HTC One Doubles Production; To Discontinue HTC First?

HTC North Asia will double its production of its flagship device, HTC One, this month, said Jack Tong, president of HTC North Asia. Production will continue to expand in June to meet the strong demand for the unit, which has merited favourable reviews by techies since its release in April.

Smartphone experts said the HTC One is favoured by tech reviewers because it is a game changer, although one of its unique feature, the aluminium body, is also its weakness because it does not allow a battery change or repair of a damaged unit.

The high demand would make up for the delays in the shipment in April caused by parts shortage as parts manufacturer placed higher priority on the production for other phone makers. Thus, HTC was able to produce only 750,000 pieces of its flagship device in April.

The Taiwanese tech firm is banking on a stronger sales for the second quarter to improve its revenue which went down to $1.45 billion in Q1 due to a 50 per cent drop in sales.

Besides the HTC One, the company also released the HTC First Facebook phone, but the device is not selling fast enough, causing the exclusive carrier, AT&T, to slash price of the unit to only 99 cents from $99 one month after the phone's roll out.

The tech blog BGR quoted a source from AT&T that HTC will soon discontinue the production of the HTC First and unsold units will be returned to the Taiwanese phone maker following very poor sales with less than 15,000 units sold one month after its roll out.

The problem was not with the device itself, but Facebook Home which got poor reviews on the Google app store with 2 of 5 stars from over 16,000 reviews, indicating phone users do not want their entire mobile device dedicated to Facebook.

This development is an indicator of Facebook becoming less popular with the social networking site scoring 61 out of 100 on the American Customer Satisfaction Index in 2012 despite having 1 billion members.

HTC One, which features a 4.7-inch screen with a resolution of 1920x1080, Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor and 2GB of RAM, retails for $199 in AT&T.