HTC Says the iPhone is Not Cool!

HTC has decided to thrown some mud in Apple’s direction, mocking their hugely popular line of smartphones. The boss of HTC America, Martin Fichter, has branded the iPhone as a device that is “not cool any more”, despite the 3GS and 4 being the best selling handsets in the US. With the iPhone 5 out in less than a month, will it need to stand out to render Fichter’s comments as merely trash talk?
Is the iPhone “uncool”? Absolutely not, the figures speak for themselves. The iPhone 5 is one of the most anticipated products to ever launch and sales are expected to go through the roof. We expect Apple’s 5th smartphone to be very cool indeed, so why is the HTC chief talking such rubbish? According to Mashable, Fichter undertook an informal survey on his daughter’s college friends and found out which mobile phones they had, the results seem to be the basis of his opinion.
The HTC boss claims that “none of them had an iPhone”, the reason being that it was because their dad had an iPhone. The classic theory of parents and their kids sharing the same interests being uncool looks to have come into play here. Fichter said that many of the students instead had HTC, Samsung and devices from a Chinese manufacturer, as a substitute for the iPhone. Have you opted against Apple’s mobile because your parents have one?


Fichter’s attack on the iPhone does appear to be some form of power play, maybe trying to get inside the minds of young people just before the iPhone 5 launches. The fact that older more mature people own iPhones could be a testament to how popular and cool they actually are, when you consider some of the older generation have tech-phobia. HTC typically offer lower end cheaper phones which are more affordable to younger people, where older people are better prepared to make payments on more expensive phones like Apple’s. It is not necessarily that young people wont go near the iPhone because dad uses one.
There is always banter between these big companies and Fichter has denied that “HTC wants to kill the iPhone”, T3 reports. Healthy competition between mobile makers sounds like a less dramatic way to describe the situation. The tech boss has said that HTC will give you something different that the iPhone wont; to add fuel to the fire it was suggested HTC would look to develop their own mobile operating system so they no longer rely on Android and Windows Phone 7. Let us know your thoughts on this one. Is the iPhone still cool?