HTC’s new flagship smartphone, the HTC One, will go on sale in the U.K., Germany and the company’s home market of Taiwan next week, HTC has confirmed today. The rollout will then ramp up “across Europe”, North America and “most of Asia-Pacific” before the end of the April.
The company had previously said the handset would start rolling out to customers “from mid-March”.
A HTC spokeswoman provided the following statement: “HTC has seen unprecedented demand for and interest in the new HTC One, and the care taken to design and build it is evidenced in early reviews. The new HTC One will roll out in the UK, Germany and Taiwan next week and across Europe, North America and most of Asia-Pacific before the end of April. We appreciate our customers’ patience, and believe that once they have the phone in their hands they will agree that it has been worth the wait.”
The One has a 4.7-inch 1080p screen — putting it close in screen size to ‘phablet’ territory — which is topped and tailed with aluminium trim. Inside it’s powered by one of Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipsets, clocked at 1.6GHz, and also packs in 2GB of RAM.
In looks the One resembles BlackBerry’s Z10, and that’s not the only similarity between the two companies at this point. Both have a lot riding on their respective flagships as rivals have gobbled up huge chunks of the smartphone market.
HTC needs the One to fly, having struggled to make an impact in an Android space dominated by Samsung’s Galaxy series of devices. Earlier this month the company reported its lowest sales since January 2010. Sales for the month of February fell by nearly 44% to 11.37 billion Taiwan dollars ($384 million). But with falling revenues, HTC has fewer resources to marshal in its fight with Samsung — perhaps explaining the One’s staggered rollout — making it all the more important it gets a hit with the device.
Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans noted recently that HTC has now “given up every penny of revenue growth it picked up from Android” — illustrating the rise and fall on the following graph:
Evans added that while the HTC One “is a very nice phone” in the current highly competitive handset market nice hardware is ” insufficient to compete”. HTC will be hoping it can prove him wrong.