HTC today announced that it will enter the retail market using its own brand. HTC just announced their purchase of Dopod, an HTC OEM that created handsets based on HTC’s reference designs. This is similar to the U.S. counterpart of Dopod, i-Mate’s business model.
HTC previous to the announced acquisition of Dopod did not manufacturer any handsets, instead outsourcing production to i-Mate, Dopod, and other companies such as UTStarcom. Through this system, HTC became the single largest producer of Windows Mobile devices, and even won over the support of HP and Palm in the creation of their more recent Windows Mobile devices.
While it was already expected that HTC would enter the retail market producing its own handsets, today they also announced that they would rebrand Dopod over to HTC, and that devices would be sold under the HTC brand. While HTC previously has never had any retail presence, its brand is widely respected in the technical community. Most users when referencing devices do so as “HTC PPC-6700” or by its reference code-name such as “HTC Apache”. This has created mass-marketing without any action on HTC’s behalf. Now, HTC appears to be poised to capitalize on this marketshare.
In addition, HTC today announced that they were launching the brand with a new device, the TyTN. The TyTN will be based on the HTC Wizard design but features tri-band UMTS. In addition, the MTeoR will be the first 3G Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone.
