The head of HTC's U.S. business expects its U.S. business to grow by 50 percent this year, according to Reuters. The smartphone manufacturer has also reaffirmed its commitment to Windows Mobile, to which the company says its newly announced "HTC Sense" user interface will be ported.
Jason Mackenzie, vice president for HTC America, is said to have told Reuters in an interview, "I expect to grow U.S. volume by at least 50 percent from 2008 to 2009." This would imply sales of about six million phones in 2009, he is said to have added.
The U.S. growth rate is more than twice that forecast for the rest of the world, where HTC expects overall 20 percent growth, Mackenzie is quoted as saying. As Reuters suggests, reasons for this could be America's strong interest in smartphones, plus the fact that HTC's brand has been established longer in overseas markets.
The Androids advance ...
Earlier this week, HTC rolled out the "Hero," its fourth phone employing Google's Linux- and Java-based Android operating system. Like the first three devices -- the HTC G1 introduced last October, the HTC Magic launched by Vodafone this spring, and the MyTouch 3G announced earlier this week -- the Hero uses an ARM-based Qualcomm MSM7200a system-on-chip (SoC).
HTC's Hero (Click to enlarge)
The touchscreen device, pictured above and at the top of our story, offers the same 3.2-inch, QVGA (480 x 320) display as the earlier models, plus other features such as quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE network support, 802.11/b/g WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, accelerometer, and a digital compass. (For more pictures and details of the HTC Hero's hardware, see the coverage on our sister site LinuxDevices.com, here.)
The Hero's most distinctive feature is its user interface, HTC Sense, which the manufacturer says will be "introduced across a portfolio of phones," though not the earlier Android devices. Much like Palm's Linux-based WebOS, Sense is said to integrate communications from phone calls, emails, texts, photos, and status updates into a single view. For example, a friend's Facebook status updates and photos can appear alongside his or her Flickr photos, text messages, emails, and call history.
Different views of HTC's Sense interface (Click to enlarge)
According to Adobe, meanwhile, the HTC will be the first Android smartphone to offer its Flash media playback technology. However, it's said this is Flash Lite 3.1, already available to Windows Mobile users, not the "full desktop" Flash 10 version recently announced for Windows phones and other mobile devices.
... but Windows fights back
HTC has said a U.S. version of the Hero will be available later this year, making it and the other Android phones mentioned above key parts of its American strategy. But asked by Reuters if Windows Mobile would remain important to the company, Mackenzie reportedly said, "We'll do great business with both platforms."
HTC has also made clear that its HTC Sense user interface will come to Windows, staging that it will be "available on all new HTC devices moving forward." As such, it may replace the company's existing TouchFLO and TouchFLO 3D, which have been available on a variety of different Windows phones.
A video demo of the HTC Hero Source: Orange (click to play)
Further information
To read the Reuters interview with HTC executive Jason Mackenzie, see the news service's website, here.
