HTC’s President of Smartphone and Connected Devices, Chialin Chang, confirmed in an interview with Engadget that the Taiwanese company plans on launching only six to seven handsets this year. This would be a drastic reduction from over a dozen handsets that HTC launched last year.
Chang says that by releasing fewer smartphones, HTC would be able to focus on their core features better thereby allowing it to better compete with other phones in the market. For the recently unveiled HTC U Play and U Ultra, HTC is emphasising on their ‘Companion’-ship aspect. The phones feature HTC’s own take on virtual assistant called HTC Companion that makes use of Google’s Awareness API, third-party data sources, machine learning, and device information to learn your habits and patterns and make recommendations based on them. HTC Companion will be a major feature of all devices that the company will launch this year, and Chang confirmed that HTC will continue improving Companion through updates throughout the year. For the rest of 2017, HTC plans on launching some Desire branded handsets for “fun and affordable” markets. As for the HTC 11, the successor to HTC 10, Chang that the handset won’t be named like that this year. This puts rumors of HTC U Ultra being the company’s flagship handset for 2017 as the Taiwanse company still has a true Snapdragon 835 powered flagship up its sleeve.
