“HTC during a call discussing its low forecast and results backtracked from the strategy that dictated 2011,” Electronista reports.
“CFO Winston Yung acknowledged a lukewarm reception for fall devices but added that the company’s philosophy throughout all of last year, where it was willing to make thick, short-lived devices for the sake of having 4G, was a mistake,” Electronista reports. “The “next product cycle” of devices would fix this, Yung said…”
Electronista reports, “HTC’s about-face indirectly validates Apple’s hesitance to jump into 4G early. It argued that an LTE iPhone in 2011 would have required too many sacrifices. While at the time many considered this a mistake that would let Android get the lead, it has so far proven to be no deterrent to Apple’s sales. Verizon sold nearly twice as many iPhones as its entire 4G roster combined, leaving any one LTE Android manufacturer with just a fraction of the demand.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Smirk.
It’s a good thing other manufacturers jumped on the 4G when they did. Having 4G devices in the hands of consumers increases incentive for carriers to build out their LTE networks and it helps the chip manufacturers learn how to improve for the next generation. Apple is the beneficiary here.
Not really. Notice consumers bought far more 3G iPhones than any 4G devices. And we haven’t even seen the return figures for 4G phones. Everyone I have talked to who has a 4G says their battery life is dismal, but more importantly, 4G access is actually pretty hard to find, and I’m in a major metro area.
Can you imagine the uproar that would have been caused by 4G iPhones which drained power like a bucket without a bottom and couldn’t access 4G networks most of the time?
er, anaknipedro is not arguing that Apple should have gone 4G. Rather, that having 4G devices out there incentivized the carriers to speed implementation of 4G. They are arguing that when Apple does put out a 4G phone, there will be more 4G coverage than if few 4G phones had been released prior.
Apple’s plan vindicated.
4G is useless on the networks available to users in North America anyway. If you were to use 4G speeds you network would spot this usage and throttle you back to sub 3G just because they can. (See http://macdailynews.com/2012/02/05/att-starts-throttling-unlimited-data-users-after-2gb-of-monthly-usage/)
but, but … thick, short-lived devices make soooo much better doorstops!
Having a faster network without resolving the bandwidth issue and the data caps and costs still isn’t much of a leap forward
Good pint, the only difference is that now the carrier can charger faster than before. 😉
You would think these companies would get it by now. Apple did the same thing when it launched with EDGE and not 3G with the original iPhone in 2007. One, the 3G cell network infrastructure was still being built out, and two, the first-generation of 3G chips was too power hungry. Why don’t people believe Apple when it explains things? Now, the same thing is happening, the 4G network is still being built out, and the first-generation of 4G chips are too power hungry! Duh!
Notice Motorola is now advertising battery life for its new Droid 4G phones because it supposedly has the largest battery of any 4G phone, but yet it still gets crappy life.
There’s a head-on collision coming between ever-increasing demand for bandwidth (as more and more multimedia content is downloaded from the internet) and the carriers’ unwillingness to provide the necessary bandwidth (and data caps) at a reasonable price. The way I see it, Apple is the only player that has what it takes to break the stranglehold that multimedia empires have had on consumers for decades.
I like HTC’s honesty. They even manned up in the face of the lawsuits and paid their share. That is respectable compared to the thieves over at Motorola, Google and Samsung.
Where’s that bell end who always goes on about how iPhones should have bigger screens?
He would have got such a kicking at my school.
You mean the ringer…
I think he means BLN 😉
He goes to the school for retards & can safely be ignored.
I have a friend who carries an Android phone with 4G service. Apart from the carriers screwing you once over with overages and sh*t like that, he says his battery lasts no more than 3 hours on full streaming services from Google’s music servers. He listens to a few online music services like Google Music, Spotify and Pandora and the battery drains in next to no time. He bought 2 extra batteries which he carries with him all the time.
3G is a power hog too. If I have that enabled on my iPhone 4 together with Wi-Fi & Bluetooth, I’ll be looking for an outlet by 2-3pm or so. I heard it’s worse on the 4S as another friend of mine says he can’t get a full day’s charge on his and has to plug it into his car charger to make it last the day. It’s tough nursing your phone through the day if you have location services and all the rest of it enabled.
I’m sorry, but don’t you, your friend and others have a computer you are at during the day, so you can listen to music?
Second, I believe the iPhone has this thing called iPod and has a really big storage space on it.
Just because you can stream does not mean you should all day long.
What part of batteries and power consumption do you not understand?
My original iPhone lasts 2 or 3 days and I listen to quit a bit of stuff but I do it a more power smart way. Podcasts.
What part of power management don’t you and your halfwit friends understand?
Turn down the backlight, turn off frackin’ Bluetooth, turn off location services, stop streaming stuff for hours that kills the battery and hits the data limits hard. Dammit, I’ve used my iP4 from 10am to 11pm reading a book for several hours on a train and in a station bar, listening to music, using various navigation and map apps and Google, and taking photos. If I need to juice it up, I’ve got a $20 5500MaH battery with two USB ports that will give nearly three full charges. Who needs extra removable batteries?
Apple’s new power efficient processors will absolutely nail everyone else’s Android phones to the wall when it comes to battery life. They’re gonna be crucified.
All this hullabaloo about 3G/4G download speeds makes me yawn. Unless you’re the type who likes streaming video or downloading large files over a cellular data connection, 3G is more than fast enough. Most places I go have Wi-Fi anyway.
If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is look at the transparently misleading commercials advertising 4G. No, 4G is not going to load websites so much faster or get you texts so much faster that you’ll know things before your friends do. That’s just stupid.
No, 4G is best for things that you actually need heavy bandwidth for: video and large files. Oh, but you’ll never see the cellular providers advertising that. Why not? Because they don’t want you doing that! They don’t want you consuming large quantities of data, so instead they advertise how much better it is to get little bits of data a few seconds faster.
4G is not worth basing a phone purchase on. When you finally get it, you’ll barely notice any improvement in your experience. Unless you stream video or download large files. Then you’ll notice a big change, in the form of how fast you hit that cap placed on your data usage.
——RM
Bingo.
I believe the problem here is the “I want it now!” crowd not waiting to get home to download over their wifi or even better, their Mac, then sync it over USB. Best way to do it. Faster and oh yea, it charges the iPhone while it syncs.
On the contrary, HTC’s action *directly* validates Apple’s approach to stick with 3G until 4G chipsets meeting Apple’s performance requirements are available. I would far rather have 3G service with good battery life than 4G service and a quickly drained battery.