BARCELONA—What makes a phone "the one," and why can't Verizon and Sprint have it? I sat down with Kouji Kodera, HTC's chief product officer to get more details on the new HTC One family.
Last night HTC announced the HTC One X for AT&T, HTC One S for T-Mobile and HTC One V for MetroPCS, Virgin and U.S. Cellular. You can check out my hands-on here.
HTC is simplifying its lineup, but not as much as it seems. There will probably be more HTC Ones throughout the year, as well as other phones that don't get the One branding, Kodera said.
"We'll have three products to start with, and later on we may have some additions. We're not going to put HTC One on every product," he said.
To get the One branding, a phone needs the right combination of hardware and software. One phones will all have Beats Audio and HTC's new image processing chip, which allows for tricks like fast, high-quality HDR pictures and intelligent flash levels.
HTC CEO Peter Chou also said all One phones will come with 25GB of Dropbox online storage, the new HTC Sense 4 software overlay which adds things like Facebook integration to Android 4.0, and a new music sync client that enables Wi-Fi music syncing from any Mac or PC.
The Beats Audio in the One phones will expand through the whole audio experience, not just in the music player, Kodera said. That means games and videos will get Beats enhancements as long as you're using Beats headphones. Those special headphones may be sold separately, though.
"We want consumers to choose a preferred Beats Audio headset in the store," Kodera said.
One phones don't have to be Android, but Windows Phones will only get the One branding if Microsoft expands its platform to let HTC introduce those features, HTC reps said. That's not possible with the current Windows Phone OS, but it may be possible in the future.
The U.S. won't initially see one of One's announced innovations, the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor. That's because "Nvidia doesn't have very solid LTE which is ready for the market yet," Kodera said. (AT&T's model of the One X is getting Qualcomm's new S4 processor instead, which we benchmarked recently.) But HTC's partnership with Nvidia is "a long term partnership," so we may see Nvidia-powered phones in the future here.
So why not only release One phones? HTC still wants to build cheaper phones which wouldn't be eligible for the One branding, Kodera said. And some wireless carrier customers are more demanding than others, apparently.
"There's a lot of operator franchise markets, and in those cases branding and those discussions will come from the [operator] customers," Kodera said.
That's why it looks like One may not come to Verizon or Sprint yet. Kodera was very cagey about HTC's relationship with those two carriers, which are notorious for rebranding phones and demanding custom versions.
"We have some franchise business outside of this [One line]," Kodera said.