdy, well made, slick) & support for improvements to the software that this manufacturer didn't even create in the first place. So far, only Nexus devices seem to fit the bill.
Also, even if it some day would become decent it would still be inferior just because it's tied to one manufacturer.
I know that more pixels does not always make for a better camera, but I think the perception from the general public would be that higher = better.
Quite a bold move on their part.
I will never buy another HTC phone again.
HTC even set up a site to make it easy to unlock the bootloader here: http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader
I was an advocate when I first bought it but I've bitten the bullet and bought a Nexus 4. I'd rather have better working software than 4G.
I don't understand the mindset behind launching a device that you aren't selling. By the time it's actually on the market, your faster moving competitors (Apple, Samsung, etc) have already matched your improvements. You also get a huge amount of buzz when first unveiling a product, and you need to capitalize on that by letting people give you money for it. Microsoft fails at this every single time, and it looks like HTC is joining them?
This is coming from someone who saw this phone and decided 'ok, sold, where do I buy one?' - and could not find any of this out. Terrible marketing failure. By tomorrow I will have forgotten completely, and I'll probably end up just getting a Samsung.
My next phone will be whatever Google's next flagship phone will be, assuming they fix USB OTG, LTE and microsd-slot. Or some other vendor that is smart enough to use vanilla Android without any "product differentiation". I don't want any custom UIs like HTC Sense or Touchwiz, non-uninstallable bloatware (looking at you Samsung: Kies, ChatON, etc.) and app-breaking UI 'enhancements'.
LTE is currently a negotiation point in hands of carriers. The price of supporting LTE would be no timely updates (see also Verizon and Sprint Galaxy Nexus). This is something that Google will not compromise about.
MicroSD is a slightly different story, it has several problems:
UX ones:
- most users are confused by two separate storage pools (see the confusion: "I have XY gigabites free on the phone, why can't I install this app?") - the SD card has to be unmounted, when the phone is attached to the computer - that means killing everything, that was launched from the card.
Technical:
- The MicroSD performance is inferior to eMMC.
Legal:
- You have to license FAT32 and exFAT (for SDXC) from Microsoft. (Yes, I know that it is technically possible to use different filesystems with SD cards - but that is a decision that would not go very well with mainstream users who just want to connect the phone to their Windows or Apple computer).
call it redhat vs debian.
I tend to buy my devices based purely on what they can do now as opposed to that and future support, which I know isn't really common here. If it's a tradeoff between future software improvements (which recently haven't been all that substantial: 4.2 was nothing special, and 4.1 was only slightly better than ICS) and current hardware capabilities (those phones are all reasonably thin and have removable batteries and SD card slots, two things that the Nexus line currently lacks), I'm going with the hardware.