HTC Says 'iPhones Are Not That Cool Anymore'

Martin Fichter, acting president of HTC America says, 'iPhones are not that cool anymore' in an interview at the Mobile Future Forward conference, reports GeekWire.

"Apple is innovating. Samsung is innovating. We are innovating. Everybody is innovating. And everybody is doing different things for the end consumers. I brought my daughter back to college - she's down in Portland at Reed - and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: 'My dad has an iPhone.' There's an interesting thing that's going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture's devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don't find them that cool anymore."

Responding to a question about what's preventing the creation of an iPhone killer, Fichter said he's not sure they want to kill the iPhone.


"I've heard the term iPhone killer a lot of times, outside of my company and inside my company. Whenever I hear it in meeting rooms inside HTC, I caution people and say: 'Hey, look, there is a market there for the iPhone.' I don't think we want to kill the iPhone because it is geared to a certain amount of people who like things in a certain way, and we do something different. If you want to do the same thing as iPhone in exactly the same way, why don't you send your people to the Apple store and have them buy an iPhone? We want to do something different. We want to appeal to different end users who have different values. And, if you look at the segmentation and the demographics of what we are doing, we are selling phones to different people. So, I don't like the term iPhone killer. I think we do something different."

HTC and Apple are suing each other for patent infringement. Recently an ITC judge found HTC in violation of two Apple patents which appear to be at the core of Android. That decision has yet to be reviewed.

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