HTC’s Latest Survival Tactic- ‘BlinkFeed’ On New HTC One

HTC One: Smartphone users these days have a wide range of operating systems to choose from – Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, etc. Android makes up for more than 70 percent of the smartphone market and there are many brands which rely on the open source operating system. While Samsung and Apple fight for the top spot, many other popular phone makers like HTC and Nokia are still striving to increase their share in the mobile industry. HTC’s market share had earlier plunged from 2.4 percent in 2011 to 1.8 percent in 2012 and the company also reported a 91 percent drop in its fourth quarter net profit.

The latest addition to the HTC family is the HTC One, its new flagship smartphone running on Android Jelly Bean. HTC touts the presence of a feature called ‘Blinkfeed’ as one of the distinguishing features of the phone compared to other flagships, describing it as, “Blinkfeed brings previously hidden content to the home screen, so you can see the things that are most interesting to you at a glance, without having to open a series of apps.” This means that the existing icons will now be replaced by a news feed which would include articles, photos and videos; similar to Windows Phone tiles. The company has also managed to rope in a few partners to supply the content required for Blinkfeed. A major win for pro-choice users is that the feature comes as an option and not a compulsion.

The HTC One incorporates another handy feature – integrated remote control function. This comes as another step towards the merger of televisions and phones and opens a wide range of possibilities for new business deals between television manufacturers, cable or satellite providers and phone manufacturers. HTC is said to be in talks with various such companies in different countries to explore the transformation capabilities of this new feature. In the future, one can probably expect co-developed features or apps which will work across a variety of devices like Android-enabled televisions (think Google TV), phones and tablets.

The final question that arises now is whether such features will succeed in wooing people away from the Galaxy and iPhone series and whether users will be ready to try these out instead of waiting for the next Samsung or Apple’s flagship models to release. Timing and pricing are the factors which will probably make or break the HTC One, since a reasonable price and a launch before the Galaxy S IV is announced will go a long way in getting some mileage for the beleaguered company.